economic and social factors. Paul Robbins asserts that the discipline has a "normative understanding that there are very likely better, less coercive, less exploitative, and more sustainable ways of doing things". From these assumptions, political ecology can be used to: inform policymakers and organizations of the complexities surrounding environment and development, thereby contributing to better environmental governance. understand the decisions that communities make about the natural environment in the context of their political environment, economic pressure, and societal regulations look at how unequal relations in and among societies affect the natural environment, especially in context of government policy. Scope and influences Political ecology's movement as a field since its inception in the 1970s has complicated its scope and goals. Through the discipline's history, certain influences have grown more and less influential in determining the focus of study. Peter A. Walker traces the importance of the ecological sciences in political ecology. He points to the transition, for many critics, from a ‘structuralist’ approach through the 1970s and 1980s, in which ecology maintains a key position in the discipline, to a 'poststructuralist' approach with an emphasis on the 'politics' in political ecology. This turn has raised questions as to the differentiation with environmental politics as well as the field's use of the term of 'ecology'. Political ecological research has shifted from investigating political influence on the earth's surface to the focus on spatial-ecological influences on politics and power—a scope reminiscent of environmental politics. Much has been drawn from cultural ecology, a form of analysis that showed how culture depends upon, and is influenced by, the material conditions of society (political ecology has largely eclipsed cultural ecology as a form of analysis according to Walker.) As Walker states, "whereas cultural ecology and systems theory emphasize[s] adaptation and homeostasis, political ecology emphasize[s] the role of political economy as a force of maladaptation and instability". Political ecologists often use political economy frameworks to analyze environmental issues. Early and prominent examples of this were Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria by Michael Watts in 1983, which traced the famine in northern Nigeria during the 1970s to the effects of colonialism, rather than an inevitable consequence of the drought in the Sahel, and The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries by Piers Blaikie in 1985, which traced land degradation in Africa to colonial policies of land appropriation, rather than over-exploitation by African