Carbon markets are rapidly expanding, driven by global demand for carbon credits. Existing agrarian studies research has examined how strategies for responding to climate change, including carbon offsetting projects, may usher in a new phase of agrarian transition. However, this research has primarily focused on forest and agriculture offsetting projects. In this article, we examine the relationship between carbon projects and agrarian change in pastoral rangelands. Informed by Bernstein's 'three problematics' of agrarian studies and using the voluntary carbon market that is rapidly expanding across East Africa's rangelands as a case study, we develop three concepts to guide future research: 'production by sequestration'; 'accumulation by sequestration'; and '(anti-)sequestration politics'. Together, these concepts capture the political-economic and socio-ecological processes associated with carbon projects in rangelands and how these intersect with agrarian change in pastoral societies. While grounded in empirical research from East Africa, the insights provided have wider relevance given the growth of carbon markets in pastoral rangelands globally. This article also advances a broader, growing body of research on the ecological agrarian question, showing how ecologies - and, in this case, socio-ecological processes unique to pastoral rangelands - shape how agrarian trajectories unfold amidst climate change.
This Key Concepts article draws on a theoretical framework that sees the commons as multiple and more-than-human, reflecting resistance, community life, and discord as well as the traditional understanding of the commons as collectively used resources or lands. The article presents a selective review of academic work on the commons, beginning with the enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, focusing on colonial expansion, before fast-forwarding to more current work on common-pool resources and commoning relations. Five main debates are highlighted: the relationship between commons and capitalism, commons as institutions, the roles of power and politics, affect and emotion, and activism in the commons. The conclusion evaluates the counter hegemonic promises of the commons and its limits. Overall, we point to the importance of careful empirical investigation, embedding research on the commons in specific histories, places and relations, and taking a fundamentally relational approach to how commoning emerges and persists over time.
Credit-debt relations between producers and so-called exploitative traders are considered a key cause of producer indebtedness. This fuels interventions to eliminate exploitative traders in commodity chains, yet alternative arrangements often fail. Therefore, indebtedness persists. This paper critically examines the conditions and practices that produce and reproduce relations of lending and borrowing and consequently indebtedness, which are closely linked to the question of what complicates changing this indebtedness. We investigated the current conjuncture of intermediation practices in Ghana's cocoa sector, which for over a century has fostered producer-intermediary credit-debt relations and associated indebtedness. Our study analyses relations between intermediaries and producers as a credit-debt dyad constituted by social and material conditions, which foster interdependencies and generate indebtedness as an inevitable outcome. This leads to an account that centralises material conditions in the social relations of debt and exposes both cooperation and tensions in producer-intermediary relations. We show how the strategic vulnerability of producers and intermediaries in navigating the materiality of production and aggregation fosters the evolution of the credit-debt dyad as a routinised and consistent socio-material relation where the value of reciprocity inherent in it complicates changing it without a fundamental change in material realities.
In this interview, Maria de Jesus dos Santos Gomes - a militant of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) since 1989 and one of its historic organic intellectuals - reflects on more than three decades of struggle in the semiarid Northeastern state of Cear & aacute;. She traces how peasant women have broadened the concept of Food Sovereignty, first elaborated within La V & iacute;a Campesina, into a wider family of sovereignties - over water, seeds, energy, and territory - that converge on peasant territorial autonomy. The conversation moves across the pillars of the MST's Agrarian Program: popular agrarian reform, agroecology and creole seeds, Popular Peasant Feminism, and Educa & ccedil;& atilde;o do Campo, including the Ciranda Infantil she helped pioneer. Her testimony reveals a leader theorizing from praxis, knitting together the material and subjective foundations of the struggle to defend and transform the peasant way of life. The interview offers a grounded vantage point on how grassroots movements generate the analytical categories through which the agrarian and territorial question is reimagined through struggle.
