| 1. |
- Bachmann, Jan, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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(Re-)moving earth, building Kenya – The politics of sand extraction in Kedong
- 2024
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 149
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article delves into the critical domain of sand mining and trade in the context of rapid urbanization and massive infrastructure development in Kenya. It joins the growing body of work in geography and political ecology that interrogates the social and political intricacies that govern the removal and forwarding of this ‘mundane’ mineral. More specifically, this article seeks to reappraise the concept of extractivism a term often applied in the discussion of mining of more inherently valuable commodities, describing a form of accumulation based on the depletion of resources in the context of unequal relations. The article focuses on Kedong Valley, a place of colossal sand removal operations, significant revenue generation, and enclave characteristics. It is an area where contestations around the environment, land ownership and use, livelihoods and political authority have long intersected and where sand mining ventures have raised the stakes for control over the land. However, uncharacteristic for extractivism, instead of a few dominant actors, the extractive agents in the Kenyan sand business are many, close and fragmented. The need for effective governance of sand extraction ties together different claims to regulatory authority expressed through norms, regulations, interests and coercion. The self-organization of loaders, for example, has built considerable leverage for collective claim-making, exposing the ‘socially thick’ relations of extraction practices. The paper demonstrates that the concept of extractivism realizes its analytical value when complementing its structural take with attending to how claims to political authority are made through extraction practices in concrete places.
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| 2. |
- Boda, Chad, et al.
(författare)
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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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| 3. |
- Cederlöf, Gustav
(författare)
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Energy as object and relation: Thermodynamics, space, and emergent energy geographies
- 2024
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 150
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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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| 4. |
- Eriksson, Rikard, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Industrial and geographical mobility of workers during industry decline : the Swedish and German shipbuilding industries 1970–2000
- 2016
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 75, s. 87-98
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article follows the industry employment histories of all individuals who at some point have been affiliated with the declining German or the dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industry during 1970–2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding, investigating the extent to which they were employed at all, tended to move to related sectors within or outside the region, and whether such moves were beneficial for the individuals. Combining insights from labour geography and redundancy studies with evolutionary economic geography, we find remarkably similar results for the West German and Swedish cases. Our findings indicate a notable impact of the regional industry structure on the labour market outcomes for workers leaving shipbuilding. This suggests that more attention should be devoted to the specific structures of the absorptive capacity of regional labour markets. The findings are discussed within the context of a mature industry.
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| 5. |
- Hellberg, Sofie, 1979
(författare)
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Water, life and politics: Exploring the contested case of eThekwini municipality through a governmentality lens
- 2014
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 56, s. 226-236
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores biopolitical effects of water governance. Based on narrative interviews with water users in eThekwini municipality, South Africa the article inquires into how water service delivery matters in terms of people’s lives. What we learn by paying close attention to the water users’ narratives is that the ways in which water service delivery are carried out in eThekwini have differentiating effects on how water users perceive themselves and their lives. Moreover, the narratives show how the municipality’s techniques of targeting certain types of populations as appropriate for particular technological solutions require that the water users exercise different forms of agency in order to safeguard access to water. This reading of people’s water stories suggests that the hydropolitics of eThekwini consolidates the disconnectedness of the different lives that are lived in Durban’s communities. Ultimately, such a biopolitical reading of the water users’ narratives illustrates how water performs a function in constituting both life and lifestyles and that an implementation of the right to basic water can work so as to produce, or further entrench, distinctions between different forms of life.
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| 6. |
- Lindberg, Jonas, 1973, et al.
(författare)
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China’s belt and road initiative: The need for livelihood-inclusive stories
- 2021
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 121, s. 138-141
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most ambitious global investment ventures in modern times, with the stated ambition to generate inclusive development processes through improved connectivity. Recent literature increasingly interprets the BRI as uneven, complex and dynamic, and there is growing focus on its environmental consequences. However, especially given the official narrative of inclusive development, surprisingly little attention has so far been paid to the livelihood politics produced where the BRI is implemented. This short paper critically reviews recent BRI literature on southern and eastern Asia. The main argument is that the current focus on economic and political dimensions of the BRI at national and international scales has left out an understanding of local issues. In conversation with recent calls for more grounded political understandings of the BRI, as well as attentiveness to its environmental consequences, we conclude by outlining some of the benefits of adding detailed livelihood analyses to the existing body of research on the BRI.
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| 7. |
- Vilhelmson, Bertil, 1952, et al.
