Climate change and agrarian struggles: an invitation to contribute to aJPSForum

Abstract

This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on 'climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.

“Central” and “peripheral” adaptation pathways of entangled agrifood systems transformations

“…Thus, central pathway takes science and policy as instruments of politics in advancing a political vision by way of rendering a complex adaptation challenge into a technical, apolitical one (Li, 2007), and, in the process, avoiding to confront the uncertainties of complex realities (Arora, 2019). Consequently, these adaptation pathways are legitimized by a dominant group in society, enabling at times authoritarian populist policy stance and sustaining social inequities (Borras Jr et al, 2022). However, central pathways may also trigger counter reactions from a wide array of stakeholders particularly those whose resilience and adaptive capacities are on the line.…”

“…While complex systems science provides a raft of conceptual tools to analyze the unintended consequences of climate adaptation within a system, there is a need to adequately explain the human, social, and political forces that facilitate the cascading of risks among different coupled social-ecological systems as a result of interacting adaptation pathways (Liu et al, 2007;O'Brien, 2021a). The paper builds on the works of researchers who argued that pathways are inherently political as they embody different goals, values, and visions of the future (Wise et al, 2014;Butler et al, 2022) and that vulnerabilities shift toward the already vulnerable because of the political ecological and political economic relations in specific historical junctures that reconfigure the distribution of benefits and risks (Marino and Ribot, 2012;Taylor, 2015;Borras Jr et al, 2022).…”

The global climate of land politics

“…The concept of 'landscape' is highly contested in the literature (see Mitchell, 1996), and without clarifying what it means in the IPCC report, it is likely to be subsumed by the neoliberal 'land tenure security' framework. We do not suggest that IPCC reports should get into prescriptive operational matters; but specifying fundamental principles that define categories and concepts could clarify perspectives and positions, especially amid competing narratives not only on land politics but on climate change (Borras et al, 2021). While it is laudable that the report notes, albeit rather weakly, the issue of emissions by monoculture plantations, it is generally silent about what kind of agriculture contributes to and aggravates climate change, andbeyond enumeration of some technical and management-related issues in farming and soil managementon what type of agriculture can help mitigate climate change.…”

“…On the other hand, significant elements within mitigation and adaptation ideas and practice are related to land and natureas productive inputs for carbon-saving or carbon-neutral commodity production systems and as a sink for waste (Fraser, 2016(Fraser, , 2021Martinez-Alier, 2021;O'Connor, 1998). Ultimately, a huge part of the global complex of responses to climate change is linked to agriculture and food (Borras et al, 2021), and thus inherently to land.…”

What is Environmental Degradation, What Are Its Causes, and How to Respond?

“…Combining these through a strategy of 'eroding capitalism', he argues, is the only route to tackling environmental degradation, including climate change, in the long term. This means investing in the social movements and alterative experiments that might foster a new way of living sustainably (cf Borras et al 2022)…”