This article describes willow scrubs and how, according to Danish farmers, they “sprout uncontrollably” in deindustrializing agricultural landscapes. Across Europe, the green transition of the agricultural sector has led to farmers’ protests, but in Denmark such expressions of discontent have been limited. Instead, willow scrubs have become a matter of concern after the retirement of peatland soil from production. Farmers find willows “ugly” and interpret peatland overgrowth as a sign of a lack of proper care for the future of rural landscapes. Based on fieldwork among farmers and public servants, and unlike the situations described in most multispecies literature, we show how willows lack human allies. We argue that they are to farmers what farmers are to the government, establishing an analogy between the willows’ recalcitrant nature and farmers’ assertion of autonomy from government control. In this context, withstanding becomes a weak form of resistance that involves a political use of the willow’s capacity to grow.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is increasingly seen as essential for mitigating climate change. In Global North countries like Denmark, Sweden and the UK, bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) projects have become a prominent component of national climate strategies. This perspective explores an emerging trend: the advancement of such projects through a co-financing model that combines state funding with corporate investment. While the specifics of these co-financing arrangements vary, we identify several risks associated with them. First, we argue that the model facilitates the double claiming of CDR climate benefits by both the national government and the corporate investor, which risks mitigation deterrence by inflating the apparent scale of climate action. Second, we contend that CDR projects that count towards Global North countries’ climate targets cannot be considered additional and therefore should not be sold as carbon offsets. Finally, we argue that market-based CDR risks favouring large corporations and affluent governments able to pay for carbon removal and storage space, raising concerns about global climate justice.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has in recent years gained increasing attention as a climate solution. In Denmark, geological CO2-storage was earlier rejected, but in 2020 CCS was incorporated into national climate policy as key to reach the country's 2030 target. In this article we investigate the incorporation of CCS into Danish climate policy as a case of mitigation deterrence. Through the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we analyse the relation between technology, risk and identity, illustrating how CCS was first resisted and rejected, but then reemerged and became embedded in national policy, extending into subnational climate plans. We posit that the incorporation of CCS in Danish climate policy likely constitutes a case of mitigation deterrence in the forms of substitution and failure and mitigation foregone. We argue that the reliance on future technologies to reach climate targets was enabled by a national imaginary of being a green frontrunner.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has in recent years gained new attention in national and corporate strategies for achieving climate goals. This is for instance seen in Denmark, where CCS was positioned as the largest single mitigation tool in the 2020 Climate Programme. As an example of how international imaginaries of mitigation technologies translate into national settings, this paper explores how CCS was brought into, adapted and adopted in Danish climate policy. Drawing on document analysis, webinar observation and semi-structured interviews, we identity four arguments (necessity, ability, capacity and opportunity) that various actors mobilise to develop a shared sociotechnical imaginary of a CCS-dependent climate future. These arguments are supported by maps and numbers that act as objective truths, serve performative roles and legitimise the future imaginary. We argue that maps and numbers function as tools for domesticating CCS in three ways: nationalising, utilising and controlling technology as well as the opposition to it. We conclude that maps and numbers, through domestication, naturalise and depoliticise the STI of a CCS-dependent future. While this may not be intentional by the actors involved, it illustrates the ability of artefacts and arguments to devise specific techno-political pathways.

Following the Paris Agreement’s climate targets and the modelling community’s scenarios of how to reach them, carbon dioxide removal is gaining increasing importance in national climate policies. This is also the case in Denmark – considered by itself and others a climate frontrunner – where biochar is envisioned to cover 10% of the 2030 reduction goal. However, apart from research experiments and test sites, biochar is at the time of research not employed in Denmark, raising the question how it came to constitute a large part of the national goal. This paper explores how biochar, as a method for carbon removal, comes into being as a relevant solution in Danish climate policy, and what this means for emission reduction efforts. Through document analysis, participatory observation, field visits and semi-structured interviews, I employ the framework of the dramaturgical regime and analyse how biochar is enacted as a climate solution through policy documents, conferences, media and network meetings. Here the concept of enactment indicates that different people’s actions are not overtly coordinated, and the effects of such actions are not necessarily fully intentional, but they are nevertheless political. I argue that through different scientific, administrative, political, and media practices, biochar is enacted as a viable climate solution that enables the continuation of current forms of production and consumption. As biochar likely substitutes for emission reductions and is in risk of failing to deliver the anticipated amount of carbon removals, the enactment of biochar as a climate solution in Danish cliamte policy possibly constitutes a case of mitigation deterrence.

