Solar power, land control, and Indigenous resistance in Yucatán, Mexico

This chapter discusses critical agrarian studies and political ecology, two of the most central academic fields responsible for charting land control, territorialization and extraction in the service of techno-capitalist development. These academic subfields, we can say, specialize in examining the parts and developmental trends of the Worldeater(s). Through an extensive review of critical agrarian studies and political ecology, this chapter shows forgotten disciplinary roots, under-acknowledged commonalities and important differences leading, nevertheless, to increasing convergence within the subfields. This review allows us to calibrate further our analytical tools for the subsequent inquiry into the ‘claws and teeth’ as well as remaining developmental form—body—of the Worldeater(s).

This contribution is a critical review of research on the global agri-food system directly or indirectly identified as political ecology (PE). It shows how food, famine and agricultural production were important topics to early proponents of PE, especially with regards to a critique of neo-Malthusian thought. It then traces further developments in the field and highlights the productive tension between materialist and poststructuralist streams, as well as the influence of actor-network theory. Further on, the paper discusses three neighbouring theories and frameworks with a potential to stimulate current political ecologies of food and agriculture, namely critical agrarian studies, food regime theory and world-ecology. Finally, seven clusters of potential research topics for a political ecology of the global agri-food system are identified. In conclusion, the relevance of PE as a theoretical lens is reiterated and the need for fruitful application of political ecology and related approaches is expressed.

Capitalist development and its fallout dispossession have been contested in various place-based struggles in India. It has intensified capital accumulation, enforcing the vast majority of population, particularly the Adivasis (tribal people) in resource-rich territories, to displace and has affected their livelihoods by accumulating their cultural rights to land, water, and forests. The prerequisite capitalist logic of investment-induced dispossession has been contested in various place-based local struggles raising important questions about mass mobilization, resistance, politics of protest, identity, and solidarity. The study provides theoretical and empirical insight of the interrelationship between culture, power, and politics of corporate state developmentalism and the way it works in Adivasi resource-rich region. By discussing how different ploys and tactics employed by corporate to establish clientelist relation with nature, backed by the state through policy, have led to poverty and dispossession of the commons, this article argues that accumulation of the growth and national development subsume various discourses facilitated by different players involving populist belief and intentions which gradually develop a class character that corresponds with dialectic of the capitalism under the rubric and politics of imperial stage of capitalism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies, the article explores the process of how the Adivasis as a class encounter neoliberal capitalist development in Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex and West Singhbhum. Initiatives like everyday resistance ‘from below’ in response to corporate land accumulation for developmental projects have further enhanced the ecological politics and class politics that will also be discussed in shadow of different theories of political economy and critical agrarian studies.

In this Afterword, I reflect on the themes of race and coloniality in political ecology highlighted by this Symposium. I draw upon and place in conversation scholarly work on Latin America to demonstrate how, notwithstanding disparate social‐historical contexts, Indigenous and Black communities encounter strikingly similar struggles for land and territorial control across the Americas. I build my comments from a fusion of postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist thinking to bolster the importance of intimate and inseparable entanglements between people’s lands and their bodies within political ecological analyses. In the following, I shape this commentary into three co‐constitutive discussions: first, that political ecologies of race are hemispheric; second, that race and coloniality condition the lives of IndigenousandBlack peoples relationally in the Americas; and third, that these multiple and mutually constituted ideologies, namely intersectional forms of power, shaping land and land control are profoundly material and embodied.

