| 11. |
- Bettini, Giovanni
(författare)
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Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A critique of apocalyptic narratives on 'climate refugees'
- 2013
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-9398 .- 0016-7185. ; 45, s. 65-74
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Climate-induced migration, and particularly the issue of climate refugees, is subject to growing attention in global climate governance. The debate on the topic sees the convergence of conflicting discourses (ranging from those of conservative European governments to southern NGOs) onto apocalyptic narratives that forecast massive, abrupt and unavoidable flows of climate refugees. Such dystopian narratives, either framed within humanitarian or 'national security' agendas, relegate the concerned populations to the status of victims (either to protect or to fear). This article, applying elements of poststructuralist discourse theory, analyzes the narratives via a set of influential reports on climate-induced migration and argues that apocalyptic narratives on climate refugees, although not totalizing or uncontested, represent a case of the depoliticization of global climate governance. The convergence into such narratives favors the drive towards a post-political discursive configuration, which, by supplanting politics with governance, leaves underlying power relations untouched and (re)produces present forms of representational and material marginalization. It therefore argues that such narratives, although often employed with the aim of attracting attention to a pressing issue, are detrimental for an emancipatory approach to climate change. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 12. |
- Boda, Chad, et al.
(författare)
-
Every farmer is a farmer? A critical analysis of the emergence and development of Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana
- 2024
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 150
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Smallholder farmer-based rural social movements have been heralded as a promising source of political power with the potential to effectively promote sustainable trajectories of agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. However, the very early stages of rural social movement building remain understudied, including under what conditions such nascent efforts are likely to lead to effective political influence and foundations for broader collective action. Drawing on insights from organizational studies and resource mobilization theories, we provide an analytical narrative of the emergence and development of a smallholder farmer-based policy advocacy organization, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG). Through analysis of organizational documents and an extensive open-ended focus group interview with PFAG's founders, long-term members, and current staff, we discuss how PFAG managed to overcome the “liability of newness” faced by new organizations, and how its resulting organizational structure influences its modes of resource mobilization and thus type and coverage of its advocacy and service delivery activities. Considering this developmental narrative, we elaborate several challenges that PFAG faces in pursuit of its ambitions to expand its influence in Ghanaian agricultural policy and practice. Our findings indicate the need for PFAG to address emerging contradictions in project activities and uneven geographical coverage, manage tensions between advocacy and service delivery objectives and to work towards establishing an umbrella agenda capable of providing for the diverse and evolving needs of their membership base.
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| 13. |
- Brydges, Taylor, et al.
(författare)
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Consuming Canada : How fashion firms leverage the landscape to create and communicate brand identities, distinction and values
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 90, s. 108-118
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the increasingly global and competitive fashion industry, firms are adopting a variety of strategies to generate value and brand loyalty. While some emphasise the quality of material elements such as inputs, local production and design, others focus on immaterial aspects such symbolic value and exclusivity. In recent years, place-branding has become an important way to create connections between people, places, and products. Yet, the processes behind this type of branding remain poorly understood. In particular, limited attention has been paid to the ways in which landscapes – in all their forms – are being incorporated into place-branding practices. Drawing on 87 interviews, participant observation and an innovative analysis of Instagram accounts, this paper examines how a range of Canadian fashion firms leverage the landscape to create and communicate brand identities, distinction and values. It demonstrates how firms of different sizes and scales construct, harness, or reimagine landscapes and/or popular stereotypes to connect with Canadian identities and consumers. It also highlights how landscape-centric branding can be combined with broader value creation strategies such as local production. In so doing, this paper brings together the economic geography literature on place branding and the cultural geography literature on landscape and identity, and makes a methodological contribution to nascent examinations of social media and visual data sources in geography.
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| 14. |
- Carmo, Renato M., et al.
(författare)
-
Translocal mobility systems : social inequalities and flows in the wild berry industry
- 2019
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - Oxford : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 99, s. 102-110
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper uses the lens of translocality to investigate the seasonal mobility system of Thai berry pickers in Sweden: the perspective highlights the local-to-local relations that constitute this transnational and fluid mobility system. In this paper, we add the aspect of social inequalities to translocal studies, while arguing that multi-sited and locally grounded recruitment processes are contributing to produce and reproduce the mobility system. In the migrant-receiving area, stereotyping processes are active in shaping the selection of workers based on ethnicity, whereas in the migrant-sending area local asymmetries are visible in the selectivity of workers on the basis of age, wealth, and gender. In this way, the aspect of social inequalities, locally embedded at both ends of the recruitment process, is highlighted as a dimension to consider in translocal mobility systems. This is achieved through the analysis of multi-sited fieldwork in Sweden and Thailand that consisted of observations and interviews with Thai workers and representatives of the Swedish berry business.
