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Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative en...
The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies. Taking the example of the tomato—a typical 'Made in Italy' commodity—Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the 'naturalization' of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.
How Costa Rican leaders adopted policies to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, and what other countries can learn from their actions. As atmospheric greenhouse gases continue their steep ascent, the world has never been more in need of policies designed to reduce emissions. Among those few nations that have committed to ambitious emission reduction plans is the small Central American country of Costa Rica, whose pioneering policies include a Payments for Environmental Services program, a carbon neutrality pledge, and a goal of decarbonizing the economy. In this book, Aiming for Net Zero, Julia Flagg explores why Costa Rican leaders have adopted more climate mitigation policies t...
Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.
Failing Forward documents the global rise of neoliberal conservation as a response to biodiversity loss and unpacks how this approach has managed to "fail forward" over time despite its ineffectiveness. At its core, neoliberal conservation promotes market-based instruments intended to reconcile environmental preservation and economic development by harnessing preservation itself as the source of both conservation finance and capital accumulation more generally. Robert Fletcher describes how this project has developed over the past several decades along with the expanding network of organizations and actors that have come together around its promotion. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, he e...
A detailed account of politics in Ghana's urban neighborhoods, providing a new way to understand African democracy and development.
Genetically engineered (GE) crops were first introduced commercially in the 1990s. After two decades of production, some groups and individuals remain critical of the technology based on their concerns about possible adverse effects on human health, the environment, and ethical considerations. At the same time, others are concerned that the technology is not reaching its potential to improve human health and the environment because of stringent regulations and reduced public funding to develop products offering more benefits to society. While the debate about these and other questions related to the genetic engineering techniques of the first 20 years goes on, emerging genetic-engineering te...
Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger. Paying particular attention to two key groups of people who provide water to most of Niamey’s residents - door-to-door water vendors, and those who sell water in one-half-liter plastic bags (sachets) on the street or in small shops – the authors offer new insights into how Niamey’s water economies affect gender, ethnicity, class, and spatial structure today.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2022, which took place in Glasgow, UK, during October 19-21, 2022. The 22 full papers, 8 short papers, and 4 late breaking papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. The deal with topics ranging from information-system design on social concepts to analyzing complex social systems using computational methods or explore socio-technical techniques using social sciences methods.
This critical text is a timely ethnography of how global powers, local resistance, and capital flows are shaping contemporary African foodways. Ghana was one of the first countries targeted by a group of US donors and agribusiness corporations that funded an ambitious plan to develop genetically modified (GM) crops for African farmers. The collective believed that GM crops would help farmers increase their yields and help spark a “new” Green Revolution on the continent. Soon after the project began in Ghana, a nationwide food sovereignty movement emerged in opposition to GM crops. Today, in spite of impressive efforts and investments by proponents, only two GM crops remain in the pipelin...