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- Convenors:
-
Calum Wheeler
(University of Bath)
Felipe Schaeffer Neves (University of Bath)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Political change, advocacy and activism
- Location:
- CB4.7 - G, Chancellor's Building
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
This panel investigates the ecological limits of capitalism, exploring radical critiques and transformative alternatives to the eco-social contradictions driving environmental degradation and crisis.
Description
In the face of multiple crises, the call for socio-ecological transformation is increasingly gaining traction, not only in academia but also in political discourse and market summits. However, the terms of this transformation remain all too often confined to techno-scientific fixes and top-down policies that fail to question the socio-ecological contradictions and colonial dynamics that drive capitalism. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen (2021, pp.163-4) argue, the prevailing assumption remains that “the necessary absolute reduction of resource consumption and of the strain on sinks is feasible without challenging the imperial mode of living, the political economy of capitalism, or the relationships of social forces that sustain it”.
This panel is a call for papers that recognise the necessity of radical critique to inform a transformation that is founded on social and ecological justice, identifying development as a key ideological framework through which accumulative and externalising regimes of capitalism have not only expanded over the last seventy years but continue to renew through contemporary crises in the guise of ‘green growth’ and ‘green colonialism’. We welcome theoretical and empirical research that critiques the contradictions and limitations of green initiatives and discourse, as well as explorations of alternative, ‘bottom-up’ approaches towards socio-ecological transformation in both the Global South and North, that disrupt, negate, and navigate the logic of capitalism and its expression through colonial, juridical-political, patriarchal and racial forms.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Wednesday 25 June, 2025, -Paper short abstract
Using Nancy Fraser’s concept of boundary struggles, the rising global demands for air-conditioning are representative of emerging discourse negotiating the distribution of vulnerability during heat waves, resulting from contradictions between the foreground and background conditions of capitalism.
Paper long abstract
Inequitable access to air-conditioning is paradigmatic of incoming (and ongoing) struggles over development exacerbated by climate change, occurring at what Nancy Fraser identifies as boundaries between the foreground and background conditions of capitalism: between the economy and ecosystem health, political power, and social reproduction. Within ecology, the construction of isolated interiors in opposition to climate-changed exteriors redistribute vulnerability through the built environment. Within the political sphere, norms produced by externalization societies and the imperial mode of living contribute to the destabilization of peripheral societies, causing them to opt-in to technologies such as air-conditioning, which individualizes security responses to climate change. Within social reproduction, air-conditioning is developed as a technology selling comfort as a consumer preference, imposing discomfort upon subaltern populations. The increasing demand for air-conditioning is thus representative of emerging discourse negotiating the global distribution of vulnerability, discomfort, and death during heat waves, mediated by access to cooling technologies.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the site of rural households in Benin, West Africa, particularly the interplay between women’s collective work in agriculture and their bargaining power within the household. It argues that in some of the most remote parts of the world, pre-capitalist forms of economic organisati
Paper long abstract
Recent research has shown that climate change has a disproportionate impact on the food and water security of rural populations across the Global South (Tandon et al., 2022). When agriculture is threatened, as a form of employment and subsistence, vulnerable groups face disproportionate rates of malnourishment as they manage a decrease in food supply (Khatri-Chhetri, 2020). These poor health outcomes are compounded by the higher likelihood of experiencing gender-based violence (Hayward and Ayeb-Karlsson, 2021). While evidence of this interplay is becoming more established in scholarship, there is a pressing need for climate adaptation policies that address these interrelated threats. This paper investigates the lived realities of women in agriculture in rural West Africa, specifically through a qualitative study in rural Atakora, Benin. The research reveals how shifts in climate patterns significantly affect household nutrition and food security. By viewing women's agricultural cooperatives as gendered workplaces, the paper explores the impact of changing rainfall, crop diseases, and declining yields on women's roles in both productive and reproductive activities. Findings show how women adapt by diversifying diets, which affects household bargaining power dynamics and incidence of intimate partner violence. This study highlights the adverse effects of climate change on women – and their innovative forms of adaptation – by connecting to broader issues of food and physical security, including freedom from violence in the household. It calls for the expansion of existing adaptation frameworks to take into account the lived realities of the polycrisis for rural populations in West Africa and beyond.
