Geoforum最新文献_第4页

The disaster contradiction of contemporary capitalism: Resilience, vital systems security, and ‘post-neoliberalism’

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104204

Stephen J. Collier

In the last few years, governments in the U.S. and Europe have responded to a series of events—from the Covid pandemic and energy shocks to a series of large-scale disasters—by directing trillions of dollars to measures that seek to bolster “resilience.” These interventions aim to ensure the function of vital systems by restructuring supply chains, investing in infrastructures, and providing governmental backstops for critical social and economic functions. The proliferation of such robust state actions challenges scholarly accounts—which were based on state practices of resilience in the 2000s and 2010s—that analyzed resilience as a philosophy of state inaction, or, at most, a norm of government actions to restore market self-organization following disruptions.

Drawing on the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe, this article analyzes the variable forms of resilience in terms of the coherent dynamics of a ‘disaster contradiction’ of contemporary capitalism. Contrary to the dominant assessment of recent scholarship, it argues that the increasing centrality of resilience as a governmental norm reflects an ongoing politicization of disaster outcomes: contemporary capitalist states are held responsible for ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems, and for fostering adaptive adjustment to shocks. But this responsibility is pulled between contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, events that disrupt vital systems threaten capital accumulation and social welfare, catalyzing state actions to curtail the scope of markets or individual choice. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, interventions in the name of resilience impose social, economic, and spatial order. On the other hand, such interventions create rigidities, inefficiencies, and unintended consequences, including a heightened risk of future catastrophes, that result in what Offe referred to as crises of crisis management. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, resilience appears in critiques of planning and intervention, and as a norm of state actions to establish—or, following crises, restore—market self-organization. It is argued that government interventions in the name of resilience in the 2020s may be analyzed as a distinctive episode in the development of the disaster contradiction, in which resilience is emerging as a key mode of ‘post-neoliberal’ government.

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引用次数: 0

Recomposing the climate-security nexus: A conceptual introduction

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104195

Delf Rothe , Christine Hentschel , Ursula Schröder

What is security in an age of catastrophic climate change? This conceptual introduction to the special issue “Critical Climate Security” develops a new theoretical approach to studying the complex linkages between climate change, security, and conflict. Through a comprehensive review, it identifies three ways of theorizing the climate-security nexus in the existing literature: as a set of causal relations, as a discourse, and as a field of practice. To transcend these ideal types and capture the climate-security nexus in its multiplicity, we propose to theorize it as a composition. This approach is attentive to the material, discursive, affective, practical, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the nexus and puts a focus on change through processes of composing and recomposing. Acknowledging the crucial role of the researcher in composing climate security, it also offers new ways of practicing critique. While critical research on climate security in the past often focused on debunking taken-for-granted knowledge and deconstructing hegemonic discourses, our perspective outlines how climate security could be recomposed around new “matters of care”, and thus be gradually reoriented toward more progressive goals. In this way, our approach is also a proposal to think differently about the future of climate security: beyond the established pathways of either dystopian catastrophe or utopian promise. Instead, a compositional approach requires a constant commitment to practices of protecting, caring, and repairing, also in the sense of reparation: not just as compensation for past damages but as a future-oriented project of world-making in which redistribution and just transformation matter.

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引用次数: 0

A Karen indigenous approach to food sovereignty: Tracing processes of institutional emergence

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104214

Diana Suhardiman , Charlotte Clare , Saw Nay Kaw

This paper looks at Karen communities’ Indigenous approach to food sovereignty, embedded in the cultural values based on the notion of reciprocity. It presents the concept of Ma Doh Ma Kha or, you help me I help you, as the cultural continuum which facilitate processes of institutional emergence. Placing food sovereignty within the broader context of Indigenous movements, it focuses on rice banks formation, factors that necessitate its formation, and the shaping of evolutionary pathways that link rice banks with centuries old Karen customary governance system contextualized in the central positioning of collective plots in rotational farming practices. Building on the concept of institutional bricolage and viewing food sovereignty as a dynamic process rather than a set of fixed principles, it illustrates how Karen communities (re)make institutions while responding to various external drivers of change, including the Myanmar Army’s political oppression. Taking the Salween Peace Park, in Karen State, Myanmar, as our case study, we show how Karen life philosophy and cultural values contextualized in rotational farming practices serve as one of the key foundations for shaping of Karen communities’ evolutionary pathways for food sovereignty.

