Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how community-owned woodland crofts in Scotland reconfigure access and agrarian property relations. Drawing on an ethnography of three community ownership organisations, it assesses the political potential and limits of woodland crofting amid entrenched rural power structures.

Presentation long abstract

This paper revisits the political potential of property transformations through an analysis of community-owned woodland crofts in Scotland. Amid a national pattern of highly concentrated landownership, community-owned woodland crofts represent an emergent reconfiguration of agrarian property relations. As community-allocated smallholdings that are withheld from the open land market and grant lifelong tenure, they redistribute access to land and foster forms of agroecological production that counter global trajectories of agrarian intensification. However, despite gesturing towards a contemporary mode of common ownership, the prevalence and political potential of community-owned woodland crofts remain limited by entrenched power relations and socioeconomic inequalities. Drawing on Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access (2003), I assess how these property transformations are actualised or hindered amid shifting bundles of power that shape who can derive benefits from land and how. I present data collected during an organisational ethnography conducted with three Scottish community landownership organisations: two of which successfully created woodland crofts, and one whose failed attempt demonstrates the ongoing control that private estate owners exert over rural land—even after it has come under community ownership. Through this analysis, the paper contributes a conceptualisation of community-owned woodland crofts as sites where future European ruralities—particularly those that counter trajectories of depopulation and land consolidation—are enacted and contested. In doing so, I situate the potentials and limits of Scottish woodland crofting within discussions of land control in the UK and beyond.

Presentation short abstract

This paper investigates the agrarian question in France through the rise of a new union actor, the Coordination Rurale, whose civilizational and populist discourse challenges classical class cleavages.

Presentation long abstract

Debates surrounding the agrarian question of capital have largely faded in France as agriculture became integrated into the capitalist industry. This theoretical distancing followed C. Servolin and H. Mendras’ ruralist theses in the 1970s, blurring cleavages between heterogeneous farming classes and framing farmers as one group with shared interests, contrasting Bernstein’s approach (Bernstein, 2006; Morena, 2024).

The 2024 European farmers’ mobilizations, particularly against the EU-Mercosur FTA, witnessed the rise of a third union actor in France and renewed academic attention to agrarian studies. The rapid growth of the Coordination Rurale (CR), from controlling three Chambres d’Agriculture in 2019 to fourteen in 2025, positions the union as the main challenger to the dominant industrial-agriculture union FNSEA, often described as co-managing agricultural policies in France.

Although claiming political neutrality, the CR has been associated with far-right rhetoric and leaders, including several cadres elected as MPs with the Rassemblement National. Its strategic use of the word paysan is embedded in a broader “civilizational” discourse that frames farmers as the guardians of “French civilization” (Purseigle, 2010). This rhetoric resonates in a political landscape where civilizational narratives have gained significant ground.

The CR’s heterogeneous membership, spanning smallholders and large bourgeois farmers across diverse French départements, complicates its ideological positioning (Laferté, 2021). This paper examines whether and how the CR has managed to transcend class cleavages through a populist and civilizational discourse. Drawing on discourse analysis and electoral mapping (Mayer 1992), it explores the union’s social base and implications for re-examining the agrarian question in France.

Presentation short abstract

The paper examines agrarian transformations in Southern Italy through the lens of the labour turn in critical agrarian studies, showing how fragmented labour, social reproduction, and workers’ agency shape struggles for a just and worker-centred agroecological transition.

Presentation long abstract

Recent contributions have reopened the debate on the agrarian question. After decades in which this discussion centred mainly on the “peasant question” in the South, new perspectives have begun to address agrarian dynamics in the North.

In Europe, this renewed engagement has largely developed through food regime analysis and repeasantization studies. While these approaches have offered valuable insights into the “new agrarian questions” of food and social reproduction, they have tended to privilege new "peasants" and food sovereignty movements, leaving agricultural wage labour at the margins.

This paper situates itself within the emerging labour turn in critical agrarian studies and political ecology, re-centring class and labour in the analysis of agrarian transformations. Drawing on an agrarian political economy à la Bernstein and labour regime analysis, it examines intensive agricultural areas in Southern Italy, where neoliberal restructuring has produced new globalised enclaves of fruit and vegetable production.

The analysis highlights a deep crisis of social reproduction affecting the agricultural working class, rooted in the extreme fragmentation of labour regimes. Far from being passive, workers negotiate, adapt to, and contest their conditions in diverse and often conflicting ways. Yet organised responses by agroecological, food, and labour justice movements have only partially intercepted these everyday forms of agency. This calls both for a new research agenda capable of exploring how climate change and processes of greening are reshaping workers’ lives and forms of agency and for deeper grassroots engagement within spaces of work and everyday life.

Presentation short abstract

This paper departs from a recent olive disease outbreak in Southern Italy to expand debates on the Plantationocene to a Global North context. It proposes the concept of "patchy Plantationocene" to account for regional specificities while tracing structural continuities across North and South.

