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In the context of the developed economies, recent political economy scholarship has highlighted the growing role of intangible assets (brand equity, software, business processes, patents etc.) in corporate portfolios. Much of this literature has emphasized how intangible assets erect barriers to entry, produce artificial scarcity of key inputs, enhance the pricing power of firms and thus lead to greater and greater levels of concentration. Being as they are monopoly rights and privileges, intangible assets represent the relational power of their owner vis-à-vis those excluded from their ownership. While much of this literature has focused on the developed world, this paper turns its gaze to the case of a developing country and analyzes the patterns and trends of intangible assets for a sample of Indian firms for the period 2000–2022. The analysis reveals a substantial acceleration in the weight of net intangible assets relative to net physical assets, especially after 2008. It also suggests that the largest and most powerful corporations are the ones that have contributed to this spike. Ranked by assets, sales and ownership category, the results show that intangible asset accumulation has been the strongest in the highest echelons of the corporate hierarchy. Moreover, the patterns of intangible asset accumulation have been such that they have not been restricted to the traditional "rentier" sectors in the sense that their presence in the "productive" sectors has been as important if not more so. By focusing on firm-level patterns of intangible asset accumulation, the results show the internal and necessary connections between accumulation and value capture that undergirds modern day capitalism in the Southern peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercial surrogacy marketizes life's work. In the era of neo-liberalism, women's work, which is often intimately performed within a heterosexual marriage in exchange of support, now remains a principal avenue to earn money. This form of feminization of labor has led to the emergence of markets for women's reproductive capacities. The present study stems from my ethnographic journey into the lives of the women who work as surrogate mothers in India. The narratives presented in the paper emerge from my prolonged fieldwork in Anand, Gujarat. It engages with the experiences, understandings, and the voices of these women, who I term reproductive laborers, in order to examine the notion of putting one's reproductive capacities in this intimate market for money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent phase of services digitalisation in the global South, reflected in the widespread adoption of Internet and smart-phone technologies, has given rise to an emergent gig economy that employs tens of millions of workers across its diverse urban centres. Pre-eminent frames of analysing the global gig economy have thus far focussed significantly on issues related to platform regulation, employment relations and labour organisation. While important, these frames tend to overlook the wider informal, unwaged and self-organised foundations of gig work and labour in the global South. This article addresses the limitations of existing analytical frames by drawing upon the analysis of 55 telephonic interviews with migrant and non-migrant gig workers associated with well-known ride-hailing and home-delivery apps across two Indian cities about their experiences of the COVID-19 crisis. The article offers novel insights into the various uncertainties and challenges that gig workers in India faced during the COVID-19 national lockdown, as well as their attempts to cope with the new post-pandemic realities. Contextualising these experiences through the lens of 'digitally organised informality', the article reveals that in the absence of formal and institutionalised systems, India's gig workers rely significantly on informal socio-spatial networks of care and support that also link internal urban-rural geographies, lives and livelihoods. Conceptualising these informal networks as fundamentally contextual in understanding the development of gig labour and its social reproduction in the global South, the article however also provides a critical evaluation of their partial and contradictory nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the work-lives of middle class Muslim professionals in India's new service economy. While these workers have successfully negotiated labour market entry into the ‘core’ growth sectors of India's globalising economy, they are simultaneously subject to different forms of social, cultural and political marginalisation. Strikingly, they also remain at the margins of both economic geography and development geography scholarship. The paper extends a growing development geography/economic geography ‘intellectual trading zone’ and enhances understandings of the complex relationships between labour agency, marginality and social inclusion. The paper draws on new survey data to document patterns of labour agency amongst Muslim professionals in New Delhi. This is augmented by interviews with Muslim professionals to show how different forms of marginality are experienced in their everyday work-lives and the strategies and agencies articulated towards (re)working those marginalities. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of these findings in relation to socially inclusive growth, the middle-class transformation of India's Muslims and wider understandings of marginality and worker agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of "bypass urbanism" to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the extended urban regions. Bypass urbanism is not emerging from the construction of a singular new town or real estate project, but is the result of the simultaneous development of an ensemble of various independent but related projects. Therefore, bypass urbanism usually does not emanate from a coherent planning initiative, even less so from a hidden "master plan" at the hands of any single developer or state agency, but it emerges through a convergence of interests over large areas of land at the geographical periphery of urban regions that have been made available for new urban developments by various measures. We understand bypass urbanism as a multidimensional process that includes material-geographical bypassing, the bypassing of regulatory frameworks, and socio-economic bypassing in everyday life. It results in the creation of exclusive and excluding spaces that enable middle and upper-class lifestyles, at the same time leading to the peripheralization of extant urban areas that are bypassed and neglected. The massive scale of bypass urbanism that we have observed represents a new quality of urban development resulting not in isolated urban enclaves or archipelagos, but in the fundamental restructuring of the extended urban region with far reaching and incalculable repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of social movements mobilise around and seek to valorise 'place-based' imageries. There is, these movements argue, vitality in place. As anthropologists remind us, people continue to construct some form of boundaries around place, however permeable and transient those boundaries might be. In the context of global agrifood, a diversity of socially generated marks indicating conditions of origin have emerged that seek to speak to a range of moral economies. Within this constellation, Geographical Indication (GI) appears as a remarkable place-based intellectual property which the author appreciates as the juridical reification of a place-based stabilisation of cultural norms. However, rather than idealise GIs, the paper also probes a 'politics in place' through a fieldwork-based study of a recently acquired GI for Feni, a liquor distilled from either coconut or cashew apples. Juxtaposing observations of Feni distilling with the specifications that constitute the GI, the paper explains these differences in terms of the local social relations of power. The Goa government aligned itself with the recently established Feni Association, composed mainly of large distillers with bottling operations, to acquire the GI and was successful because of the complicity of the GI Registry office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explain the role of labor intermediaries in the weaving of capital–labor relations in capitalist agro-business. I do so by focusing on migration infrastructure or the vertical network of labor intermediaries who facilitate labor recruitment from migrant home villages and migrant labor disciplining on cane fields in rural western India, where the laborers are brought seasonally to harvest sugarcane. I show how the role of labor intermediaries cannot be understood by containing them within the villainous stereotypes associated with brokers. Intermediaries are embedded within the labor geographies of commodity production where capital accumulation requires the downward transferring of the risk of financial loss from capitalist agro-business to intermediaries and laborers. I collected data for this research by conducting interviews and focus-group discussions in the Yavatmal and Kolhapur districts of Maharashtra state in rural western India during summer 2014 and 2015–2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of 'invited' spaces for female participation within urban governance, both through women's presence within democratically elected municipal councils, and the deliberate linking of its implementation to Kudumbashree, Kerala's network of womenonly neighbourhood groups that are responsible for implementing various antipoverty interventions throughout the state. Drawing on oral histories of the slum's evolution, interviews with project participants, and detailed ethnographic observation, we highlight the contests over identifying the list of JNNURM beneficiaries who would ultimately be granted a government-built flat at the project's completion. This key task in the project's implementation has been devolved to the local level, and therefore offers important insights into the practical efficacy of these invited spaces. The contests over this list show how 'actually existing' urban governance unfolds, and in particular highlight the interplay of formal and informal practices at work in 'fixing' a list that had local legitimacy. They also illustrate the ways in which power and authority are contested, and the role gender plays within performances of leadership. Women's political agency and efficacy are hampered both by Kerala's restrictive gender norms and by the high stakes and highly masculinist struggles present within its urban politics. The paper's theoretical contribution is to broaden our conceptualisation of leadership and claims making in the Global South, and within this to pay proper attention to the gendered nature of political space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a 'higher and better use'. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that 'urban revolution', 'enclosures', and 'accumulation by dispossession', while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The domestic work sector in India has been absorbing an overwhelming proportion of workers who migrate from rural and semi-urban spaces to cities for employment. The supply of workers is driven by multiple unregulated intermediaries, which expose them to multiple modes of exploitation before and after the point of placement. We compare digital platforms, which have recently entered the sector as intermediaries, to traditional placement agencies as pathways to livelihood opportunities in the domestic work sector. We shed light on the placement routes for domestic workers in the platform economy by comparing it with the larger informalised domestic work sector. We also compare the impact of different types of digital platforms and traditional intermediaries on migrant workers and the supply chain of migration. The analysis is based on qualitative inputs provided by domestic workers in two Indian cities – Delhi and Bengaluru as well as inputs from platforms, unions and government agencies. This primary data when situated in the context of traditional modes of intermediation presents the inadequacies of platforms in overcoming the challenges of the institutional ecosystem for migrant domestic workers. We conclude that the histories of intermediaries and work arrangements in domestic work continue to shape the position of migrants in the platform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the relatively rare instances when the spatialities of temporary migrant work, workers' journeys, and labour-market negotiations have been the subject of scholarly attention, there has been little work that integrates time into the analysis. Building on a case study of low-paid and insecure migrant manual workers in the context of rapid economic growth in India, we examine both material and subjective dimensions of these workers' spatiotemporal experiences. What does it mean to live life stretched out, multiply-attached to places across national space? What kinds of place attachments emerge for people temporarily sojourning in, rather than moving to, new places to reside and work? Our analysis of the spatiotemporalities of migrant workers' experiences in India suggests that, over time, this group of workers use their own agency to seek to avoid the experience of humiliation and indignity in employment relations. Like David Harvey, we argue that money needs to be integrated into such analysis, along with space and time. The paper sheds light on processes of exclusion, inequality and differentiation, unequal power geometries, and social topographies that contrast with neoliberalist narratives of 'Indian shining'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban transition is generally imagined as a large-scale permanent migration of people from