862 research outputs found

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    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

    Urbanised forested landscape: Urbanisation, timber extraction and forest care on the Vișeu Valley, northern Romania

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    By looking at urbanisation processes from the vantage point of the forest, and the ways in which it both constitutes our living space while having been separated from the bounded space of the urban in modern history, the thesis asks: How can we (re)imagine urbanisation beyond the limits of the urban? How can a feminine line of thinking engage with the forest beyond the capitalist-colonial paradigm and its extractive project? and How can we “think with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) towards the forest as an inhabitant of our common world, instead of perpetuating the image of the forest as a space outside the delimited boundaries of the city? Through a case study research, introducing the Vișeu Valley in northern Romania as both a site engaged in the circulation of the global timber flow, a part of what Brenner and Schmid (2014) name “planetary urbanisation”, where the extractive logging operations beginning in the late XVIIIth century have constructed it as an extractive landscape, and a more than human landscape inhabited by a multitude of beings (animal, plant, and human) the thesis argues towards the importance of forest care and indigenous knowledge in landscape management understood as a trans-generational transmission of knowledge, that is interdependent with the persistence of the landscape as such. Having a trans-scalar approach, the thesis investigates the ways in which the extractive projects of the capitalist-colonial paradigm have and still are shaping forested landscapes across the globe in order to situate the case as part of a planetary forest landscape and the contemporary debates it is engaged in. By engaging with emerging paradigms within the fields of plant communication, forestry, legal scholarship and landscape urbanism that present trees and forests as intelligent beings, and look at urbanisation as a way of inhabiting the landscape in both indigenous and modern cultures, the thesis argues towards viewing forested landscapes as more than human living spaces. Thinking urbanisation through the case of the Vișeu Valley’s urbanised forested landscape, the thesis aligns with alternate ways of viewing urbanisation as co-habitation with more than human beings, particularly those emerging from interdisciplinary research in the Amazon river basin (Tavares 2017, Heckenberger 2012) and, in light of emerging discourses on the rights of nature, proposes an expanded concept of planetary citizenship, to include non-human personhood

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory

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    What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries

    How did Britain come to this? A century of systemic failures of governance

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    If every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, what is wrong with the design of the systems that govern Britain? And how have they resulted in failures in housing, privatisation, outsourcing, education and healthcare? In How Did Britain Come to This? Gwyn Bevan examines a century of varieties of systemic failures in the British state. The book begins and ends by showing how systems of governance explain scandals in NHS hospitals, and the failures and successes of the UK and Germany in responding to Covid-19 before and after vaccines became available. The book compares geographical fault lines and inequalities in Britain with those that have developed in other European countries and argues that the causes of Britain’s entrenched inequalities are consequences of shifts in systems of governance over the past century. Clement Attlee’s postwar government aimed to remedy the failings of the prewar minimal state, while Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s in turn sought to remedy the failings of Attlee’s planned state by developing the marketised state, which morphed into the financialised state we see today. This analysis highlights the urgent need for a new political settlement of an enabling state that tackles current systemic weaknesses from market failures and over-centralisation. This book offers an accessible, analytic account of government failures of the past century, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to make an informed contribution to what an innovative, capable state might look like in a post-pandemic world

    Drones, Signals, and the Techno-Colonisation of Landscape

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    This research project is a cross-disciplinary, creative practice-led investigation that interrogates increasing military interest in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). The project’s central argument is that painted visualisations of normally invisible aspects of contemporary EMS-enabled warfare can reveal useful, novel, and speculative but informed perspectives that contribute to debates about war and technology. It pays particular attention to how visualising normally invisible signals reveals an insidious techno-colonisation of our extended environment from Earth to orbiting satellites

    Net Zero Roadmap for Copper and Nickel

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    As we seek to meet the challenges of climate change impacts, many commodities will play an increasing role in decarbonizing economies. There are increasing challenges of addressing the emissions from extraction of these commodities needed to support the zero-carbon transition. CCSI, in a consortium with Carbon Trust, RMI, and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, developed the Net Zero Roadmap to 2050 for Copper and Nickel Value Chains to support the copper and nickel mining sectors in taking collective, coordinated action by providing a clear, approachable, and accepted roadmap for decarbonization. Our key messages to mining CEOs are as follows: Demand for Energy Transition Metals (ETMs) doubles GHG emissions. To reach net zero, ETM emissions will need to reduce by 90%. Technological solutions are already or soon will be available. Three waves of technology deployment: (i) Renewable energy, site operational energy efficiency improvements, and process optimization; (ii) zero-emissions haulage trucks; (iii) process heat electrification and green hydrogen. Enormous ESG risks associated with rising ETM demand. For example, many copper and nickel reserves are located in high water risk and high biodiversity areas respectively, necessitating proactive and responsible management. Just Transition. Mining companies, governments and other actors have an important role in enabling communities to reimagine their future at the center of a new climate economy and in the process build community resilience. Collaboration is key to achieving net zero. Mining companies, value chain actors, and policymakers must work together to accelerate the development, deployment, and co-investment in the technological innovations required for the mine of the future, and to develop net zero industry standards, regulations, and frameworks. The project was commissioned by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), as part of the World Bank Group’s Climate-Smart Mining initiative

