Presentation short abstract

The presentation explores how a REDD+ project in Colombia reshapes value relations and rural class dynamics. It brings together three bodies of Marxian literature to propose a framework of rural class conflict around socioecological reproduction.

Presentation long abstract

Carbon credit schemes integrate forests and rural livelihoods into global value circuits redefining socioecological relations at multiple scales. Although class-based understandings of these processes are emerging, we still lack a theory of rural class conflict attuned to them. This presentation attempts to advance this project through an examination of how a REDD+ project in Colombia’s Alto Magdalena reshape forest-based value relations, class structures, and dynamics of class conflict. To do so, it connects three bodies of Marxian literature: debates on value-nature relationships, socioecological reproduction, and rural class conflict. The main argument is that REDD+ projects reproduce and recast unequal class relations rooted in geographically specific trajectories of agrarian change, enabling new conflicts around socioecological reproduction. Differences around landownership, source of livelihood, and the integration of paid/unpaid forest-care work by the project, shape differential capacities to contest the terms in which socioecological reproduction take place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the presentation traces three key movements in the redefinition of value-nature relations in the REDD+ Huila Project: the devaluation of forest socio-environmental reproduction work; the resignification of uneven landownership, and the reorganization of forest-based agrarian relations. This supports the elaboration of a framework for theorizing about the dynamics of rural class conflict that REDD+ is steering. By tracing the transformations in value-nature relations produced by REDD+ projects, this analysis contributes to debates on the emergence of new labor regimes based on socioecological reproduction in green capitalism, as well as to those around its distinct forms of labor politics and class struggle.

Presentation short abstract

I examine sustainability managerial labor-power as a social process. Based on ethnographic data from sustainable sourcing initiatives in the palm oil sector in Mexico, I show how workers’ experiences generate critiques and hesitation around "green" capitalism, while reinforcing the ideology of work.

Presentation long abstract

Critical scholars are increasingly examining how efforts to green the economy are shaping labor relations. Workers are seen as strategically positioned to leverage power across industries to confront the climate crisis. Political ecologists have also studied the role of unpaid, unorganized, and precarious forms of labor in climate adaptation and conservation. These studies illuminate workers’ struggles and their collective potential. But they neglect the political implications for workers who are not obviously “producing” or “maintaining” things. Workers in corporate sustainability tend to be quickly dismissed as a managerial class with fixed material interests, thereby overlooking processes of social differentiation and their political imaginaries. In this paper, I suggest unpacking the constitution of sustainability managerial labor-power as a social process. I examine the division of labour of corporate sustainability based on 14 months of fieldwork with sustainability workers across the palm oil supply chain in Mexico. I focus on one sustainable sourcing initiative in Chiapas to show how different workers experience and negotiate the value of their labor through managerial practices. I build this analysis in conversation with political ecologists, environmental labor studies, feminist scholars, Spinoza, Ranciere, and Marx. I argue that the political effects of corporate sustainability are not only about capitalist expansion but also in how capitalist labor mediates our relationship with socioenvironmental concerns. I show how in “greening” capital, workers’ experiences generate critiques and hesitation around capitalism, while reinforcing the ideology of work.

Presentation short abstract

This research shows how different forms of labour shape engagements with the forest in Bahía Málaga. Logging creates tactile, affective knowledge, while conservation monitoring reifies it. On the green frontier, loggers-turned-monitors use bureaucratic labour to assert claims and agency.

Presentation long abstract

What happens when the forest you have frequented for decades gains importance because it stores something called carbon? How does this affect the way you engage with it, while instead of cutting trees, you measure their diameter? Drawing from ethnographic research in the Colombian Pacific, this research addresses these questions by tracing how two forms of labor, logging and conservation monitoring, enact different forest landscapes within the same geographical coordinates. In Bahia Malaga, logging has been practiced for generations, cultivating tactile and socially embedded relationships with individual trees, species, and landscapes. Therefore, logging can be conceptualized as a form of affective labor (Hardt and Negri, 2000) that relies on situated knowledge and moral economies of reciprocity and obligation. In contrast, over the last decade, conservation monitoring has introduced a new type of waged, extractive labor, enacted through reporting, photographing, and generating data for NGOs and state agencies. Even when performed by former loggers, these labor arrangements position them as producers of verification, reifying the forest as an object of surveillance and mediating their agency through institutional protocols and technological oversight. This research analyzes how, even within these constraints, loggers-turned-monitors mobilize counterpowers through performative conservation. By skillfully performing bureaucratic requirements, producing verifiable data, and meeting institutional expectations, they assert territorial claims, demonstrate stewardship, and ensure continued funding for local livelihoods. This analysis illustrates how green labor regimes simultaneously alienate, reorganize, and create spaces for agency, reshaping human forest relations and the production of value in the forest frontier.