villages to cities. The formation of new cities is also theorized as occurring through the migration of people. However, recent scholarship implies that parts of India may be witnessing an urbanization process that depends on natural population growth rather than in-migration. This claim carries significant implications for urban theory, but it has never been tested empirically. This article addresses that gap by examining migration patterns in India alongside urbanization—measured in terms of densification of population and built-up area and an economic transition away from agriculture. I find that certain parts of the country, notably the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain, are exhibiting all the trends constitutive of urbanization even as they experience negative net migration—a phenomenon I term "urbanization from within." My analysis also highlights that these same regions see high rates of temporary out-migration—suggesting that human mobilities may play a role in the in situ urbanization of rural settlements, but not in the ways that foundational urban and development theories would predict. I discuss the inequalities of India's economic transition and its spatial regime of social welfare as possible causal underpinnings of the trends I observe. The article's findings suggest that urban social scientists should reevaluate long-held assumptions about the relationship between urbanization and migration in the context of 21st-century urban transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bio-economy is characterised by aspirations of replacing the fossil-based economy with biobased energy, resources and processes; biofuels are particularly popular. This new shift comes with multiple risks and uncertainties in both industrialised and developing economies. The uptake of biofuels is inextricably linked to and legitimised by policy processes involving a complicated nexus of vested interests, political aspirations, and technological drivers, and a range of associated factors. In this paper we describe the characteristics of and contours along which two national biofuels policies in India and South Africa have been articulated and developed. In doing so we establish how a biofuels regime has gained legitimacy, becoming embedded into policy processes dictated largely through specific networks and reflective of the rationalising effect of global and local narratives. We analyse how pro-poor 'win-win' narratives gained purchase amongst different actors and in turn how they were used as a basis for biofuels policies. The case studies are, however, complex and differentiated, pointing towards sociopolitical nuances and structural subtleties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to fertile debates in environmental social sciences on the uses of and potential synergies between qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches for theory development and validation. Relying on extensive fieldwork on local forest governance in India, and using a dataset on 205 forest commons, we propose a methodological innovation for combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to improve causal inference. Specifically, we demonstrate that qualitative knowl- edge of cases that are the least well predicted by quantitative modeling can strengthen causal inference by helping check for possible omitted variables, measurement errors, nonlinearities in posited relationships, and possible interaction effects, and thereby lead to analytical improvements in the quantitative analysis. In the process, the paper also presents a contextually informed and theoretically engaged empirical analysis of forest governance in north India, showing in particular the importance of institutional and historical factors in influencing commons outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a detailed study of the location history of eight software and information technology (IT) enabled service firms, with varying attributes such as age of firm, type of work undertaken, and ownership sited in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. These cases are used to relate urban restructuring occurring in the city of Bangalore to the strategic shifting of location of firms within the urban fabric. While IT firms cannot be strictly classified as producer services, it is possible to contextualise their location decisions in terms of other office-based economic activities, such as producer services. Findings from the case studies are examined in relation to urban growth theories of the 1980s and 90s, which were related to an expansion of the service sector in advanced economies. The literature discussed in this paper explains the role of growth in producer services in suburbanisation of office space and the development of 'edge cities' and 'suburban downtowns' as alternatives to and in competition with traditional city centres. Studies of office location and contact patterns indicate the retention of management functions in the CBDs, with a consequent relocation of routine office operations to these suburban office spaces. The findings from the firms studied in Bangalore indicate a reverse pattern of peripheralisation of control functions and a retention of routine production functions in the core urban areas. The limited need for face-to-face contacts with actors in the local urban economy and the export-related output of this offshore industry are contributors to this apparent reversal of location dynamics. The paper briefly concludes with directions for future research on such specialised service production activity that is often being located in cities of developing countries, and its impact on the urban structure of these cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) is premised upon 'partnership', 'participation', and 'cost recovery' in the delivery of large toilet blocks as a practical solution to the stark lack and inadequacy of sanitation, and offers an opportunity to interrogate a growing consensus on sanitation provision among mainstream development agencies. In the paper, I argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions. I also consider whether the SSP, as the largest city project of its nature in Indian history, marks a shift in the relationship between the state and the 'slum' in Mumbai. I suggest that, despite constituting a change from ad hoc sanitation provision to a more sustained and universal policy, informal settlements in the SSP remain populations outside the sphere of citizenship and notions of the clean, ordered modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the emergence of R&D services in Bangalore, India, by focusing on the process of technological upgrading in the Indian software industry. The development trajectory of the Indian software industry and the upgrading it has experienced, from providing low-skill software services to providing high-skill R&D services, are examined using evidence from interviews with Indian firms in Bangalore. Whereas