Paper short abstract

Delhi's Land Pooling Policy, framed as an equitable model of land assembly, unfolds through uncertainty and everyday speculation. This paper uses a Speculative and Agrarian Lens to explore how non-state actors reimagine futures via everyday speculative practices rooted in socio-political relations.

Paper long abstract

Delhi’s Land Pooling Policy (LPP) envisions creating world class smart neighbourhoods through conversion of agricultural lands and the active involvement of private sector in the assembly, planning, development, and financing of land. Though the policy is framed as equitable and participatory, its implementation remains fraught with political contestations, negotiations, and everyday speculation. The process of land assembly has become a terrain of uncertainty, hope, aspirations, and contestation, where diverse actors, including landowners, developers, bureaucrats, politicians, and financiers, strategically speculate to undertake various practices on the periphery that disrupt policy outcomes.

This paper examines how non-state actors – landowners, landless, intermediaries, and village collectives - actively reimagine and negotiate through everyday speculative practices that are shaped not only by financial motives but also by social, cultural, and political factors rooted in caste, kinship, colonial legacies, and historical village affiliations over a period. Combining Speculative Urbanism with Agrarian Urbanism, the paper conceptualises the periphery as a dynamic frontier where past claims and future imaginaries intertwine to produce an uneven geography. The framework engages with the concept of Agrarian Urbanism to interrogate the social and agrarian worlds that underpin land speculation.

Methodologically, the paper is grounded in critical ethnography and proposes a multi-method qualitative-spatial approach to uncover counter-stories that challenge power relations and structural inequalities. The research represents an interesting case of state uncertainty, where continuous policy amendments and delays in the implementation have initiated a set of practices from a diverse network of actors living, working, or interested in the periphery.

Paper short abstract

This paper aims to explore how the social identities of gender, age and ethnicity shape how artisanal and small-scale miners come together to collectively bargain for mining rights in Kenya.

Paper long abstract

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) constitutes a socio-economic space in which actors with diverse, overlapping and sometimes conflicting social identities converge, shaping access to and claims over mining rights. In an environment of constrained agency, where the state has mostly employed top-down approaches, I aim to unpack how artisanal and small-scale miners organise themselves to navigate this traditionally neglected sector.

On gender dynamics, women’s participation in ASM has increasingly taken place through collective action, evidenced by the emergence of women-only and women-majority mining groups in the region. This has contributed to shifting gendered power relations within a traditionally male-dominated and patriarchal sector. Preliminary findings reveal that women have been able to improve their status in the ASM spaces, through their grassroots organisations and the support of male allies and other of civil society organisations.

Findings on age reveal a more contradictory picture. Despite extensive literature highlighting the growing role of youth in ASM across Sub-Saharan Africa, youth participation in the study areas remains largely passive, prioritising alternative sources of livelihood like brokerage, transport and retail. This raises important questions about the future of ASM and the prospects of collective agency by the youth in a sector dominated by older generations.

Finally, competing legitimacies, rooted in indigeneity on one hand and long-term occupation and settlement on the other, influence miners’ perceptions of entitlement to land and mining rights. While ASM sites are often characterised as multicultural spaces, ethnic allegiances shape how miners organise collectively and define their priorities within mining spaces.

Paper short abstract

Ticuna women spontaneously form a collective and reimagine development beyond the state, building alternative futures through food sovereignty, autonomy, and care, demonstrating non-state agency under uncertainty while constructing relational pluriversal worlds grounded in Indigenous knowledge.

Paper long abstract

In the Amazon Basin, Indigenous rights and knowledge systems are routinely instrumentalised or marginalised by state actors and external institutions. The core challenge therefore lies not in merely expanding participation within existing development frameworks, but in fundamentally reimagining development itself, redistributing power, and reawakening diverse knowledge systems and cosmologies. In contexts of environmental degradation, political uncertainty, and contested boundaries, meaningful transformation is increasingly emerging from the ground up through Indigenous knowledge, everyday practices, and community-driven autonomous action.

This research examines how Ticuna Indigenous women collective emerges as non-state actors actively reconfiguring agrifood systems and redesigning alternative futures. Focusing on the localized, bottom-up structure, this research analyses the Saberes y Sabores Ticuna, a woman-led community-based organization in the Colombian Amazon through a mixed-methods approach, comprising participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, cooking meetings, and secondary data analysis. It investigates how these Tikuna women reimagine development (Meechi Torü Maú - good living), the challenges they face, and how their innovative practices in pursuit of prosperity drive transitions within the agrifood system, from chagra (farmland) to the table. Specifically, it examines how Ticuna women autonomously restore, innovate, and share traditional recipes, thereby preserving Indigenous food culture, empowering women, fostering a multispecies ethic that extends beyond human concerns, and unsettling dominant, state-centred models of agrifood development. By foregrounding Indigenous women’s agency under conditions of uncertainty, the research contributes to the articulation of relational and pluriversal alternative worlds grounded in Indigenous autonomy, food sovereignty, and the creative power of communities at the margins.

Paper short abstract

This paper unveils dynamics of inequality within the hierarchical humanitarian structure at the Colombia/Venezuela border. It analyses processes of dependence and contested narratives of aid from grassroot organizations towards international cooperation in the light of the USAID funding withdrawal.

Paper long abstract

The dismantling of USAID in January 2025, combined with the largest displacement Colombia experienced in the 21st-century caused by the armed conflict in Catatumbo, triggered the onset of a polycrisis along the Northeast Colombia–Venezuela border. Colombia, the largest USAID funding recipient in Latin America and the Caribbean, was hit by the most severe global funding crisis in the history of international cooperation, affecting more than 70% of the sector in the country. This collapse threatened the survival of humanitarian and development actors in a region already facing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and in a city through which circa 50% of Venezuelan migrants cross, and where more than 60 organizations had operated over the past decade. But it also exposed deep power hierarchies, inequalities, dependency structures, and forms of resistance.

Based on 6 months of ethnographic research and 35 interviews in Cúcuta and Bogotá in 2025, this PhD chapter thesis unveils dynamics of inequality within hierarchical humanitarian structures at the border. It analyses processes of dependence from grassroot organizations towards international cooperation, along with counternarratives that showed relief in the light of the funding withdrawal. This chapter shows how Colombia, upon its dependency on U.S. funding, has a robust and strong – but precarious and wasted – grassroot humanitarian structure that operated in the region for decades. It allows to reflect on how the USAID withdrawal can be critically seen as an opportunity to reshape governance from below and reimagine new futures in a post-aid era.