Carbon dioxide removal is rapidly becoming a key focus in climate research and politics. This is raising concerns of "moral hazard" or "mitigation deterrence," that is, the risk that promises of and/or efforts to pursue carbon removal end up reducing or delaying near-term mitigation efforts. Some, however, contest this risk, arguing that it is overstated or lacking evidence. In this review, we explore the reasons behind the disagreement in the literature. We unpack the different ways in which moral hazard/mitigation deterrence (MH/MD) is conceptualized and examine how these conceptualizations inform assessments of MH/MD risks. We find that MH/MD is a commonly recognized feature of modeled mitigation pathways but that conclusions as to the real-world existence of MH/MD diverge on individualistic versus structural approaches to examining it. Individualistic approaches favor narrow conceptualizations of MH/MD, which tend to exclude the wider political-economic contexts in which carbon removal emerges. This exclusion limits the value and relevance of such approaches. We argue for a broader understanding of what counts as evidence of delaying practices and propose a research agenda that complements theoretical accounts of MH/MD with empirical studies of the political-economic structures that may drive mitigation deterrence dynamics.This article is categorized under:The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of MitigationThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate KnowledgePolicy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Sand is one of the most extracted materials in the world and a fundamental input for the construction sector. Currently, extraction rates exceed the natural rates of renewal locally and globally, why much literature on sand extraction focusses on environmental and social impacts. Sand extractors are often portrayed as external actors damaging local environments and communities, and limited attention has been granted to how sand extraction unfolds locally. Based on ethnographic research in western Colombia, this paper explores how manual sand extraction is conducted, organised and governed locally, its role in the local community, and how it relates to wider economic and political relations. Through the concept of moral ecology, I illustrate that manual sand extraction in the case is governed by notions of sustainability, reciprocity and solidarity. This ensures that extraction is done in a way that respects ecological cycles and contributes to the construction of community, proposing an alternative to environmentally and socially damaging ways of extraction. Nevertheless, the moral ecology of the dominant political-economic elites relies on notions of efficiency, legality and macro-economic responsibility. As long as these notions determine the terms of formalisation, the alternative form of extraction falls outside the legal framework.

Across the world, economic interests and state-making interventions have converged in dispossessing rural and urban dwellers. Drawing on literature on rural transformation, precarity, and life after dispossession, this paper explores how lifeworlds are constructed after dispossession. Based on ethnographic research in an Afro-descendant village in agro-industrial Colombia, I analyse five income-generating activities that together point to rural precarity, characterised by uncertain labour relations, fragile conditions of life, ecological dependence, and reconfigured rural relations. While villagers construct their lifeworlds around community, autonomy, and recognition, the constant search for income and reconfigured rural relations uphold and deepen inequalities in the agro-industrial margin.

Ethnic recognition and collective titling have since the second half of the 20th century been promoted as ways of compensating for historical injustices and countering the destructive effects of capitalist development. While holding promise of autonomy, territorial rights, and resource control, they have also been seen as political technologies governing, spatially tying identities to place, and incorporating new areas into capital market relations. This paper draws on and contributes to these debates by exploring how the Colombian legislation for Afro-descendants ethnic recognition and collective titling is understood, employed and 'reworked' from below as well as from above. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, the paper follows the case of an Afro-descendant sand-extracting community in the Cauca Valley Region, Colombia. Threatened by a competing mining claim, the villagers seek to gain ethnic recognition among other things to secure rights and control mining resources. In the process, the villagers are offered a land plot away from where they live and work to title as their collective territory; a mechanism that I term 'ex-situ titling'. As the villagers have no prior relation to the land, nor intend to resettle there, I argue that the ex-situ land titling only serves as a procedural step in the process of ethnic recognition, which, nevertheless, contributes to the uncertainty and incertitude around the villagers' ethnic rights and resource control.

