Methodological neutrality is what keeps the regional studies from being either toothless or partisan. A framework about ecological conditions that refused to say where a real ecology is thin would eventually become meaningless — so it does not stay neutral about standing, distributed jurisdiction, interior sovereignty, ecological transfer, or correctability. Those are the conditions it exists to defend, and it will name plainly where any ecology, however admired, is deficient in them.
What it is neutral about is which political tradition supplies those conditions. A right can be produced by a market or a state; standing can be secured by welfare or by ownership; correction can flow through courts, competition, or protest. The framework takes no side on that ownership question, only on whether the condition is present — which is why it can apply the same severity to a system whose rhetoric resembles its own as to one that does not.