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| 15. |
- Carton, Wim
(författare)
-
Money for nothin’ and coal for free: ‘Technology neutrality’ and biomass development under the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme
- 2016
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-9398 .- 0016-7185. ; 70, s. 69-78
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent literature has highlighted the creation of multiple equivalences as an important factor underpinning the rise of market-based mechanisms for environmental regulation. Extending these insights into the field of renewable energy policy, this article focuses on one example of this trend – namely the principle of technology neutrality as applied under the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme – and analyzes the concrete ways in which it has shaped the evolution of the Flemish renewable energy landscape. Concretely, the article shows that technology neutrality played a key role in promoting the uptake of biomass combustion in old coal power plants in Flanders, which led to a number of undesirable outcomes and gave rise to significant opposition. Correcting these shortcomings required a number of policy interventions on the part of the Flemish government that fundamentally moved the scheme away from the principle of technology neutrality and towards a more hybrid RE support system, suggesting that the promotion of technology neutrality was fundamentally misguided. Together with similar experiences from related market-based instruments, this suggests that the promotion of technology neutrality has far-reaching implications for the environmental effectiveness of climate and energy policies. In light of the continued promotion of the principle, the article calls for full recognition of the inherent technological choices that are being made through the promotion of policies that purport to be technology-neutral.
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| 16. |
- Cederlöf, Gustav
(författare)
-
Energy as object and relation: Thermodynamics, space, and emergent energy geographies
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Geoforum. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 150
-
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- A fundamental question in energy geographies is how the materiality of energy should be conceptualised. In the physical sciences, energy is a concept of thermodynamics, but this is a kind of materiality that has received little attention in energy geographies. This article engages with recent social-science energy research on thermodynamics to conceptualise a continuous, relational mode of materiality. This contrasts with the discrete, object-like material properties of resources and socio-technical systems that condition social practice. Energy, I argue, is a spatiotemporal relation that shapes the contexts in which object-like properties come to matter. First, the article introduces space as a keyword in a longstanding debate on the relationship between entropy and the irreversibility of time. When entropy, time, and space are understood as imbricated phenomena, unanswered questions of political economy emerge. Second, I review discussions in the history of the science of thermodynamics. These focus on the extent to which thermodynamics inscribes the spatiotemporal relations it defines with political content. The political implications of thermodynamic knowledge have to be studied through open-ended questions in a wide range of contexts. More research is needed, therefore, to nuance our understanding of energy’s materiality and thermodynamics. This involves the role of labour and the human body in infrastructural systems. It also includes the economic, political, and discursive work performed in sustaining the flow of energy in social practices.
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| 17. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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Against (the idea of) financial markets
- 2015
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 66, s. 85-93
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact - and thus as essentially separate from banks - but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems - it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, "the market" to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 18. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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From Marx to market and back again : Performing the economy
- 2014
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 57, s. 12-20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article argues for a more constructive dialogue between political-economic and other heterodox economic approaches to capitalist markets. Arguing that political economists' suspicion of "techno-cultural" approaches is overstated, and drawing closely on the work of David Harvey, the article explores the potential for one particular such approach - that which emphasizes the "performativity" of markets to contribute towards one particular variant of political economy: the classical political economy of Marx.
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| 19. |
- Christophers, Brett, 1971-
(författare)
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Seeing financialization? : Stylized facts and the economy multiple
- 2017
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 85, s. 259-268
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the most prominent stylized facts about contemporary capitalism concerns its "financialization." Like all economic stylized facts, however, facts about financialization are recognized by some commentators and not by others. This article offers one explanation why. It argues that the claims we can make about "the economy" depend upon how we envision that economy in the first place. The economy can be pictured in myriad ways - it is multiple, not singular - and different pictures of it enable the identification of different stylized facts about it. So it is with financialization. The article illustrates this by examining the history of two different traditions of picturing the economy. One - national accounting - increasingly has enabled financialization to be seen; the other - mainstream economics - generally has not.
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| 20. |
- Dzalbe, Sania, et al.
(författare)
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Jumping scales and producing peripheries : farmers' adaptation strategies in crises
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 148
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Resilience has gathered significant attention from economic geographers, yet their focus has primarily centered on economic outcomes at the regional level. This approach often overlooks the intricate micro-processes and lived experiences during crises, assuming that individual resilience can be understood solely through macro-level economic observations. We argue that comprehending the questions of resilience 'to what means' and 'to what ends' requires that we acknowledge the importance of social reproduction and daily practices. Through semi-structured interviews with mink farmers in Denmark and by using the concepts of spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement, we first highlight the everyday practices and broader social structures that individuals aim to preserve and reproduce. Second, we draw attention to the application of a relational spatial ontology in resilience studies by discussing cross-scalar networks of individuals as an adaptation strategy. In so doing, we contribute to the resilience literature in economic geography by highlighting that resilience for individuals entails the reproduction of everyday practices. We also draw attention to the consequences of network detachment for individual livelihoods. Thus unveiling how peripherality is shaped and re/produced, rather than given, through the evolving networks of 'left behind' people in 'left behind' places.
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