History is written by the powerful. Representations of the past are framed within the structures of the dominant institutions today, and other pasts – those of the enslaved, the marginalised, the disenfranchised – are often suppressed. Drawing of Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, this chapter explores how the fertile lands of the Cauca Valley, Colombia, have been transformed into a sugarcane monoculture landscape, and how a dominant narrative of a successful industry has been established and maintained. Based on a review of written historical material, oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how conflicts and contestations, connections and collaborations have shaped the developments of the region, and how global forms of production have been met, resisted and adapted to locally. Drawing attention to the role of discourses and landscape interventions, the chapter illustrates how political and economic elites through history have appropriated land and labour through discourses of ‘empty land’ and ‘scarcity of labour’, as well as through landscape interventions and infrastructural developments. Meanwhile, subaltern groups have contested the changing economic and political conditions by escaping enslavement, forming independent settlements, organising labour strikes, and occupying lands to settle in the margins of the agro-industrial landscape. Though these contestations offer an alternative historical narrative of the region, the chapter points to a steady precariatization of the rural population, in which discourses and landscape interventions mask past dispossessions and legitimise the current relations of production.

This article argues that the entanglements of a growing global demand for construction material and neoliberal resource governance result in an incremental and piecemeal form of dispossession. While mining in Colombia has been broadly researched, little has been said about sand extraction and the challenges small-scale artisanal miners face when trying to formalise their activities. This article seeks to fill this gap by following a group of areneros (manual sand extractors) who attempt to defend their right to sand extraction against a competing mining claim. Drawn into the domain of the state, the areneros navigate a changing institutional setup and a complex legislation that favours the wealthy, the lettered and the connected. Political-economic interests are masked behind procedures, symbols and legal-administrative means, which create a ‘state effect’ and result in a subtle form of legal dispossession. The article points towards a scalar model of dispossession, in which small-scale mining activities pass through ‘small-scale intermediaries’ to end up in the hands of private corporate actors with capital and technical expertise to conduct large-scale extraction. The article adds to the limited literature on sand extraction and challenges the view that the activity is merely conducted by criminal actors; yet, it argues that subsistence mining is under threat by government and corporate interests, positioning sand extraction as a new resource frontier. As small-scale miners find themselves in the conflict between two competing rights regimes and two competing production logics, they are doubly stretched between proletarianization and eviction, criminalisation and self-erosion.

Environmental degradation is often understood as linked to poverty and ignorance of ecosystem values. Taking point of departure in the theories of ecological economics and political ecology, this study seeks to offer an alternative explanation of the concurrence of environmental degradation and economic challenges. Through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews and group interviews, the study investigates the production-consumption patterns of farming, brickmaking, charcoal burning and fishing in Apac district, Northern Uganda. While brickmaking is aimed at local consumption, farming, charcoal burning and fishing are partly for external consumption indicating a net outflow of labour, materials and energy, eventually leading to social and environmental impoverishment. The study further shows that the environmental impacts, in the form of soil degradation, loss of ecosystem services, deforestation and depleted fish stocks, are only affecting producers and the rest of the community, and are thus unequally distributed among producers, consumer and other actors. The environmental impacts are, however, mostly discursively constructed as local challenges of poverty, ignorance and poor attitudes. The subsequent responses are predominantly aimed at producers focussing on sensitisation, regulation and promotion of ‘modern’ technologies to increase production. The study concludes that current responses cannot fully address the production-consumption patterns, and hence have limited impact on the net outflows of labour, materials and energy.