1st Edition
Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies
Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants.
The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world.
The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial.
The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003467960/climate-change-critical-agrarian-studies-ian-scoones-saturnino-borras-jr-amita-baviskar-marc-edelman-nancy-lee-peluso-wendy-wolford, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. A version of the open access title is also available on the OAPEN platform https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85297 .
Preface: Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies
Shaila 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 struggles
Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Amita Baviskar, Marc Edelman, Nancy Lee Peluso and Wendy Wolford
2. The environmentalization of the agrarian question and the agrarianization of the climate justice movement
Zehra Taşdemir Yaşın
3. Violent silence: framing out social causes of climate-related crises
Jesse Ribot
4. Climate change and class conflict in the Anthropocene: sink or swim together?
Murat Arsel
5. The political life of mitigation: from carbon accounting to agrarian counter-accounts
Shaila Seshia Galvin and Diego Silva Garzón
6. Imagined transitions: agrarian capitalism and climate change adaptation in Colombia
Alejandro Camargo
7. Beyond bad weather: climates of uncertainty in rural India
Tanya Matthan
8. Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfields
Gabe Schwartzman
9. Up in the air: the challenge of conceptualizing and crafting a post-carbon planetary politics to confront climate change
Alistair Fraser
10. Power for the Plantationocene: solar parks as the colonial form of an energy plantation
Ryan Stock
11. Oro blanco: assembling extractivism in the lithium triangle
Daniela Soto Hernandez and Peter Newell
12. Adapting to climate change among transitioning Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya: an intersectional analysis of differentiated abilities to benefit from diversification processes
Edwige Marty, Renee Bullock, Matthew Cashmore, Todd Crane and Siri Eriksen
13. Advocating afforestation, betting on BECCS: land- based negative emissions technologies (NETs) and agrarian livelihoods in the global South
Pamela McElwee
14. Food, famine and the free trade fallacy: the dangers of market fundamentalism in an era of climate emergency
Matias E. Margulis, Kristen Hopewell and Edi Qereshniku
15. Uneven resilience and everyday adaptation: making Rwanda's green revolution ‘climate smart’
Nathan Clay
16. Rethinking ‘just transitions’ from coal: the dynamics of land and labour in anti-coal struggles
Amod Shah
17. 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 target
Jevgeniy Bluwstein and Connor Cavanagh
18. Producing nature-based solutions: infrastructural nature and agrarian change in San Martín, Peru
Will Lock
19. Climate refugees or labour migrants? Climate reductive translations of women’s migration from coastal Bangladesh
Camelia Dewan
20. Certificated exclusion: forest carbon sequestration project in Southwest China
Jun He and Jiping Wang
21. Resilience and conflict: rethinking climate resilience through Indigenous territorial struggles
Noémi Gonda, Selmira Flores, Jennifer J. Casolo and Andrea J. Nightingale
22. Resisting, leveraging, and reworking climate change adaptation projects from below: placing adaptation in Ecuador’s agrarian struggle
Megan Mills-Novoa, Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger and Jeroen Vos
23. Linking climate-smart agriculture to farming as a service: mapping an emergent paradigm of datafied dispossession in India
S. Ali Malik
24. Prefiguring buen sobrevivir: Lenca women’s (e)utopianism amid climate change
Benjamin C. Fash, Betty del Carmen Vásquez Rivera and María Sojob
25. Forest as ‘nature’ or forest as territory? Knowledge, power, and climate change conservation in the Peruvian Amazon
Maritza Paredes and Anke Kaulard
26. Whose security? Politics, risks and alternatives for climatesecurity practices in agrarian-environmental perspectives
Corinne Lamaine
Biography
Ian Scoones is Professor at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton UK. He is an agricultural ecologist by original training but today works on questions of policy around land, agriculture, and agrarian change, mostly in Africa. He is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded PASTRES programme (http: //pastres.org).
Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Nedtherlands; Distinguished Professor at China Agricultural University, Beijing, and Associate of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute.
Amita Baviskar is Dean, Faculty and Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University, Sonipat, India. Her research and teaching address the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. She focuses on the role of social inequality and identities in natural resource conflicts.
Marc Edelman is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, USA. His latest book is Peasant Politics of the Twenty-first Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (2024).
Nancy Lee Peluso is Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Wendy Wolford is Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development in the Department of Global Development, and Vice Provost for International Affairs, Cornell University, Ithica, USA. Her research includes work on international development, land use and distribution, social mobilization, agrarian societies, and critical ethnography.