    Marine Toxins from Harmful Algae and Seafood Safety

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    The rapid expansion of aquaculture around the world is increasingly being impacted by toxins produced by harmful marine microalgae, which threaten the safety of seafood. In addition, ocean climate change is leading to changing patterns in the distribution of toxic dinoflagellates and diatoms which produce these toxins. New approaches are being developed to monitor for harmful species and the toxins they produce. This Special Issue covers pioneering research on harmful marine microalgae and their toxins, including the identification of species and toxins; the development of new chemical and biological techniques to identify and monitor species and toxins; the uptake of marine biotoxins in seafood and marine ecosystems; and the distribution and abundance of toxins, particularly in relation to climate change

    “An interval of comfort”: postamputation pain & long-term consequences of amputation in British First World War veterans, 1914-1985

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    The First World War resulted in the largest amputee cohort in history, with 41,208 amputees in the UK alone; the majority injured as young men and surviving into the late 20th century. Recent studies have estimated that significant residual limb pain affects up to 85% of military amputees: applying this figure to the First World War amputee cohort raises the possibility that up to 35,000 British veterans may have experienced chronic postamputation pain. Despite this and the fact that 13% of injuries in this conflict resulted in amputation, there has been little research into the long-term impact on veterans’ health and quality of life. Recently catalogued historical medical and pension files held at The National Archives offer the opportunity to follow up this type of injury in a large group of veterans for the first time. This thesis will use these files to document and explore long-term outcomes of amputation and chronic postamputation pain, developments made in the treatment of this condition, the impact of aging on amputee veterans and their likelihood of developing a concomitant condition from 1914 to 1985. It will examine these issues from three perspectives: that of the injured servicemen, the civil servants attempting to value and compensate those injuries, and from the clinicians’ responsible for the veterans’ medical care and rehabilitation. This research has been based on a unique model of interdisciplinary collaboration, incorporating research methods from history and clinical medicine, and will present its findings from historical material with recommendations for current practice. Given the similarities in injury patterns and prevalence of chronic residual limb, phantom and neuropathic pain between the First World War cohort and contemporary casualties, it is anticipated that the findings of the project will assist in the strategic assessment and planning for long-term pain conditions by medical staff and care providers for today’s and future blast injury amputee cohorts.Open Acces

    Essays on globalization, commodities, and local economic development

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    Over the course of this dissertation, I will explore the market mechanisms through which the unintended consequences of commodity booms in resource-oriented local labor markets have been fostered by features of international trade, which has been intensified over the past few decades. These features include offshoring, the presence of multinational companies, and participation in global value chains. For this purpose, this dissertation explores the cases of the mining and agricultural sectors in two major, resource-rich, emerging economies and exploits the different sources of exogenous variation peculiar to these commodity sectors to identify the mechanisms of trade in these sectors for contemporaneous and long-term local economic development. The work is organized in four chapters and provides a wide range of policy recommendations for resource-rich, developing economies to encourage a production structure that is more consistent with long-term local economic development. The first part of this dissertation comprises two chapters that explore the variation induced by the expansion of the copper industry in Chile, the largest copper producer, during the commodity price boom in the 2000s. The first chapter examines the heterogeneous economic impacts between multinational companies and domestic firms on the characterization of the long-term effects of a resource boom in local labor markets. On the side of firms, the empirical evidence suggests that although the linkage effect of multinationals can be lower than that of domestic firms due to offshoring, the local productivity spillovers induced by multinationals are slightly higher than those induced by domestic firms. These productivity spillovers can mitigate the productivity losses from crowding-out effects from the booming sector. Additionally, on the workers’ side, multinationals in the resource sector can affect the local economy by indirectly increasing housing rents via higher wages, which may imply lower, overall, welfare gains from the resource boom in relation to domestic firms. The second chapter analyzes the sectoral upgrading from low-processed mine copper to smelting and refined copper exports in Chile to estimate the local welfare and productivity gains from industrial upgrading in local labor markets. This chapter uses spatial variation in the relative importance between low-processed mine copper and smelting and refined copper production, with two main objectives: first, to measure the role of resource endowment and export competition in inducing industrial upgrading in the local labor markets; and second, to estimate the local welfare and productivity gains from industrial upgrading. The results suggest that the gains from this sectoral industrial upgrading in local labor markets are small and largely concentrated in the primary segment of mineral extraction. The last two chapters provide a different perspective by studying the different contexts and margins of adjustment of local areas to trade shocks to commodities. The third chapter examines the case of small-scale gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon to show how informal forms of extractive industries, relative to formal activities, are fostered by international demand shocks. For this purpose, this chapter estimates the heterogeneous effects of international price shocks on the intensity of activity of formal, informal, and illegal, small-scale gold producers. This chapter provides evidence that the differences in mining activity between illegal and legal producers disappear in the wake of high prices. The results suggest a rise in the profitability of illegal mining relative to formal and informal gold mining during price booms. Finally, the last chapter departs from the mining sector to analyze the extent to which increases in market access lead to higher local economic development and growth in remote places with low density and different degrees of specialization in agriculture. For this purpose, following a market access approach, this chapter estimates the effects of urbanization and road-infrastructure development on the structural transformation of rural villages in Chile. The empirical strategy uses the spatial and temporal variation in urban growth and road-infrastructure development to estimate the elasticities of access to urban markets by the population as well as to the farm and non-farm employment of rural villages. The results suggest important heterogeneity across rural areas, revealing that the growth of the non-farm sector induced by market access is higher in locations with better conditions for agricultural production
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