Political Ecology of Human Environment Change in Gojal, Gilgit Baltistan, Pakistan
In the past half century, the Gojali people of northern Pakistan have experienced dramatic human ecological change, the dynamics of which have been shaped by key aspects of the region's environmental governance context, including Gojal's geographical peripherality and constitutional liminality, the emerging influence of global conservation and international Ismailism as non state transnational governance actors, the construction of the Karakoram Highway and subsequent development of a regional road network and the 2010 Attabad landslide disaster and associated influx of food relief. These contextual features have complemented and sometimes contradicted each other to influence Gojal's political ecology in three ways: they have (1) diminished Gojalis' inclination and capacity to maintain and productively use agricultural and pastoral environments, (2) limited locals' access to their ecological resource base and undermined the legitimacy of local resource control and (3) created new Gojali identities that are both less materially rooted in the local environment and more capable of acting politically in support of local resource control.