S. Ali Malik

It is difficult to imagine anything more urgent for critical agrarian scholars and movements than the questions Borras et al. (2022) raise about how to develop an emancipatory mode of confronting climate change in agrarian and rural settings. Unfortunately, we find in India that institutionalized approaches to such challenges in the form of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA)/Climate-Smart Villages (CSV) point in the opposite direction and which, as such, are obstacles to the emancipatory approach Borras et al. call on us to imagine. This essay subjects such obstacles to critical scrutiny, arguing that CSA/CSV programs take the form of neoliberal technologies of government which intensify the disenfranchisement and dispossession of Indian farmers. By doing so, these technologies of government reduce farmers’ ability and, perhaps, willingness towards the development of ‘a sufficiently anti-capitalist, trans-environmental and agrarian approach to confront climate change’ (17–18). I suggest that any serious effort to construct the emancipatory project Borras et al. call for will be forced to confront how governmental technologies serve to produce specific forms of agrarian subjectivity antithetical to emancipatory change.

The full reprinted edited can be openly accessed here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003467960/climate-change-critical-agrarian-studies-ian-scoones-saturnino-borras-jr-amita-baviskar-marc-edelman-nancy-lee-peluso-wendy-wolford

Critical scholarship on geographical indications (GIs) has increasingly focused upon their role in fostering development in the Global South. Recent work has drawn welcome attention to issues of governance and sparked new debates about the role of the state in GI regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequality and foster the inclusion of marginalized actors in commodity value chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial legacies, which have entrenched conditions of racialized and gendered dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples from South Africa an...

Critical scholarship on geographical indications (GIs) has increasingly focused upon their role in fostering development in the Global South. Recent work has drawn welcome attention to issues of governance and sparked new debates about the role of the state in GI regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequality and foster the inclusion of marginalized actors in commodity value chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial legacies, which have entrenched conditions of racialized and gendered dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples from South Africa and South Asia, we illustrate how GIs conventionally reify territories in a fashion that obscures and/or naturalizes exploitative conditions of labor and unequal access to land based resources, which are legacies of historical disenfranchisement. Like other forms of neoliberal governmentality that support private governance for public ends, however, GIs might be shaped to support new forms of social justice. We show how issues of labor and place-based livelihoods increasingly influence new policy directions within Fair Trade agendas while concerns with " decolonizing " agricultural governance now animate certification initiatives emerging from new social movements. Both initiatives provide models for shaping the governance and regulation of GIs in projects of rural territorial development that encompass principles of rights-based development to further social movements for rural social justice.