Walking with farmers: Floods, agriculture and the social practice of everyday mobility

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the relationship between human mobility and environmental variability and change in recent years, there is relatively little understanding of the role of human agency within this nexus. This paper helps to address this knowledge gap by illuminating the role of perception, action and decision-making in the everyday. Using an innovative walking methodology, it presents an empirical case study of regularised farmers’ movements in and out of a floodplain during the rainy season in central Mozambique to show how people’s day-to-day routes are continuously reproduced through meaningful encounters and engagements with physical obstacles and other people. The paper demonstrates how a concern with everyday mobility highlights people’s day-to-day capacities to respond to environmental variability and change while also drawing attention to the challenges associated with the gradual accumulation of risk in mobile, rural livelihoods.