(författare)
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Does the Internet encourage people to move? Investigating Swedish young adults’ internal migration experiences and plans
- 2013
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 47:June, s. 209-216
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Internet offers personalized and constantly updated information about opportunities and facilities at places far away. It stimulates distant personal contact and interaction via social media. Attention is thus increasingly being paid to the relationships between Internet use and traditional, physical forms of spatial interaction and movement. This paper explores possible associations between Internet use and internal migration, based on a 2009 survey of 750 young adults in Sweden. We explore Internet-based information seeking practices associated with actual migration experiences and with current plans to move to another place. Results indicate that many recent movers believed that the Internet influenced and facilitated their decision to move, and somewhat influenced their choice of destination. Many have also developed Internet-based communication practices that involve plans to migrate in the near future. Results suggest that the Internet reinforces intentions to move for a sizeable group, and also affects their migration motives.
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| 8. |
- Wade, Philip, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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Peri-urban communities and precarious temporality in Cochabamba, Bolivia: Class, indigeneity, and social exclusion
- 2024
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Ingår i: GEOFORUM. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 153
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the key challenges facing urban areas in the twenty-first century is how to promote inclusive developmental policies and address increasing social inequality. Using the community of Mercado Campesino de Arocagua in north-western Bolivia as a case study, this article shows how peri-urban spaces destabilise traditional ethnic and class divisions, exemplifying the growing complexities of the politics of social and racial exclusion in Latin America. The article argues that the endurance of relations of coloniality enables the exclusion of rural Indigenous groups from the political, social, and economic boundaries of the city. These boundaries, however, are increasingly permeable and unstable. In this context, the multi-scalar governance structures that have helped many Indigenous people in Bolivia to move to and prosper within urban spaces prevent the community of Mercado Campesino from legal recognition.
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| 9. |
- Wästfelt, Anders, et al.
(författare)
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Landscape care paradoxes: Swedish landscape care arrangements in a European context
- 2012
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 43:6, s. 1171-1181
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contemporary European agriculture has a number of additional aims beside of food production, such as safeguarding environmental services and conservation values. Substantial efforts at official levels are aimed towards sustainable development but also towards maintaining values of what may be termed van- ishing landscapes. Selected areas and landscape features are set aside for protection or restoration. Indi- vidual efforts of this type have a long history in Sweden, and the issue has recently received increased attention, primarily due to more ambitious government goals concerning biodiversity conservation and Sweden’s ratification of the European Landscape Convention. This has resulted in an increased scientific and official interest in vanishing values in the rural landscape, where parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Maramures district in Romania, have been used as model examples of land use regimes which in the past was common in Sweden. In this context, the dilemma of romanticizing peasants’ use of land is highlighted and discussed more than has hitherto been done. This paper sheds light on some paradoxes inherent in official policies in relation to land use practices concerning the management of rural land- scapes in Sweden, and relates the Swedish situation to a contrasting example of landscape practice in Romania. We discuss the concept of landscape care in relation to the construction and perception of land- scape values and valuable landscapes through the lenses of rural realities and official policies. When Swed- ish authorities engage in the promotion of landscape care, they tend to work with slices of land, specific predefined values and individual farmers, and they often disregard the need to treat the landscape as a socio-ecological complex dynamic in space and time. We discuss how environmental policy generally could be improved through the adoption of a more inclusive and flexible approach towards aiding the dif- ferent aims inherent in multifunctional rural landscapes.
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| 10. |
- Acosta García, Nicolas, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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The coloniality of power on the green frontier: commodities and violent territorialisation in Colombia's Amazon
- 2022
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185. ; 128, s. 192-201
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The dynamic frontier-making in Colombia's Amazon department of Caquet ' a is the focus of this article. Since the mid-nineteenth century, booms and busts of commodity production have been associated with violent struggles as actors have challenged pre-existing orders and authorities. At different times, the area has been controlled by the Catholic Church, the Colombian state, FARC and paramilitary groups, following the different boom-and-bust cycles of commodity production. We use this case to theorise on the general mechanisms behind frontier-making. Reading the frontier literature through the lens of the coloniality of power, we draw four interrelated categories to access frontier-making analytically: commodity production, dispossession, hegemon, and subjectivities. These are used to explain six distinct periods in the political economy of Caquet ' a and its spatial reconfigurations. We argue that current issues of distrust on the state, violence, and land grabbing, are best understood as part of a historical continuum of multiple actors keeping the area as a frontier space.
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