Tag: PE/CAS

CfP POLLEN20 – Degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggle*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Yi-Chin Wu (Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to Y.Wu1@ids.ac.uk  no later than November 22nd.

Session description

Debates about a new economy, responding to environmental and climate challenges are raging. On the one hand, green economy approaches rely on achieving sustainable futures within win-win-win scenarios based on market and technology based transformations (Bergius et al., 2018). On the other hand, degrowth ideas promoting a downscaling of production and consumption seek to enhance ecological conditions and equity on the planet. Similarly, Environmental Justice movements in the South seek to reshape international agendas by putting forward alternative visions and transformative pathways for society (Rodríguez-Labajos et al., 2019). These three frameworks call for different futures where societies engage in a different way with their ecological means. Although these three frameworks have been broadly studied, little is known about their relationship with the politics of agrarian change. With this in mind, the following questions arise:

  • What do these debates mean for poor and marginalised rural peoples?
  • How are agrarian and environmental debates – whether around a radical degrowth or environmental justice agenda or a more reformist green economy position – being played out?
  • Are there tensions in the way agrarian and environmental futures are being imagined? How are they negotiated and by whom?
  • What does this mean for a new politics of agrarian change that takes environmental questions seriously?
  • How are land, water and climate politics converging and/or clashing in these debates and in relation to agrarian change?

As new climate movements take to the streets, it becomes even more vital to ask what possibilities there are for alliances and interactions between rural (agrarian and fisheries) and climate movements, and between the broader politics of land, water, food, energy and climate. Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged here too.

CfP POLLEN20 – Land, environment and nature: politics of resources*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Charles-Alexis Couvreur (University of Oxford). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to chalexiscouvreur@gmail.com no later than November22nd.

Session description

Critical agrarian studies has focused on land as the central resource for agrarian production, driving the dynamics of accumulation. However, as with much scholarship originating in Marxist thought, it has been widely critiqued for its failure to engage with environmental questions more broadly. As the ‘environment’ is itself a contested and multi-layered notion, we are interested in further fleshing out how non-human ‘natures’ interact with processes of agrarian change and, more broadly, capital accumulation in rural settings with the following questions:

  • How can the role of nature(s) be incorporated into a re-theorisation of agrarian/rural economy dynamics?
  • Can diverse knowledge systems recast conventional understandings of the relationships between people, production and nature?
  • What are the political and ontological implications of ‘greening’ conventional understandings of agrarian/rural capitalistic transformations?

Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged too, for the complementary light they shed on the importance of nature(s) in the multiple processes of capital accumulation that still need to be further unpacked.

CfP POLLEN20 – Renewable Energies and Agrarian Change: Contestations over Low Carbon Investments*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Gerardo A. Torres Contreras (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to g.torrescontreras@ids.ac.uk no later than November22nd.

Session description

Renewable Energies are expected to play a significant role in the energetic transition towards the development of greener energy production systems. Climate change mitigation investments are supposed to reduce environmental degradations related to fossil fuels, ensure energy security and to foster both economic and social development. However, these transitions have to be situated in the local time and space.

With this in mind, little attention has been put to the role renewable energies play out in land dynamics and land use change because of the ‘materialities’ of these projects. Only in wind energy projects, for instance, infrastructure only occupies between 5 to 7 percent of the total extension of land required for a project. This means that not only the land within the wind farm projects remains productive while windmills harvest energy but that also we assist to processes of agrarian change resulting from these new land dynamics.

The energetic transition, in this sense, draws attention to the need for land and the pressures that such spatial requirement exert on rural lands and people by displacing or hindering existing or alternative land uses (Huber and McCarthy, 2017, p. 11). In this sense, it is worth exploring the following questions:

  • How do politics around renewable energies interact with land dynamics?
  • How do they foster or undermine patterns of accumulation within and across host communities?
  • How are these dynamics associated with processes of class formation and social differentiation?
  • How are they modifying local relations of production?