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引用次数: 0

The monster has landed: Shifting land tenure regimes and the political ecology of a Chilean mining ‘wasteland’

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104202

Armando Caroca

This article examines the emergence and expansion of El Torito, a large-scale tailings dam in El Melón, Chile. I present the dam as an outcome of multiple historical land tenure regimes, including the rural proto capitalist “hacienda”, the twentieth century agrarian reform, and the current liberalisation of land markets. The political ecology literature on wastelands (including mining waste sites) has extensively explored the historical features that lead to the production of such territories, including land control and appropriation. However, I argue that this scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which multiple, successive, and radically different land tenure regimes overlap over time, collectively shaping the production of wastelands. Furthermore, I claim that each land tenure regime involves a particular valuation of the territory, and that their intersection explains the availability of land for waste disposal. To support this argument, the article discusses the concepts of ‘wastelanding’, ‘valuation’ and ‘territorial emptying’. The thematic analysis of the conducted interviews and the review of secondary sources suggest that most of the features described in the literature on the production of wastelands are present in my case. However, my findings contribute to expand the literature: Firstly, the production of wastelands is not necessarily characterised by the imposition of one valuation of the land over other, subaltern, or fundamentally different valuations. Secondly, the production of wastelands can be shaped simultaneously by processes of territorial emptying and repopulation, manufacturing multiple and contradictory valuations of the territory.

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引用次数: 0

Financing climate and disaster risk through contingency: The case of humanitarian risk pools

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104177

Olivia G. Taylor

This paper examines the adoption of risk pooling in the humanitarian sector as an innovative climate and disaster risk financing mechanism. Risk pooling is a strategy borrowed from the insurance industry to enable a portfolio of pre-agreed funding to be over-committed, or ‘stretched’, in order to allocate funding more efficiently. Risk pooling has emerged in the context of concerns about rising humanitarian costs and is part of wider calls for more efficient, ‘risk-based’ climate and disaster financing. The paper explores humanitarian risk pooling through the lens of geographical scholarship on risk and contingency, drawing empirically from a case study of a humanitarian risk pool, to show that pooling represents the extension of financialized logics of risk into new spaces in the humanitarian sector. Risk pooling is described as offering ‘protection’ to beneficiaries, but while it offers potential efficiencies for humanitarian agencies and donors, it renders funding certainty for beneficiaries more complex and fragile. The paper explores how risk operates as a ‘hinge-point’ for decision-making through the pool, extending a logic of contingency into new domains of humanitarian financing, as agencies seek to gain efficiencies in the face of more costly, frequent and severe future climate and disaster events.

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引用次数: 0

Rhythmanalysis of pedestrian streets in Hanoi: A spatial–temporal reading of public spaces

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104200

Huu Lieu Dang , Thi-Thanh-Hien Pham , Julie-Anne Boudreau

Streetspace reallocation has been drawing considerable attention from city governments and practitioners, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last ten years in Vietnam, pedestrianization has rapidly been adopted by many cities across the country. Despite this, there is still a gap in our understanding of how pedestrianization is conceived and used in Vietnam and in other parts of the Global South, where high population densities and informal economic activities shape urban public spaces. Our research explored how pedestrian streets are imagined, used, and negotiated by different user groups (planners, locals, informal vendors, and visitors) in downtown Hanoi. Drawing on rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 1992), our conceptual framework included analyses of the street’s usage as well as socio-political aspects of rhythms. We conducted systemic observations of the pedestrian street in the spring of 2022 and 70 in-depth interviews in the summer of 2022. This research enriches the conceptualization of rhythms by introducing the dominant-adapting-dominated rhythms triad, which uncovers a network of power dynamics that limit informal-sector street vendors’ access to public spaces. By characterizing street sectors based on magnitude and types of rhythms, we demonstrate the methodological significance of rythmanalysis. Our findings offer valuable insights for policymakers and designers seeking to create more inclusive pedestrian streets.

