Flood barriers impede fish mobility, so one would expect environmentalists to welcome the current vogue for dam decommissioning and dam removal. Dam removal, however, may also contend with strong stakeholder dissent and opposition. Influential community members may have developed a stake in the infrastructure’s functioning and rally behind keeping it in place.Drawing on Yong’s (2021) application of Cresswell’s politics of mobility applied to fish and flood infrastructure, this article applies a fish mobilities framework to a European case of multilevel conflict: the partial opening of the Haringvliet flood barrier on the Dutch coast to restore tidal dynamics in the Rhine-Meuse estuary. It charts how a very local bottleneck could hold up the implementation of basin-level fish migration policy for 19 years.Based on literature review and interviews with key stakeholders, it is found that in the tussle over the (re)opening of the Haringvliet sluicegates, environmental, water quality and navigation interests) backgrounded the interests of migratory fish and fishers for most of the stand-off’s course. This negates that the return of migratory fish to the Rhine was the main (symbolic) driver for the intervention in the first place. Now that their passageway has been partly re-enabled, it turns out fish migration is not as predicable and controllable as believed; given the choice, migratory fish migrate as they please.
This article examines post-disaster (im)mobility after the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, showing how unequal trajectories of moving, remaining, and returning were produced across the rural–urban continuum through overlapping property relations, reconstruction governance, labour-market restructuring, and migration governance. Drawing on multi-temporal qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Antakya, Samandağ, and Kırıkhan districts of Hatay, the article develops a post-disaster (im)mobility matrix that distinguishes between capacity-enabled mobility, compelled mobility, anchored immobility, and constrained immobility. These categories identify dominant trajectories rather than fixed social positions: aspirations and constraints frequently coexist, and individuals and households may move between trajectories as recovery unfolds and access to housing, work, legal recognition, aid, and reconstruction claims changes over time. The analysis demonstrates that physical destruction alone cannot explain post-disaster mobility patterns. Property relations and uncertain reconstruction processes could anchor residents to place in ambivalent ways for some and produce spatial lock-in for others; changing labour markets generated both new mobility opportunities and deepening precarity; and, for Syrian refugees, travel-permit requirements, registration restrictions, and the loss of legally recognised addresses produced administratively constrained and circular forms of movement. By situating citizens and refugees within a shared but differentiated local context, the article conceptualises post-disaster (im)mobility as a dynamic and stratified socio-spatial process shaped by the temporal and uneven unfolding of recovery.
This paper explores climate change-driven housing insecurity by focusing on unstable foundations. With climatic and environmental conditions changing, housing foundations, specifically those built on clay soils and in coastal areas, become unstable as soil properties adapt to prolonged periods of heat and heavy rainfalls. Taking the issues of housing foundations as our point of departure, we show that unstable housing foundations are producing new forms of material insecurity and argue that we need to come to a more nuanced understanding of their political, financial, and socio-emotional repercussions. As we illustrate, technical issues regarding housing foundations are, on the one hand, highly politicized as solutions are costly and responsibilities obscure. On the other hand, they affect the subjective feeling of security and home as the material basis of housing becomes destabilized. We follow the contested issue of housing foundations in Bordeaux, France, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Our comparison draws on media analysis, observations during field stays in both cities, as well as key informant interviews. We argue that foundation issues expose the intertwined economic, social, and political dynamics of climate‑changed cities, demanding more coordinated policy responses.
Oil palm smallholders have attracted growing attention in Southeast Asian agrarian studies, especially as research has disaggregated the category to reveal diverse constraints, opportunities, and forms of differentiation. Yet such approaches have an analytical limitation: they often capture smallholders as “snapshots” observed at the time of research, treating oil palm cultivation as a relatively stable component of livelihoods. To address this limitation, this paper develops the framework of “transient lives” to shift attention from smallholders as a stable analytical category to smallholding as a provisional position within changing livelihood trajectories. The framework examines how shifting access to land, labor, and capital is assembled across places through mobility at entry, and how the role of smallholding is subsequently recalibrated as oil palm’s long productive cycle intersects with changing household circumstances. Drawing on long-term field research in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Riau, Indonesia, the paper compares these processes under contrasting boom conditions. In Sarawak, a secure-boom setting, entry depends largely on labor and capital mobilized through multi-local livelihoods, whereas in Riau, an insecure-boom setting, it depends more on land access shaped by the timing of migration. Across both cases, the role of smallholding is repeatedly recalibrated as household circumstances and access to resources change over time. The framework thus foregrounds the spatial and temporal dynamics of livelihoods that are difficult to capture through snapshot analysis. It further suggests that policy interventions, particularly replanting programs, should account for gradual livelihood reassessment rather than treating replanting solely as a technical matter of renewing aging trees.
How do bosses and workers within ethnic niche businesses negotiate and contest working relations and exploitation amidst shifting political and economic conditions? This article explores the challenges facing recent migrants to the UK working in the rapidly expanding Vietnamese-run nail salon ethnic niche, based on a rich tapestry of ethnographic, interview and online data. The combination of legal precarity and lack of English language skills push marginalised migrants into reliance on co-ethnic bosses, making them liable to exploitation. An everyday political economy analysis, based on rich ethnographic data, reveals how different actors navigate overlapping and conflicting interests amidst a shifting politico-economic environment. The boss-worker balance of power is contingent on external factors including immigration policy changes, supply of migrant workers, economic downturns and geographical location. While nail salon owners and workers use different tactics to improve their bargaining position, they also engage in discursive struggles to justify or contest working norms. This article provides evidence of a neoliberal subjectivity which may challenge traditional Vietnamese patron-client workplace values and threatens to undermine community solidarity.
