Introduction

Urban Political Ecology has emerged as an important and influential theoretical framework for environmental justice studies. Through the work of Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) and oth-ers, Urban Political Ecology has not only laid out a clear theoretical and political agenda for addressing environmental injustice, but has also generated a rich and growing body of empirical research (Holifield, 2009).

According to Bjerkli (2013), Urban Political Ecology emerged from Political ecology which has been a highly dynamic theoretical approach for geographical studies on development (Zim-mer, 2010). The origin of Political Ecology dates back to the 1970s when some commentators

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including journalist Alexander Cockburn, anthropologist Eric Wolf, and environmental scien-tist Grahame Beakhurst coined the term with a view of questioning access and control over resources (Watts, 2000).

However, the foundation and definition of Political Ecology was laid down and formulated by Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield in 1987 (Zimmer, 2010). It was broadly defined as an approach which seeks to combine the ‘‘concerns of the ecology and the political economy’’

(Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987 p.17) to understand and address the effects ‘‘on people as well as their productive activities, of ongoing changes within society at local and global levels’’

(Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987 p.21). The analytical aim of Political Ecology was to examine and understand the relationship between nature and society which produces environmental change through processes at different scale driven by uneven power relation (Robbins, 2012). But Po-litical Ecology has evolved in many different directions. One of such newly formed PoPo-litical Ecology is Urban Political Ecology (Bjerkli, 2013; Zimmer, 2010). The difference between them is not significant though they have a common theoretical toolkit (Bjerkli, 2013).

Urban Political Ecology has evolved over the last years to focus on specific spatial context.

Researchers who employed Political Ecology skewed their attention to rural areas in developing countries on issues such as soil degradation, deforestation, conflicts regarding access to natural resources and protected areas, climate change, environmental entitlement, environmental pro-tection and conflicts of livelihood strategies etc. (Zimmer, 2010). On the contrary, Urban Polit-ical Ecology focus on urban areas in developed countries and discusses issues like access and control of urban water, urban environmental politics, land use changes and urbanisation pro-cesses, urban risk, control over urban environment, urban environmental justices etc. (ibid).

With an increasing urbanisation process in most cities in developing countries, urban political ecology could be useful research approach to study geographic phenomenon in urban areas in developing countries as well.

Urban political ecology is ‘‘an integrated and relational approach that helps to untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes’’ (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003 p.15). It focuses on both the social and ecological nature of urban environment. Thus it defines urban areas as being hybrid in character comprising of both physical and social environment with no clear-cut boundary and hence welded together (Zimmer, 2010).

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It assumes that the social and physical environment which constitute an urban landscape is produced by the interconnected political, economic and cultural processes which produce spa-tially differentiated and highly uneven urban landscape (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006). These processes occur in the realms of power in which social actors strive to defend and create their own environments. It also premises that such produced social and environmental conditions are not independent of class, gender, ethnicity, or other power struggles. Those in-terconnected political, economic, social and cultural processes are identified at different level of scale (i.e. at global, regional and local levels) (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003) which produce socio-environmental conditions which favour powerful individuals and groups but to the dis-advantage of the marginalized (Heynen et al., 2006).

Urban Political Ecology is purposefully determined to critically examine such uneven social and ecological conditions of a particular urban landscape by identifying actors and their agen-das, and exploring their power relations (Bjerkli, 2013) in order to understand the changing socio-environmental conditions in an urban space. It assumes that unequal power relations shape the social and political configurations and the urban environment in which we live (Heynen et al., 2006). In view of this, it attempts to tease out who gains and who loses (and in what ways), who benefits and who suffers from particular processes of socio-environmental change (Desfor & Keil, 2004; Heynen et al., 2006). This helps Urban Political ecologist to devise plans or ideas that would determine what or who needs to be sustained and how this could be done (Gibbs, 2005; Heynen et al., 2006).

It is very imperative to summarize the above propositions and principles of Urban Political Ecology that had been teased out from the literature. It is shown that Urban Political Ecology focuses on the physical and social environment of an urban space with a particular emphasis on the examining how unjust social and physical urban environment are produced. It posits that there are different actors with different roles, interest and agendas as well as their distinct power relations which drive the various social, economic, political and cultural processes. The unequal power relations among these actors cause unjust physical and social conditions in a given con-text.

The research therefore intends to integrate the various definitions of environmental justice, the concept of environment and justice in environmental justice and factors behind the production of injustice. Again, it incorporates the various principles of Urban Political Ecology and read-ings on e-waste from the literature. This provides a useful foundation for the design of an ana-lytical framework in order to explain the unjust social and environmental conditions of e-waste

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processing activities in Agbogbloshie. The subsequent sections therefore focuses on the analyt-ical framework of the research.