Articles

Climate change puts an inequitable and heavy burden on people who are forced to adapt to unjust socioenvironmental conditions created by the legacy of ongoing climate coloniality and historical settler and imperial colonialism. However, universalizing climate adaptation discourses fail to conceptualize these historical processes by framing climate change as external to complex social and human systems. A plural reconceptualization of adaptation instead asks us to question what it means to adapt to environmental changes not just under the guise of global climate change, but as embedded in coloniality and settler colonialism in place.

Law and political economy (LPE) scholars have revived a longstanding debate over the relationship among law, capitalism, and postcapitalist possibility. Is law a creature of capitalism, destined to reproduce its dynamics of exploitation and dominance? Or are there moments of indeterminacy in law that function specifically as openings to a postcapitalist elsewhere?

The economic implosion in the late 1990s in Argentina created the conditions for the emergence of a series of alternative social organizations that were autogestionados, or created from the ground up by unemployed
workers, social activists, artists, and educators. Here, we describe one of these social organizations, Bachillerato Popular IMPA, which is located within an abandoned factory that was recuperated to form a workers’ cooperative.

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales.

As the planet moves further into the human-induced Anthropocene there is an urgent need to reconsider the values, practices, and politics leading to widespread ecological degradation. The prioritisation of economic growth by the most dominant political institutions encourages limitless expansion while minimizing awareness of the ecological vulnerability of the planet. Commoning presents an alternative political structure based on transformative practices of collective care or caring with. In this paper, we investigate how communities in Skouries of Halkidiki, Greece, are responding to the imposition of large-scale mining through three different commons initiatives. The women's collective, the chamomile commons, and the ten-day festival.

The differential impacts of climate change have highlighted the need to implement fit-for-purpose interventions that are reflective of the needs of vulnerable communities. However, adaptation projects tend to favour technocratic, market-driven, and Eurocentric approaches that inadvertently disregard the place-based and contextual adaptation strategies of many communities in the Global South. The paper aims to decolonise climate change adaptation guided by the critical tenets of ‘Decolonising Climate Adaptation Scholarship’ (DCAS). It presents empirical case studies from Fiji, Vietnam, and the Philippines and reveals the different ways that Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and strategies are devalued and suppressed by modernist and developmentalist approaches to climate adaptation.

This research article outlines a provocation for diverse and experimentally open, situated approaches to exploring care and caring. The diversely positioned authors discuss this idea using the subject of soil, in the place and context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Little is known about the diversity of ways that everyday people value, or, have caring relationships for/with soil, among a plethora of research that positions soil ‘care’ around, for example, commercial food production, waste-sinking, or property land value. To study diverse care in relation to soil, as with many relational subjects, requires equivalent diversity in the ways in which we might explore it. Here we outline the basis for diverse, situated methodologies that necessarily lead to a diversity of methods.

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’. Problematising such reductionist narratives, this essay explores CEE as a lively and rich site of postcapitalist alternatives.

When talking about prefiguration what is often talked about is the creation of formal anti-oppression protocols, sometimes critiqued as the self-bureaucratization of anarchist social movements. The result is what I refer to as the protocolization of daily life, a situation where the day-to-day is formalized into defined rules or norms. In doing so, activists often reproduce the control found at the heart of mainstream organizational forms. Such control often works to the detriment of the democratizing goals of social movements, excluding minorities and working-class people, generating the often-critiqued homogenization of social movements. This paper explores an antonym of such protocolization, what I refer to as the prefigurative feel.

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves.

As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degrowth, and diverse and community economies (DCE), respectively. In this Critical Review, I reflect on resonances and similarities, as they emerge from the academic literature. I argue that sites of dissonance, disjuncture or discomfort also emerge which have not been reflected on in the respective literatures thus far, primarily relating to questions of essentialising capitalism and growth imperatives.

This paper identifies characteristics of a 'composting ethic' and grassroots community contexts and skills supporting its emergence.

This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking about changes in subjectivity to write and think about what this might mean for postcapitalist countercities already present in place. 

I wrote this piece for a special issue on emerging methodologies in care and care-giving in Asia Pacific. In it, I reflect on some of the embodied aspects of ethnographic methods that we sometimes overlook. I use Anna Tsing's idea of awkward engagements, but apply it as an embodied method for sensing and responding to different pluriversal realities. The context is myself as a Pākehā New Zealand European person doing research work in the multicultural far west of China.