Paper short abstract
The Amazon region has a history of having its territory encroached upon by outside agents seeking natural resources (Ravena & Marin, 2013). This paper discusses the Bioeconomy and Carbon Market as new paradigms that facilitate the intrusion into Amazon's traditional territories.
Paper long abstract
As a neoliberal program, Payments for Environmental Services (PES) has emerged as a global initiative, often imposed from above in the Global South. This paper highlights how Indigenous and traditional communities assert their autonomy by resisting the encroachment of intermediaries seeking to exploit their territories for bioeconomy actives and carbon markets. Developing a digital platform in a data co-production strategy with scholars and sectoral bureaucracies, traditional people influence the public policy cycle, compelling both the state and the market to adhere to their environmental protocols. Divided into three major fields, the perspectives of the Bioeconomy presented a lexical convergence around the prefix “bio”, but they differ substantially from the point of view of the conception regarding the suffix “economy”(Birch, 2013; Bugge et al., 2016; Philp, 2018). The Bioeconomy and the carbon market constitute new and unfamiliar institutional arrangements for traditional peoples, communities, and bureaucracies. The latter requires knowledge and expertise to develop sectoral policies for both fields based on these market arrangements. In this direction, the paradigm of missions oriented towards the creation of public value (Kattel, Mazzucato, 2018) gains weight, which allows the co-production strategy to incorporate public agents (Ostrom, 2005; Halfat, Martin 2015; Kattel et al., 2019) who will ultimately be responsible, given their participation in the co-production of data, for the inclusion of the indigenous and traditional communities in the design and implementation of public policies aimed at these territories.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the political, social & material production of zones and boundaries of mining waste in Chile. I propose to qualify sacrifice zones as 'certain' spaces of development and commodity production, countered by practices and knowledges, political action, and transformative alternatives
Paper long abstract
This article explores 'sacrifice zones': territories of degradation and socioecological injustice, caused by extractive operations and capitalist modes of production. I claim that the relevant literature has not explored the fact that they are defined as zones. Thus, this article explores the political, social, and material conditions that explain the production of semi-rural zones and boundaries of sacrifice, particularly those associated with mining waste. The case is the 'polygon of influence' of the potential collapse of "El Torito" dam, one of Chile's largest mining waste deposits. The polygon delineates the homes, land, and people that would be swept away by a tailings landslide. Its hard edges, based on technocratic "expert" knowledge, are at odds with the opaque methods used to design it, the lack of information and preparation for emergencies, and the errors in its design and implementation. This research extends the political ecology of extractive sacrifice zones, drawing on the literature on zones and borders and Scott's 'seeing like a state', which explores the interplay between centralised schemes of spatial order, and alternative, grounded, or improvised modes of knowing/living. I propose to qualify sacrifice zones as a 'certain' space underpinned by state-led development projects, global extractive pressures and 'green growth'. These hegemonic discourses and planetary circulations are made tangible through changes in land use, legal procedures, modes of governance and risk management measures. However, my findings suggest that these certainties are countered by multiple bottom-up practices and knowledges that lead to collective political action and transformative alternatives.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines housing occupations in São Paulo and how they operationalise radical repair, care, and political mobilisation as an alternative framework to navigate capitalist logics of alienation of labour, private property, and commodification.
Paper long abstract
This presentation explores how grassroot insurgent practices against socio-economic exclusion can serve as a framework for facing the simultaneous crises of inadequate housing and environmental collapse. Towards this, it studies the ideological and operational elements of housing occupations, ocupações, as part of the greater housing rights movement in São Paulo. A movement of many movements, the housing rights movement mobilises houseless populations to occupy abandoned state-owned spaces and pressure the state to provide adequate housing. Ocupações become sites for collective inhabitation through labour of their residents across various stages of creating material and social life from the vestiges of the city. By observing life in ocupação sites and through discussions with members of the movement in diverse roles, this presentation unpacks everyday and longitudinal responses amidst simultaneous crises at individual and communal scales. More specifically, it highlights the radical practices of repair and care alongside political education to recognise the realities of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) as a mode of challenging and navigating the components of private property, commodification, and alienation of labour within capitalism amidst the backdrop of colonial and racial Brasil. Furthermore, this discussion complicates these insurgent negations of capitalism by questioning the extent to which capitalism can be challenged as the struggle for inclusion into urban apparatuses becomes entangled in notions of sustainment and success in the urban realm.