Presentation short abstract

I examine tour-guiding as a critical yet precarious labour in the production of the ‘wild’ within Maasai Mara safari tourism. I consider how conservation-driven economies create precarity for guides, revealing frictions and entanglements in the commodification of nature and accumulation of capital.

Presentation long abstract

In the savannas of the Maasai Mara, the labour that animates this landscape and sustains its image as a global ‘wilderness’ often goes unnoticed. I argue that tour-guiding is a critical form of work that actively produces this space as a site of experience. Beginning with the safari, I focus on the image of the Land Cruiser as it cuts across the landscape and the driver-guide as central objects of inquiry. Starting here allows me to examine the marginalisation and exploitation of tour guiding within the safari tourism economy. As conservation-based tourism gains prominence in the economic strategies of states like Kenya, new frontiers of nature are created, even as sites of capital accumulation and profit extraction emerge in geographies and landscapes often considered peripheral. Yet, the forms of labour that make these experiences possible remain unconsidered. ‘Wilderness’ conceptualisation packages territories as consumable landscapes of experience that attract investments driven by economic interests, international networks, and moral claims of nature conservation. These dynamics shape how tour-guiding labour is contested, negotiated, unpredictable and rendered precarious even as investments in conservation-based tourism grow. I approach these frictions and discontinuities to explore the complex entanglements involved in producing the experience of the wild. I ultimately argue that conservation needs to come to terms with the forms of labour it continuously reproduces, renders precarious and ultimately requalifies as its accumulation of capital and territory continues to unfold in southern contexts.

Presentation short abstract

Through a study of the intersection between migrant labour coming from the Global South and energy decarbonisation in Spain, this paper highlights the centrality of the spatio-temporal dynamics of capital, labour regimes and labour organising in the (im)mobilisation and influence of eco-precariat.

Presentation long abstract

The expansion of offshore wind energy capital in Galicia, Spain, is inextricably linked to the existence of an eco-precariat largely formed by migrant workers from the Global South who are either employed in the manufacturing of monopiles and jackets or affected by offshore wind farms due to their employment in the coastal fisheries sector. Drawing on a five-month fieldwork research in this Spanish region, this paper explores three different aspects of such intimate connection: a) the relationship between the development of offshore wind energy capital and the labour regimes of migrant workers intersecting with this type of energy decarbonisation; b) processes of mobilization, immobilisation and demobilisation by migrant workers in this context; and c) the socio-spatial relations migrant workers establish with unions and migrant associations when mobilizing around their labour conditions. The paper highlights how, despite migrant workers’ agency manifesting through numerous reactions to exploitation and the disposability of labour-power, their ability to influence labour mobilisations and challenge the terms of exploitation and maritime spatial transformations associated to offshore wind farms is inseparable from spatio-temporal dynamics, including those of capital in the offshore wind energy industry, those of migrant labour regimes and those of labour organizing. The collective power of this eco-precariat is constantly being shaped by time pressures imposed by capital, the temporality of migrant employment in this context, migrant workers’ mobility as sellers of labour-power, territorial relations between unions and them, the scales of resistance and the development of a sense of place by migrant workers.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation analyses the conservation labor regime underlying the environmental protection of the Doñana wetlands. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how environmental measures draw on hegemonic representations of agricultural work and reproduce the subordination of migrant labour.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation analyses the conservation labor regime within which the environmental protection measures of the Doñana wetlands are embedded. Doñana is a protected area in south-west Spain that has, once again in recent years, received national and international attention due to the impact of groundwater extraction on an ecosystem widely regarded as unique. Bordered by Europe’s leading berry-producing region, Doñana is currently the setting for one of Europe's most significant agricultural conservation conflicts. Following extensive national and international media coverage of the effects of groundwater extraction on the protected area, the regional and national governments have agreed on an official set of measures intended to mitigate the impact of agricultural activities on the Doñana Natural Space. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic project, this presentation explores how hegemonic representations of agricultural work have shaped the conservation plans currently being implemented. Through an analysis of the measures currently in place based on interviews with local and regional actors, I demonstrate the role that government-backed conservation measures play in perpetuating the subordination of agricultural laborers to a regional coalition of agri-industrial interests. Rather than solving the Doñana groundwater crisis, I argue that the measures are likely to accelerate the relocation of agricultural capital and redraw the frontiers of a regional geography of depletion.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces articulations between deindustrialization and decarbonization in Sulcis, Sardinia. It reworks the notion of the semi-periphery in the context of an uneven and combined green development arguing that it looks less like a transition than another shift in the seesaw of capital.