Presentation long abstract

Debates on the Plantationocene have gained significant traction within agrarian studies in recent years. Yet, critical scholarship has mainly focused on case studies in Global South contexts, where histories of colonial domination, labour exploitation, and dispossession are most vividly present. Less attention has been paid to how plantation logics materialise within the Global North—not only as drivers of resource extraction for global commodity markets, but as lived socio-ecological formations shaped by landscape simplification, transformed labour regimes, and disrupted multispecies relations. Although historical research has documented plantation configurations in various European and North American settings, these accounts often confine them to a distant past, obscuring how similar exploitative dynamics persist in contemporary agrarian spaces. This paper, conversely, argues that the Plantationocene is a useful analytical concept in contemporary Global North contexts as well. Drawing on the case of olive landscapes in Apulia, Southern Italy, it shows how a plant disease outbreak has exposed and accelerated longstanding tendencies toward radical landscape simplification and agricultural intensification. Historically shaped by colonial histories and later restructured under neoliberal globalization, olive plantations are now transitioning toward super-intensive systems that aim to eliminate human labour rather than exploit it, while exacerbating ecological stressors. By situating these dynamics within broader debates on the Plantationocene, the paper proposes the concept of “patchy Plantationocene” to account for regional specificities while tracing structural continuities across North and South. This perspective challenges analytical binaries, enriches agrarian political ecology, and foregrounds the multispecies and affective dimensions of capitalist agriculture in Europe’s rural margins.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation discusses territorialization processes in the Elbe estuary, highlighting how regulatory mechanisms shape peripheral agrarian territories and how local contestations emerge as these areas are subordinated to the port’s economic centrality.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how territorialization unfolds within port regions and their agrarian peripheries, contributing to degrowth debates on re-localization and resistance to extractive relations. While degrowth scholarship emphasizes re-localizing production and consumption to counter imperial dynamics, enable environmental care, and foster autonomy from global capital, little research investigates how these processes operate beyond the hyperlocal scale. Understanding territories as relational constructs shaped through center–periphery power struggles, the paper conceptualizes territorialization as a technology of power that organizes space for resource extraction and future valorization.

Moving beyond existing work that focuses narrowly on local ecological impacts or planetary-scale port urbanization, I develop an inward-looking perspective on regional politics. I argue that regulatory instruments bind agrarian peripheries to the growth imperatives of port economies, even under conditions of stagnation. Through this perspective, Othering emerges as a mechanism that renders certain territories sacrificeable, reinforcing their marginality and constraining alternative territorial visions.

Empirically, the analysis centers on the Hamburg port region and the Elbe estuary. Drawing on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, archival materials, and regulatory analysis, I identify three intertwined processes of territorialization shaping the estuary’s agrarian peripheries. First, regulatory mechanisms produce future sacrifice zones by capturing peripheral spaces for anticipated valorization, illustrated by developments in the hydrogen economy. Second, decades of Elbe dredging have created zones of environmental cost shifting, transferring ecological burdens onto rural communities through compensation landscapes and sediment disposal. Third, spatial laws and associated participatory procedures consolidate regulatory lock-in, formally including peripheral actors while effectively binding them to port-led growth logics.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces hidden genealogies of radical, left-wing farming politics in Europe, and asks how they were transformed through the early 20th century double movement of fascism/social democracy.

Presentation long abstract

Up until the 1930, we could still find multiple examples across Europe of farmers and farmworkers organising under a left-wing or explicitly socialist framework, be that in producer co-operatives, farmers’ parties or grassroots formations. Today, while across the world social movements are challenging the imperialist status-quo, many of the organisations and spokespeople representing farmers’ interests in Europe are either aligned with liberal, centrist political programmes, or, increasingly, formulate their demands through racist, xenophobic nationalist rhetoric.

This paper looks at the particular moment in the early to mid-20th century after which radical, left-wing agrarian politics seemed to largely disappear from the European stage. It analyses what conditions, constraints and contradictions left-wing farmers and farmer organisations were met with, to speculate on some of the causes for their decline, disappearance and/or erasure in the historiography. In particular I want to pay attention to the double moment of fascism/social democracy during the first half of the 20th century, the effects of the two World Wars on agricultural policy in different regions, and how farmers movements negotiated and shifted in relation to these changing conditions.

By arguing for an understanding of fascism and European liberal democracies as structurally linked, rather than diametrically opposed, the paper illuminates the ways radical alternative visions for society and for food provisioning (socialist, anarchist, communist, and beyond) were subsumed and/or erased and proposes that a deeper interrogation of the class-composition of the farming subject is necessary, if we want to understand what happened to the agrarian left.

Presentation short abstract

This study explores gender in agriculture on the Iberian Peninsula, analysing structural inequalities and rural women’s visions for change. Based on 24 interviews, it highlights their roles, barriers, and collective strategies, framing rurality as a space of life, dignity, and transformation.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, the integration of a gender perspective into agricultural and food policies in Europe has gained significant traction. This shift reflects both the urgency of revitalising rural areas—faced with depopulation, ageing, and masculinisation—and the imperative to challenge persistent gender stereotypes and address the underrepresentation of rural women in decision-making spaces.

Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, this communication offers a critical and situated analysis of the structural dynamics that marginalise and render invisible peasant and rural women, and foregrounds their visions for a more inclusive and transformative agricultural policy. Drawing on 24 interviews with peasant and rural women from Portugal, Galicia, and the Basque Country, this presentation highlights their roles in food production, the barriers they encounter, and the strategies they develop—particularly through collective action. The methodological approach, grounded in oral histories, recognises these women as political subjects and knowledge holders.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, these women share a deep connection to the land, a life-centred rather than productivity-driven sense of time, a commitment to cooperative and care-based agricultural models, and a strong engagement with ancestral knowledge. Their voices articulate a vision of rurality as a space of life, dignity, and transformation. Only by acknowledging the heterogeneity of rural women—beyond universalised images and stereotypes—and ensuring spaces for their voices to be heard, can agricultural and gender policies become more just, inclusive, and responsive to the realities of those who sustain rural life.

Presentation short abstract

An agricultural transition is required in order to both mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown. Neoliberal transitions are insufficient. I will explore a diversity of strategies and tactics for winning an agroecological transition of the mass of agricultural producers in the Global North.

Presentation long abstract

Agriculture is both a key source of GHG emissions and is increasingly having to contend with the effects of climate breakdown. In response, governments across the Global North are trying to implement agricultural transitions that both attempt to mitigate against and adapt to climate breakdown while addressing the need for ecosystem restoration in response to declines in biodiversity. However, neoliberal, market-driven measures, undertaken within a regime of fiscal austerity, inhibits and curtails agricultural transitions. As such, piecemeal approaches have developed that spark farmers’ protests and the transition is left languishing.

In this paper, I will argue that those struggling for an agroecological transition of agriculture must pay more attention to the dissatisfied and disaffected farmers that form the bulk of the agricultural system. In turn, I argue this can only occur through an ecosocialist transition whereby ecosocialist parties seize control of the commanding heights of the economy, to effect a long-term plan for the socialisation of agriculture. In order to theorise this I will introduce a variety of approaches to strategy and tactics, including transitional programmes, non-reformist reforms, hegemonic struggle, and Rodrigo Nunes’ concept of an ecosystem approach. Finally, I will briefly suggest several policy ideas to consider, organise and struggle over towards an agroecological transition of agriculture.

Presentation short abstract

I argue that the urgent task to downscale societal throughput, address ecoclimatic breakdown, liberate the Global South from (neo)colonial oppression, and redistribute reproductive work, must be rooted in recentering land and rebuilding Northern socio-ecological reproduction capacities.

Presentation long abstract

In this article, I argue that the task to drastically downscale societal throughput, liberate the Global South from (neo)colonial oppression, redistribute care and reproductive work, and address ecological breakdown, must be rooted in rebuilding the Northern provisioning capacities for socio-ecological reproduction at all scales. To do so, I make a case for an agrarian degrowth that roots itself in rebuilding the forces of socio-ecological reproduction (subsistence agriculture, care work, earthcare and all that’s necessary to make and maintain life) in Europe, starting from the instances of their persistence within it. I mobilise materialist ecofeminist thought on subsistence economies and socio-ecological reproduction, bringing further a “subsistence approach” for Europe. Addressing the persisting gap in sustainability, degrowth and social transformation scholarship regarding the role of the countryside for desirable futures, I argue for the centrality of rural space in operationalising the re-centering of life and socio-ecological reproduction, beyond escapism and localisms. Finally, I draw on peasant and critical agrarian studies to highlight the lessons we can learn from peasant economies and their traces within Europe, putting forward subsistence-oriented and degrowth-akin economies persisting in European internal peripheries, and their unexplored political potential. While existing at the margins of capitalist growth in the core, these are tangible instances of non-capitalist social metabolism that aim at socio-ecological reproduction, and that can be of inspiration in the context of broader political economic transformations and agrarian theories of change.

Presentation short abstract

Building on my fieldwork in Czechia, this contribution aims to investigate the analytical and political relevance of the category of a ‘farmer’ in the context of the country’s landscape of agricultural production.

Presentation long abstract

Building on my fieldwork in Czechia, this presentation aims to investigate the analytical and political relevance of the category of a ‘farmer’ in the context of the country’s landscape of agricultural production.

Czechia has the largest average arm size in the EU (ca.130ha). This outstanding size of farms is complemented by a messy ownership structure where, as a result of privatisation of the socialist agriculture in the 1990s, most farms are either owned by hundreds of owners-shareholders or have been bought up by a handful of Czech oligarchs—a class with a growing interest in investing in agricultural production.

Furthermore, in the transition to market capitalism, formerly collectivised land had been returned to its pre-socialist owners, and today more than 2 million Czechs own a piece of agricultural land, which they lease to the farms. This results in a situation where any single farm often operates within ownership structures containing hundreds, if not thousands, of people. This is complemented by a shift to less labour demanding agricultural production and a steady decline of the people working in agriculture (ca.1% of the population).

Thinking from within this conjuncture, is ‘farmer’ still a category with political, economic, or material meaning in such financialised and fragmented agricultural landscape? If yes, who is it? The agronome, the land owner, the oligarch,or the worker?

This presentation hopes to put into conversation different visions of agricultural production/labour and thus offer a post-socialist perspective to a discussion that often privileges a Western European category of a small-farmer.