The agrarian question of climate change

Abstract

The agrarian question of the twenty-first century is the agrarian question of climate change. The classical agrarian question asked how capitalist development was reshaping fin de siècle agriculture and with what consequences. The answers often contradicted predictions, and thereby teleological notions of development. Today, we must ask how climate change adaptation and mitigation, alongside and through other ongoing processes of capitalist development, are reshaping agrarian lives, livelihoods, landscapes, and politics, and with what consequences. We argue that attention to the agrarian question is essential to understanding social, political, and economic transformation broadly in the time of climate change.