While conservation organizations work to expand the network of protected areas in Africa to 30 percent or more of terrestrial land area, the flip side of such expansion is the mounting dispossession of rural land users, including subsistence-oriented farmers and pastoralists. This may result in forced migration to urban areas or elsewhere, but also to various forms of resistance: both covert and more overt instances of opposition to conservation. This chapter examines the risks and determinants of these variable constellations of overt resistance. In doing so, it assesses whether or to what extent recent developments in violent resistance, including the growth of jihadist groups, can be linked to the expansion of a top-down environmental conservation agenda. Drawing on case studies from throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, the chapter suggests that mainstream conservation interventions often underestimate the risks of local resistance to these initiatives. In a similar vein, ideology-focused explanations of violent extremism also tend to overlook the material determinants of violence and associated grievances rooted in the loss of access to land, natural resources, and customary forms of livelihood. Empirical studies of the latter factors—and particularly those which eschew single-factor determinism in favor of qualitative, multifactor explanation or contextualization—represent a promising new area for future research on resistance to conservation in political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and related fields.

Advancing future-oriented perspectives in political ecology and critical agrarian studies, this paper examines projected land use and land cover change (LULCC) dynamics in four ‘archetypal’ scenarios foregrounded by the IPCC for limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2100. Focusing on the Global South, we explore how these archetypes project a radical reversal of historical LULCC and rural population trends, potentially implying a considerable rescaling of contemporary land rush dynamics. Taken together, land-based climate mitigation futures highlight risks related to the (re)production of relative surplus populations through processes of rural enclosure and accumulation by dispossession in the Global South.

From cotton to paddy: Political crops in the Indian Punjab

Governments and corporations exclaim that “energy transition” to “renewable energy” is going to mitigate ecological catastrophe. French President Emmanuel Macron makes such declarations, but what is the reality of energy infrastructure development? Examining the development of a distributional energy transformer substation in the village of Saint-Victor-et-Melvieu, this article argues that “green” infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe. Since 1999, the Aveyron region of southern France has become a desirable area of the so-called renewable energy development, triggering a proliferation of energy infrastructure, including a new transformer substation in St. Victor. Corresponding with this spread of “green” infrastructure has been a 10-year resistance campaign against the transformer. In December 2014, the campaign extended to building a protest site, and ZAD, in the place of the transformer called L’Amassada. Drawing on critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and human geography literatures, the article discusses the arrival process of the transformer, corrupt political behavior, misinformation, and the process of bureaucratic land grabbing. This also documents repression against L’Amassada and their relationship with the Gilets Jaunes “societies in movement.” Finally, the notion of infrastructural colonization is elaborated, demonstrating its relevance to understanding the onslaught of climate and ecological crisis.

Accumulation by Restoration (AbR) represents a shift from a conservationist ‘mode of production’ emphasizing sustainability and preservation to a ‘growth economy of repair’ in which nature becomes valued not just for its use but also for its potential for repair or restoration. The ‘repair mode’ mobilizes the assumption, imagery and mythology of degradation juxtaposed with the promise of economic and ecological redemption. Through rationalization, restoration, re-creation and/or re-cultivation, it aims to generate new, better-disciplined, more legible, ‘substitutable’ natures to multiple accumulative ends. Bridging political ecology, critical agrarian studies and science and technology studies, contributions to this themed issue explore transformations associated with AbR at across scales and involving variegated alliances, discourses, technologies and institutional dynamics giving rise to ecologies of repair. We demonstrate how the dynamics and contradictions of the repair mode are mediated and enacted through the performative, spectacular and metrological rendering of ‘mitigation’, ‘equivalence’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘repair’ as instruments and object, simultaneous means and ends. These dynamics have given rise to new materialities and technologies of governance and new intensities and spatialities of resource control and accumulation, as what were consequences of growth have become strategic goals and the foundation of a new growth economy.

This article contributes to the study of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance by introducing a novel framework: “Indigenous Diplomatic Resistance” (IDR). Michel Foucault’s theories are useful for highlighting how Indigenous groups use diplomatic channels to resist settler-colonial domination. By applying settler colonialism theory to the Palestinian case, this article offers new insights into Palestinian resistance against colonial Zionism, especially in the time of Jewish immigration between 1882 to 1914. Foucault’s notion of discursive power underscores how colonial powers impose knowledge systems that justify control, whilst Indigenous peoples push back through alternate forms of knowledge, including diplomatic strategies (Foucault 2003: 23–24). This article challenges narratives that focus on military or grassroots resistance, suggesting that Palestinian diplomatic resistance was central to their resistance strategy. This approach provides a new lens through which to understand the nature of Palestinian resistance, emphasizing the epistemic struggle inherent in their fight against settler colonialism.

