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Climate change is a lived experience of changes in the environment, often destroying conventional forms of subsistence and production, creating new patterns of movement and connection, and transforming people’s imagined future. This book explores how people across the world think about environmental change and how they act upon the perception of past, present and future opportunities. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of expert authors, it sheds new light on the human experience of and social response to climate change by taking us from the Arctic to the Pacific, from the Southeast Indian Coastal zone to the West-African dry-lands and deserts, as well as to Peruvian mountain communitie...
The volume Environmental Change and African Societies contributes to current debates on global climate change from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. It charts past and present environmental change in different African settings and also discusses policies and scenarios for the future. The first section, “Ideas”, enquires into local perceptions of the environment, followed by contributions on historical cases of environmental change and state regulation. The section “Present” addresses decision-making and agenda-setting processes related to current representations and/or predicted effects of climate change. The section “Prospects” is concerned with contemporary African megatrends. The authors move across different scales of investigation, from locally-grounded ethnographic analyses to discussions on continental trends and international policy. Contributors are: Daniel Callo-Concha, Joy Clancy, Manfred Denich, Sara de Wit, Ton Dietz, Irit Eguavoen, Ben Fanstone, Ingo Haltermann, Laura Jeffrey, Emmanuel Kreike, Vimbai Kwashirai, James C. McCann, Bertrand F. Nero, Jonas Ø. Nielsen, Erick G. Tambo, Julia Tischler.
This book presents a comprehensive exploration of the emerging concept and framework of telecoupling and how it can help create a better understanding of land-use change in a globalised world. Land-use change is increasingly characterised by a spatial disconnect between its main environmental, socioeconomic and political drivers and the main impacts and outcomes of those changes. The authors examine how this separation of the production and consumption of land-based resources is driven by population growth, urbanisation, climate change, and biodiversity and carbon conservation efforts. Identifying and fostering more sustainable, just and equitable modes of land use and intervening in unsusta...
Parched landscapes, biodiversity loss, encroaching deserts and deforestation are some of the environmental crises taking place in tropical savannas and dry forests throughout the world. To date, much research into these regions has treated humans as 'outside' or as an 'impact' only. However, over and over again, examples show that, in fact, humans are not external factors, but integral components of these systems. Humans are key determinants of savannas and dry forests, affecting patterns and processes, as well as impacts on natural resources. Unless we understand the human-environment relationship in these regions, we will never truly identify the causes or be able to provide solutions. Thi...
The failure of political institutions, including national governments and the United Nations, to mitigate climate change reflects the modern constitution of the nation-state as a cultural and secular, rather than created and providential, agency. Northcott constructs a new political theology of climate change that acknowledges the role of borders in the constitution of the nations, and their providential ordering under God as assemblies of persons who recognise particular duties to each other within those borders. Against this conception, a global economy promotes a state of conflict over access to basic natural goods. Elite agents use networks of power to act without reference to the common good or to fair access to natural resources.
Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible. This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex t...
An exploration of how approaches that draw on evolutionary theory and complexity science can advance our understanding of economics. Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years: one emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions; the other views economies as complex adaptive systems. In this book, leading scholars examine these two bodies of theory, exploring their possible impact on economics. Relevant concepts from evolutionary theory drawn on by the contributors include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a prod...
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Experts discuss the potential of early intervention to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders. Mental illness represents one of the largest disease burdens worldwide, yet treatments have been largely ineffective in improving the quality of life for millions of affected individuals—in part because approaches taken have focused on late-stage disorders in adulthood. This volume shifts the focus by placing the developmental stage of “youth” at the center of mental health. The contributors challenge current nosology, explore mechanisms that underlie the emergence of mental disorders, and propose a framework to guide early intervention. Offering recommendations for the future, t...
Taking as a starting point that hunger results from social exclusion and distributional inequities and that lasting, sustainable and just solutions are to be found in changing the structures that underlie our food systems, this book examines how law shapes global food systems and their ongoing transformations. Using detailed case studies, historical mapping and legal analysis, the contributors show how various actors (farmers, civil society groups, government officials, international bodies) use or could use different legal tools (legislative, jurisprudential, norm-setting) on various scales (local, national, regional, global) to achieve structural changes in food systems. Section 1, Institu...