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引用次数: 0

Between binary- and mono-ontologies: The rewilding practice of Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town Wetland Park

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104201

Zijing Shen , Junxi Qian , Hong Zhu , Shuang Tian

This article engages with the scholarships on rewilding, the Anthropocene, and urban nature to advance a case study of urban rewilding in Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town Wetland Park (OCT Park), the only wetland park located in a megacity centre in China. We argue that the two philosophical underpinnings of rewilding, i.e., the ideal of a pristine baseline and human non-intervention, must be rethought in urban contexts. For one thing, Anthropocenic critiques of the Edenic imagination and the socio-nature dichotomy urge us to envision human-nature interactions as co-constituted and open-ended. For another, urban nature scattered and embedded in complex socio-natural negotiations provides different conditions for rewilding from remote natural reserves. To address these enquiries, we highlight three scenarios in OCT Park: (1) restoration and protection of the wetland; (2) establishment of Nature School and nature education; and (3) disciplining of tourists and the open-ended surprises. This paper reveals OCT Park’s future-focused approach to ecological restoration, its open attitude toward human participation, and the outcomes of human-nature interaction, which collectively constitute a potentially worthwhile model for rewilding practices in urban settings. In doing so, this article adds new knowledge to the rewilding framework by drawing the ontological positions advocated by the Anthropocene literature and an emphasis on urban contexts. Specifically, the paper reveals that human-nature relationships in urban rewilding practices manifest as dynamic negotiations, oscillating between the binary-ontology, which divides humans and non-humans into separate realms, and mono-ontology, which, in contrast, emphasises blurred boundaries and ontological positions.

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引用次数: 0

Framing locally led adaptation in a planned relocation in Fiji

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104196

Merewalesi Yee , Annah Piggott-McKellar , Celia McMichael , Karen E McNamara

Locally led adaptation (LLA) is a new paradigm that seeks to ensure that adaptation decision-making is driven by local people affected by climate risks to deliver context-specific and equitable solutions for local communities. LLA proposes a meaningful approach to decision-making about how, when, and where to adapt; however, there are several challenges associated with LLA including complex power dynamics at the local scale. Empirical research is needed to examine how to best utilise and put in practice LLA principles and processes for improved outcomes on-the-ground. This paper reports on findings from research undertaken in Cogea, Fiji, which is a village that planned to relocate following the destructive category 5 Tropical Cyclone (TC) Yasa and associated flooding in December 2020. This paper draws from Talanoa discussions with small groups and individuals and participant observation in December 2021 and January 2023, to contextualise experiences of the planned relocation process in the context of the eight principles of LLA: devolved decision-making, responsiveness to structural inequalities, reliable funding, investment in local capabilities, robust understanding of climate risk, flexible programming, transparency and accountability, and collaborative action and investment. As this paper explores, Cogea’s relocation was aligned, either strongly or partially, to these LLA principles, albeit with the involvement of donor and development partners in decision-making processes. The paper argues that it is not sufficient to devolve adaptation decision-making to the ‘local’ level; LLA requires ‘critical localism’ that is responsive to vernacular understandings of the local, and the agency of and power dynamics between different actors.

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引用次数: 0

Remoteness and subjectivity in gas extraction: Indigenous agency and the roadless design 天然气开采中的偏远与主体性：本土代理与无路设计

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2024-12-02 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104166

Ana Watson , Conny Davidsen

Past research has confirmed how ‘green’ extractive projects can reproduce exclusion and displacement overall, but constructions of otherness and remoteness that emerge in such green illusions of extractivism and their resistance remains little understood. Peru’s Camisea liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction in the Peruvian Amazon has been framed as an environmentally friendly flagship project because of its enclave or roadless design that enables a smaller environmental footprint. Drawing on a political ecology analysis of subject formation and co-production of remoteness, this paper analyzes the agendas and effects of constructed “remoteness” in its resource extraction as a strategy to design, legitimize, and enforce territorial control. This analytical lens moves away from strict binaries of the powerful and the powerless towards a continuum of power in the resistance of extraction. We found that the notion of ‘remoteness’ is a central rhetorical strategy that paradoxically enables and limits corporate expansion, neoliberal agendas and Indigenous tactics to negotiate access to benefits. This study contributes to and works toward a more diversified power knowledge base on the ways in which environmental claims in extractivism are assessed.