Presentation long abstract

This paper traces articulations between deindustrialization and decarbonization in the Sulcis region of south-western Sardinia. Since the end of the second World War, multiple waves of deindustrialization have left Sulcis with some of the highest youth unemployment rates and the lowest per capita income of the country. Today, the area sits at the very frontline of the energy transition: On the one hand, the area has a long history of metal and coal mining and represents and heavy-industry exception to the otherwise service-oriented economy of the Sardinian Island. On the other hand, Sulcis is currently experiencing a massive and increasingly contested international interest in “green” energy projects. Based on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and historical material, the paper explores how the intertwined legacies of industrial reorganisation, labour mobilization, and environmental degradation inform the current, contentious politics of energy transition. Conceptually, the paper reworks and revitalizes the notion of the semi-periphery in the context of an uneven and combined green development regime – paying particular attention shifts in labour regimes and the conditions of social reproduction. Building analytically on local experiences, as well as institutional and material legacies, I ultimately argue that the current conjuncture looks less like a transition and more like another shift in the seesaw of capital.

Presentation short abstract

This paper draws from research conducted with forest-dwelling communities in two conservation areas in India, exploring the relationship between dispossession and various forms of labour, including the hidden labour that communities perform for the state in order to maintain conservation spaces.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology has long been interested in the relationship between enclosure, conservation and labour. Building on these literatures, this paper offers new insight into questions of labour, resistance and dispossession. Drawing from research conducted with Van Gujjars and Soligas – two forest dwelling communities who live in and around Protected Areas in India – I show that dispossession is contested through various forms of resistance and articulations of care. Tracing historical control of territories and communities by the state from colonial times to the present, I show that communities have consistently been marginalized and ‘managed’, either as useful sources of kooli, or daily wage labour, or as lawless, criminal and outsiders in the landscape. Today, decades into establishing conservation areas, the state no longer views forest-dwelling people as useful labour, and local sources of employment are few and far between. However, despite their perceived negligibility in the landscape, communities articulate their belonging through both explicit and implicit assertions of hidden labour that they perform in their everyday lives. Bringing the two sites and communities’ experiences into conversation with each other through a relational comparison framework, I show the convergences between community assertions that without them, the work of the forest department would not be possible. Invoking both historical relations of care for the forest, and the everyday ways in which the forest department is dependent on community presence, I show that hidden labour is simultaneously an assertion of legitimacy in the landscape, and a challenge to fortress conservation models.

Presentation short abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have become central to the EU’s climate policy, yet the manual and intellectual labour requirements necessary for their implementation remain understudied. This paper examines labour representation in NBS projects and policies through document analysis and interviews.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have become a key policy pillar and buzzword in climate adaptation, green transition, and biodiversity conservation approaches for the EU, Member States, and their regions (Faivre et. al., 2017; Kotsila et. al., 2021). Promising “win-win” socio-ecological outcomes, NBS implementation depends on labour-intensive processes (e.g. design, implementation, maintenance, monitoring) which remain largely invisible or poorly accounted for in policy and scholarly discourse (Mabon, 2023; van der Ree, 2019). This is additionally compounded by often-racialized labour markets, particularly in relation to physical, precarious, hazardous agricultural, or nature restoration work (Mahanty et. al., 2020; Neimark et. al., 2020).

