"Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it's climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don't know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty - where we cannot predict what may happen - is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to live from uncertainty? Drawing on experiences from across the world, the chapters in this book explore finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. Each chapter contrasts an approach centred on risk and control, where we assume we know about and can manage the future, with one that is more flexible, responding to uncertainty. The book argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and to develop new approaches, including some reclaimed and adapted from previous times or different cultures. This requires a radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices for successfully navigating uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world"--
Preface: Climate Change and Critical Agrarian StudiesShaila Seshia Galvin, Mercedes Ejarque, Jennifer Franco, Jacobo Grajales, Ruth Hall, Ricardo Jacobs, Sinem Kavak, Katie Sandwell, Sergio Sauer and Annie Shattuck 1. Climate change and agrarian strugglesSaturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Amita Baviskar, Marc Edelman, Nancy Lee Peluso and Wendy Wolford2. The environmentalization of the agrarian question and the agrarianization of the climate justice movementZehra Taşdemir Yaşın3. Violent silence: framing out social causes of climate-related crisesJesse Ribot4. Climate change and class conflict in the Anthropocene: sink or swim together?Murat Arsel5. The political life of mitigation: from carbon accounting to agrarian counter-accountsShaila Seshia Galvin and Diego Silva Garzón6. Imagined transitions: agrarian capitalism and climate change adaptation in ColombiaAlejandro Camargo7. Beyond bad weather: climates of uncertainty in rural IndiaTanya Matthan8. Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfieldsGabe Schwartzman9. Up in the air: the challenge of conceptualizing and crafting a post-carbon planetary politics to confront climate changeAlistair Fraser10. Power for the Plantationocene: solar parks as the colonial form of an energy plantationRyan Stock11. Oro blanco: assembling extractivism in the lithium triangleDaniela Soto Hernandez and Peter Newell12. Adapting to climate change among transitioning Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya: an intersectional analysis of differentiated abilities to benefit from diversification processesEdwige Marty, Renee Bullock, Matthew Cashmore, Todd Crane and Siri Eriksen13. Advocating afforestation, betting on BECCS: land- based negative emissions technologies (NETs) and agrarian livelihoods in the global SouthPamela McElwee14. Food, famine and the free trade fallacy: the dangers of market fundamentalism in an era of climate emergencyMatias E. Margulis, Kristen Hopewell and Edi Qereshniku15. Uneven resilience and everyday adaptation: making Rwanda's green revolution 'climate smart'Nathan Clay16. Rethinking 'just transitions' from coal: the dynamics of land and labour in anti-coal strugglesAmod Shah17. Rescaling the land rush? Global political ecologies of land use and cover change in key scenario archetypes for achieving the 1.5 °C Paris agreement targetJevgeniy Bluwstein and Connor Cavanagh18. Producing nature-based solutions: infrastructural nature and agrarian change in San Martín, PeruWill Lock19. Climate refugees or labour migrants? Climate reductive translations of women's migration from coastal BangladeshCamelia Dewan20. Certificated exclusion: forest carbon sequestration project in Southwest ChinaJun He and Jiping Wang21. Resilience and conflict: rethinking climate resilience through Indigenous territorial strugglesNoémi Gonda, Selmira Flores, Jennifer J. Casolo and Andrea J. Nightingale22. Resisting, leveraging, and reworking climate change adaptation projects from below: placing adaptation in Ecuador's agrarian struggleMegan Mills-Novoa, Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger and Jeroen Vos23. Linking climate-smart agriculture to farming as a service: mapping an emergent paradigm of datafied dispossession in IndiaS. Ali Malik24. Prefiguring buen sobrevivir: Lenca women's (e)utopianism amid climate changeBenjamin C. Fash, Betty del Carmen Vásquez Rivera and María Sojob25. Forest as 'nature' or forest as territory? Knowledge, power, and climate change conservation in the Peruvian AmazonMaritza Paredes and Anke Kaulard26. Whose security? Politics, risks and alternatives for climatesecurity practices in agrarian-environmental perspectivesCorinne Lamaine
"Over the past decade, substantial resources have been spent on tackling avian influenza and building a global capacity for a pandemic response. The catastrophic costs of the 1918 influenza pandemic are well documented, and the swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 has raised the alarm yet again. Across the world, surveillance systems have been upgraded, stockpiles of antiviral drugs and influenza vaccines have been created, veterinary and public health systems have been improved and poultry production and marketing has been dramatically restructured. What are the lessons from this experience? And what does this suggest for the future? This book explores how virus genetics, ecology and epidemiology intersect with economic, political and policy processes in a variety of places - from Bangkok to Washington, to Jakarta, Cairo, Rome and London. It focuses on the interaction of the international and national responses - and in particular the experiences of Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. It asks how effective is the disease surveillance and response system - can it respond to a new pandemic threat? The comparative analysis reveals the challenges and limitations of a technocratic, centralised response, and the need to take seriously local contexts. Drawing from these experiences, the book concludes with a discussion of future prospects and challenges, examining in particular what a 'One World, One Health' approach - where approaches to animal, human and ecosystem health are integrated - would look like in practice."--Publisher's description
For many years, studies of peasants and pastoralists have run in parallel, creating mutual blind-spots. This article argues that, despite contrasting research traditions and conceptual framings, there are many commonalities. The classic problematics of agrarian studies – around production, accumulation and politics – apply as much to pastoralists as they do to peasants. Processes of social differentiation and class formation, the role of wage labour and questions around mobilisation and politics are consistently relevant. However, a reflection on a large literature on pastoralism across nine world regions reveals that there are nevertheless some important contrasts with classic representations of a settled peasantry. These are: living with and off uncertainty; mobility to respond to variability; flexible land control and new forms of tenure; dynamic social formations; collective social relations for a new moral economy; engaging with complex markets and a new politics for a transforming world. The article concludes by arguing that, under contemporary conditions, these are all important for understanding settled agrarian systems too, as today pastoralists and peasants face many of the same challenges. These seven themes, the article argues, offer a new set of lenses for examining pastoral and peasant settings alike, helping to expand perspectives in agrarian studies.
This article focuses on the methodological lessons from Sam Moyo's scholarship. Sam's research is characterised by a combination of detailed empirical investigation, deep knowledge of the technical and practical aspects of agricultural production and farming livelihoods, and bigpicture political economy analysis and theory. Sam's method is an insightful contemporary application of the method originally set out in Marx's Grundrisse. Many contemporary explorations of agrarian political economy fail to sustain the important tension and dialectical debate, between diverse empirical realities and their 'multiple determinations and relations' and wider theorisation of the 'concrete' features of emergent processes of change. The implications of Sam's methodological approach for the analysis of Zimbabwe's land reform are discussed, especially in relation to the land occupations and the politics of agrarian reform since 2000.