This paper critically examines the dominant role of concrete in the modernization of Asian cities since the mid twentieth century. While builders, architects, planners and citizens have long praised the advantages of concrete, we argue that concrete can no longer be seen as socially and environmentally neutral in the Anthropocene. When concrete cracks, it does so literally and metaphorically. The cracks manifest not only in the actual material but as socioecological concerns. We employ the concept of “shadow places” to explore the underside of concrete production where those cracks emerge.

Over the past three decades West Virginians have experienced a deepening economic crisis. Divestment in coal and manufacturing has resulted in widespread unemployment, state, county and municipal revenue losses, and cascading effects on social services, households, livelihoods and community life. For 10 years, FJL has conducted ethnographic research, coordinated cooperative experiments, and built pedagogical tools to democratize knowledge about West Virginia’s food system amidst this crisis. Working in a so-called red state, we have fostered conversations about food justice with rural, often socially conservative communities, and have worked to raise up human resources for meaningful community-led food justice organizing in Central Appalachia.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking.

Calls to transform food systems along more ethical and sustainable lines are mounting alongside debates about what constitutes transformative change and strategies needed to achieve it. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have argued that transforming food systems requires transforming the governance of food systems, as dominant “productivist” approaches to governance have narrowly invested in corporate priorities while marginalizing the many small-scale food workers that animate our food system. In this paper, we examine the possibilities and unexpected pathways of food system transformation through the case of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines).

En este artículo analizamos las situaciones de acceso al lugar de emplazamiento actual de varios grupos pre-cooperativos que encuadran en la denominación de “cooperativas sociales” que se nuclean en un entramado más amplio, el de una Asociación Civil denominada Integración Comunitaria por la Salud Mental Una Movida de Locos (MdL), situada en la Ciudad de La Plata, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. En este texto proponemos

In my commentary, I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems.

We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context.

Mainstream biodiversity conservation continues to emphasise the rapid disappearance of charismatic megafauna. Fungi are ignored, partially because many are invisible. However, their conservation is of growing concern because their decline signals a decrease in overall biodiversity and losses in ecosystem integrity and function. Social science engagement with microbes is of growing interest because the diverse characteristics of fungal bodies create new entry points for conservation. Using data collected over three years from literature review, lab ethnography, and interviews, this paper develops two new concepts intended to operate at the intersection of these discussions. A review of the fungal conservation literature finds mainstream species conservation an ill fit for fungi.

Participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities is encouraged in calls for sustainable transitions and transformations. The term ‘community’ is widely used yet nebulously defined. Conservation that removes people from their communities of land invokes epistemological authority and displaced relationships. We relate our work to the articles in this special issue to rethink the relationship between humans and nature in conservation. We propose expanding the term ‘local communities’ to include more than just humans. By decentring the human subject, we rethink what it means to participate in community and place-making, further unpacking the ethical motivations of emplacement.

As the Covid pandemic and unprecedented ecological change unsettle our lives, the growing public awareness of care is reshaping economic thinking and practice as we emerge from the pandemic but find ourselves in deepening social reproduction crises and the ongoing climate crisis. Feminist economists have long identified that unpaid care work forms the basis for social reproduction or the unseen work through which capitalist economies and societies are reproduced. Even if the act of care is central to relationships and fundamental to our survival and wellbeing, it is too often taken for granted, invisible, not counted as productive or profitable, and carried out mostly by women, people of colour, immigrants, or other marginalised groups.

This paper investigates food system resilience—conceptualized through the four dimensions of agency, buffering, connectivity, and diversification—from the perspective of rural–urban relations. We consider three cases that capture distinct actor and policy foci in the wider literature on urban–rural interactions. These are secondary cities and their development potential as central nodes in urban–rural food systems, the role of digital infrastructure in shaping food systems resilience, and finally, street food vendors as a particularly vulnerable yet crucial group of actors linking rural food supply with urban demand. We review existing literature within these themes, with a particular focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food systems in middle- and low-income countries.

Aotearoa New Zealand is at a critical juncture in reducing and managing organic waste. Research has highlighted the significant proportion of organic waste sent to landfills and associated adverse effects such as greenhouse gas emissions and loss of valuable organic matter. There is current debate about what practices and infrastructure to invest in to better manage and use organic waste. We highlight the diversity of existing organic waste practices and infrastructures, focusing on Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We show how debates about organic waste practices and infrastructure connect across three themes: waste subjectivities, collective action in place and language.