This paper brings together the lenses of the conservation eco-precariat (Neimark et. al., 2020; Neimark, 2023) and environmental justice in NBS (Anguelovski & Corbera, 2023) to investigate labour represention in NBS projects and supporting policies. Moving from EU policies to their operationalization in Spain and Catalonia, the research employs qualitative coding of policy and project documents and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders to distil the place and role given to labour in NBS, and identify power relationships that shape the representation, empowerment, or erasure of marginalized workers. Visibilizing labour is necessary to challenge dominant narratives that commodify natural resilience and ecosystem services but obscure the human and more-than-human work which sustains them (Kaluarachchi, 2025; Stanley et. al., 2025). The article concludes by foregrounding human exploitation and racial capitalism in green transitions (Welden, 2023) and calls for greater sensitivity to labour issues and their justice implications in the EU’s environmental action programs.

Presentation short abstract

Elite women’s investments in land in Mali reshape labor relations, creating systems that mix empowerment with exploitation. Relying on underpaid rural women’s work, these investments fuel eco-precarity, amid land commodification, and reinforce inequalities while creating new forms of exploitation.

Presentation long abstract

This study examines how elite women’s investments in peri-urban agriculture around Bamako, Mali, restructure agrarian labor relations and replicate new forms of precarity within the agribusiness sector. As urban extension transforms agricultural frontiers into spaces of speculative and prolific investment, the access of urban female elites into land markets produces hybrid labor systems that blur the line between empowerment and exploitation. While these women investors are often perceived as agents of women’s empowerment and the modern agricultural revolution, their farming activities heavily rely on underpaid and informal rural labor, mainly that of women displaced from customary plots.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Baguinéda and Sélingué, the paper locates peri-urban farming within broader practices of capitalist accumulation, neoliberal agrarian policy, and land commodification. It contends that the gendered reconfiguration of agricultural labor establishes a form of “eco-precarity” (Neimark et al., 2020), where sustainability and food security discourses disguise persistent discriminations in access to land, income, and decision-making. Through the lens of elite capture (Warren & Visser, 2016), the analysis assesses how rural women navigate these evolving labor regimes, both as evicted farmers and as workers seeking to regain agency within elite-controlled agricultural areas.

By exploring the intersection of class, gender in environmental governance, this study furthers to grasp how green labor frontiers in Mali reproduce unequal power relationships while also creating new sites of contestation, solidarity, and potential counter-politics among the rural marginalize workers.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses the emergence of enterprise culture and extractive, informal labour regimes under the conservation strategy of ecotourism. Through ethnographic research in Panna Tiger Reserve, India, it reveals how the ecotourism labour force is disciplined into maintaining their own precarity.

Presentation long abstract

International conservation lobbies, state actors and NGOs promote market based conservation strategies like ecotourism as forms of “selling nature to save it” and green developmentalism (McAfee, 1999). These strategies increasingly rely on informal labour regimes, often comprising displaced indigenous and forest dwelling populations (Igoe, 2017). Through an ethnographic study of ecotourism in Panna Tiger Reserve in central India, this paper illuminates how market based conservation fosters a culture of enterprise amongst two groups of actors- safari guides and homestay owners, the latter offering low-cost accommodations marketed as “authentic” rural experiences.

Ecotourism consolidates an aspirational “win-win” promise (Grandia, 2007; Igoe & Brockington, 2007) where individuals can liberate themselves from structural inequality through entrepreneurship. However, the nature of entrepreneurship (Anjaria & Anjaria, 2013; Gooptu, 2013a), intertwined with the histories of conservation induced dispossession, reveals a different reality. Running enterprises like homestays require large financial risks (Bröckling, 2015) and rely on the reproductive labour of women for housework (Vogel, 1983). Similarly, safari guides navigate contradictory regimes of discipline obeying the restrictions of Protected Areas and the competitiveness of the market that necessitates transgressing these restrictions. This paper also examines how late capitalism extracts labour in more than professional forms including embodied and emotional labour (Gooptu, 2013b; Hochschild, 1983) from both groups of actors. Individual competition, along with caste and gender hierarchies weakens possibilities of collective struggles and workers express their agency in covert, surreptitious ways. Conservation strategies then discipline these groups into furthering the agenda of conservation by maintaining their own precarity.