German energy giant and coal mine operator RWE makes two products: cheap electricity and ‘pretty new landscapes’. These ‘pretty new landscapes’ are biodiversity offsets to compensate for the destruction of…
Securing accumulation by restoration – Exploring spectacular corporate conservation, coal mining and biodiversity compensation in the German Rhineland
Pastoralism and Development: Fifty Years of Dynamic Change
IDS Bulletin 51A edited by Ian Scoones This archive IDS Bulletin reflects on 50 years of research on pastoralism at IDS. Much has changed, but there are also important continuities….
Land, Investment & Politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s Pastoral Drylands
The introduction is available as Open Access Chapter 14 is available as Open Access Buy a copy Examines the new challenges facing Africa’s pastoral drylands from large-scale investments and how…
Resource warfare, pacification and the spectacle of ‘green’ development: Logics of violence in engineering extraction in southern Madagascar
Bringing political ecology’s concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and…
Structured Collaboration Across a Transformative Knowledge Network — Learning Across Disciplines, Cultures and Contexts?
Realising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require transformative changes at micro, meso and macro levels and across diverse geographies. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research has a role to play in documenting,…
Transformations to sustainability: combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches
The imperatives of environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation and social justice (partially codified in the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs) call for ambitious societal transformations. As such, few aspects of actionable…
Water for Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice
by Lyla Mehta, Theib Oweis, Claudia Ringler, Barbara Schreiner and Shiney Varghese Pathways to Sustainability series £29.99 (paperback) Routledge, 2019 Buy this book About the book This book is the…
Political Ecology and Differential Vulnerabilities to Droughts among Livestock Farmers in South Africa: A Case Study of Mpakeni Community
The enormous contributions livestock production makes to rural livelihood in communal areas are perhaps why it is deemed a vehicle that can reduce the high poverty and inequality levels through the injection of effective policies.
Golden Rice and technology adoption theory: A study of seed choice dynamics among rice growers in the Philippines
We draw upon and contribute to a wider literature on what drives farmers’ seed selection practices. Seed choice has been a frequent case in the elaboration of technology adoption theory. We apply a recently proposed tripartite model of learning, and present new survey data to shed light on the dynamics of seed choice and variety replacement rates among rice farmers in two sites in Nueva Ecija, Luzon, the Philippines. We compare our findings with previous research on the seed choices of Indian cotton and rice farmers in Warangal, Telangana, India.
A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure
This paper proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow are significant and differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations. A multi-typology framework is presented, identifying the conditions under which pastoralists can be considered real-time reliability professionals in systems with mandates preventing or otherwise avoiding key events from happening. The framework leads to a different policy-relevant counternarrative to pastoralism as understood today. Some features of the counternarrative are already known or have been researched. The paper’s aim is to provoke further work (including case research and interactions with decision-makers) on how robust the counternarrative is as a policy narrative for recasting today’s pastoralist policy and management interventions.