Lithium-ion battery (LIB) production as a central part of decarbonisation strategies is driving mineral extraction in countries of the global South, where they exacerbate existing conflicts over the creation and distribution of value. Value, however, is a contested concept. Following the pragmatic sociology of values, we argue that the analysis of value creation and distribution cannot be separated from the intersubjective and normative conflicts over valuation. We examine valuation controversies in Madagascar as a mining dispute by describing the grammar of values on the example of taxation design in Madagascar’s mining reform influenced by LIB production. Empirical evidence from ethnographic fieldwork and expert interviews on negotiations between stakeholders’ different principles of value helped identify conflicting value justifications and finding local compromises. Here, the pervasive nature of neoliberal economisation is monopolised by a specific interpretation of value wired to investors’ expectations and complicated by path-dependent legacies. Our analysis illustrates how asymmetric economic power favours particular economic and operating registers of a ‘green capitalism’ valuation system. Building on the analytical gain of Heinich’s novel pragmatic value approach, we show how the recent mining reform in Madagascar is contested and that compromise around value remains fragile (or impossible) in the current institutional context.

Beyond land grabbing narratives, acknowledging patterns and regimes of land control in Senegal

This article dives into the way in which productive and territorial transformations have created or increased inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation in two rural and periurban areas across Argentina: the Chaco region, in the province of Salta in the north of the country, and the central plateau of the province of Chubut, in Patagonia. The approach combines tools from political ecology, critical social geography and recent literature on water infrastructures. In these territories, water supply services are not provided or solely governed by the formal system but, rather, by an heterogeneous set of stakeholders, rules and arrangements that operate on the side, in the form of long-standing practices rooted in the territory. Thus, addressing infrastructures makes it possible to analyze water inequalities, including issues related to quality, maintenance and the involvement of the target population in infrastructure design. We have developed a qualitative methodological approach focused on the analysis of interviews from different stakeholders in each region and cartographic, documentary, legislative, statistical and newspaper sources. The study shows that water infrastructures produce and reproduce historical inequalities that are social, economic and environmental, so when there are production transformations in the territories, conflicts over its forms of appropriation and distribution reemerge. Besides, access to safe water requires not just “technical” improvements but also a social and political acknowledgment by citizens and constant efforts and investments in order to work.

Constitutional aspects of ecological safety in relation to offshore wind farms in the British and Polish legal systems

In this collection of essays, which were first presented at the Academy of European Law in Florence, we bring together a series of contributions which explore the changing landscape of the EU’s legal acts, and the boundaries between legal acts and acts and processes which may create norms but which do not create ‘law’ in the traditional sense. We bring together two different ways of looking at this picture. The first is to focus on the transformations in and challenges to the EU’s ‘classic’ or traditional legal acts, in particular since the reconfiguration of the categories of legal act and the procedures for their adoption by the Lisbon Treaty. The second perspective is to focus on those acts found at – or beyond – the margin of the classic EU legal acts, including acts of the Member States such as inter se treaties; self-regulation and collective agreements; so-called soft law; and decision-making outside the normal legislative procedures. On the one hand, the volume is concerned to explain this somewhat puzzling adaptability of the EU legal order given that the legal instruments at the Union’s disposal appear essentially the same as they were when the Treaty of Rome came into force 60 years ago (regulations, directives, decisions and international agreements). On the other, it explores the challenges the making and quality of acts pose for the EU’s legal order, such as alterations to institutional balance and the roles of the different institutional actors and challenges to the rule of law.