过去的研究已经证实了“绿色”采掘项目是如何在整体上再现排斥和流离失所的，但是在这种采掘主义的绿色幻想中出现的他者性和距离性的构建及其抵抗仍然很少被理解。秘鲁亚马逊地区的Camisea液化天然气（LNG）开采项目被认为是一个环保的旗舰项目，因为它的飞地或无路设计使环境足迹更小。通过对主体形成和异地共同生产的政治生态学分析，本文分析了构建的“异地”在其资源开采中的议程和效果，作为一种设计、合法化和实施领土控制的策略。这种分析的镜头从强大和无能的严格二元对立转向了抵抗抽取的连续权力。我们发现，“偏远”的概念是一种核心修辞策略，它矛盾地促进和限制了企业扩张、新自由主义议程和土著策略，以谈判获得利益。本研究有助于并致力于建立一个更多样化的权力知识库，以评估采掘活动中环境索赔的方式。

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引用次数: 0

Strategic silences for normative work: Inclusions and exclusions of migrant labour in policy foregrounding of the Swedish gig economy 规范性工作的战略沉默：瑞典零工经济政策前景中对移民劳工的包容和排斥

IF 3.4 2区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Geoforum

Pub Date : 2024-11-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104157

Natasha A. Webster , Qian Zhang

Migrants constitute a sizable portion of vulnerable workers in digitally-mediated work, particularly in the gig economy. They face wide-scale labour exploitation as well as exclusions and further marginalization from existing labour markets and welfare systems. Policy intervention is a focal point of debate in the expanding gig economy literature. In Nordic countries, it is often assumed the welfare state will regulate the gig economy, but due to ambiguous understandings of what the gig economy is, debates are focused on topics such as taxation, often downplaying complexities. This study aims to explore how strategic silences towards migration underpin policy narratives relating to the foregrounding of gig economy in welfare contexts, specifically Sweden. Our approach highlights silence as an agentic and strategic process. Based on twenty-three selected Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU series) issued between 2016 and 2022, we first mapped the main themes regarding the gig economy in the Swedish policy arena. We show the Swedish state is shifting to recognize migrants and the gig/platform economy, but the role of structural inequalities remains ambiguous. We further critically analyzed contents of ten reports and show silence is strategic in two ways: first maintaining normative work forms as the key interest of the state and second, positioning precarious migrant labour as a sphere of exclusion. This study provides new perspectives and insights into the governance of the gig economy by highlighting the role of strategic production of silences regarding structural inequalities and the tensions within welfare-labour relations.

移民在数字媒介工作的弱势工人中占相当大的比例，尤其是在零工经济中。他们面临着大规模的劳动剥削，在现有的劳动力市场和福利制度中被排斥和进一步边缘化。政策干预是不断扩大的零工经济文献中争论的焦点。在北欧国家，人们通常认为福利国家将监管零工经济，但由于对零工经济的理解含糊不清，辩论集中在税收等主题上，往往淡化了复杂性。本研究旨在探讨在福利背景下，特别是瑞典，对移民的战略沉默如何支撑与零工经济前景相关的政策叙述。我们的方法强调沉默是一种代理和战略过程。基于2016年至2022年间发布的23份精选瑞典政府官方报告（SOU系列），我们首先绘制了瑞典政策领域有关零工经济的主要主题。我们表明，瑞典政府正在转向承认移民和零工/平台经济，但结构性不平等的作用仍然模糊不清。我们进一步批判性地分析了十份报告的内容，并表明沉默在两个方面具有战略意义：首先，保持规范的工作形式作为国家的关键利益，其次，将不稳定的农民工定位为排斥的领域。本研究通过强调战略性生产对结构性不平等和福利-劳动关系紧张的沉默的作用，为零工经济的治理提供了新的视角和见解。

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引用次数: 0