most research on the Indian software industry thus far has emphasized the role of the state and multinational corporations, in this paper we argue that active local entrepreneurship is playing an increasingly important role in technological upgrading and in the shift from low-skill to high-skill services in Bangalore. These shifts are being facilitated by growing institutional thickness, as evidenced by the accumulation of local expertise, increasing local entrepreneurship addressing specific market niches, and the development of a local technical community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of "following the financial strategy" by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance's use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s power distribution in agrofood networks has changed in many countries in Africa, Latin-America, South Asia, and the postsocialist countries in Europe and Asia. In the course of economic liberalization, retail and wholesale trade as well as the food processing and agroscience sector were opened up to foreign investment. Within the frame of such liberalization many states gradually refrained from directly governing this sector and reregulated the trade in a way that gave private companies the possibility to implement new power structures. We analyze the so-called 'Food Chain Partnership' (FCP) program implemented by the transnational company Bayer in India as an example for private governance in agrofood networks. Bayer is advancing and coordinating relations between the food processing and retailing industry and farmers. We explore whether such private activity can substitute for the activities of state institutions in governing agrofood networks. As the case study will show, the FCP model is highly selective in terms of farmers, Who can participate (criteria include minimum farm size, irrigation facility, literacy, agricultural practices, and mobile phones), the crops that are covered, and the information passed on to the farmers. This limits the potential of market-driven instruments like the FCP to replace the traditional trade system as they concentrate only on those regions and products which are promising most profit to the companies. The global production network approach builds the analytical framework of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political ecological effects of the expansion of an urban centralized water-supply network and the transformation of it into a full-cost-recovery system in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. It draws on data collected through a 2007 household survey of six Jaipur neighborhoods stratified by class; follow-up household interviews in 2007 and 2009; and interviews with public water supply managers and private water tanker vendors in both 2007 and 2009. The investigation concludes that the spatially uneven integration of network expansion and the intermittent flow of water circulating through it, combined with historical axes of political economic difference produces uneven adaptive responses to maintain access to water, such as waiting on water, private tubewell construction, and private water tanker operations, while transforming social power relations. It is concluded, first, that these uneven flows and cost-recovery initiatives are exacerbating current disparities in access to drinking water and, second, that the current public water-supply system has only been partially reformed and that these policy changes have rendered the public supplier unable to recover costs. This makes the need for a private sector rescue of an incapacitated and inefficient public institution seem obvious to planners, yet the public utility's inability to set costs or to set infrastructure priorities draws into question the need for the private sector and full-cost-recovery reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent worldwide trend towards devolution has been driven by the belief that fiscal decentralisation is likely to have a positive effect on government efficiency and economic growth. It is generally assumed that the transfer of powers and resources to lower tiers of government allows for a better matching of public policies to local needs and thus for a better allocation of resources. These factors, in turn, are expected to lead to an improvement in regional economic performance, if subnational authorities shift resources from current to capital expenditures in search of a better response to local needs. In this paper we test these assumptions empirically by analysing the evolution of subnational expenditure categories and regional growth in Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. We find that, contrary to expectations, decentralisation has coincided in the sample countries with a relative increase in current expenditures at the expense of capital expenditures, which has been associated with lower levels of economic growth in countries where devolution has been driven from above (India and Mexico), but not in Spain, where it has been driven from below. We hypothesise that the differences in legitimacy between the central or federal government and subnational governments in top-down and bottom-up processes of devolution may be at the origin of the diverse capacity to deliver greater allocative and productive efficiency and, eventually, greater economic growth by devolved governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ambivalent feelings towards the Government of India produced in one of the government's own employees. In establishing the Delhi Improvement Trust in the 1930s, Arthur Parke Hume had to battle against governmental cost cutting in an attempt to secure the rehousing of slum evictees. The refusal of the government to accept this welfarist commitment to investment led to the stalling of the improvement projects and great emotional disquiet for Hume. This is traced through his personal correspondence with his parents. In interweaving these insights with the imperial archive, three biographical approaches are adopted. A traditional chronology is used to order the events, an analytical approach is used to outline the discursive regularities of Hume's observations, and a genealogical approach is used to suggest the influences on Hume's writings and the broader governmental rationalities that he had to negotiate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arsenic crisis that affects at least thirty million water consumers in Bangladesh has been called the world's greatest ever environmental health disaster. Although the problem and the potential solutions have been presented confidently in the media, the argument of this paper is that, ironically, very little of the science or the technology is certain. From the spatial and depth variabilities of contamination, through safety thresholds, to the accuracy of field testing kits, we find indeterminacy. We argue that rather than shying away from such uncertainty, however, mitigation policies must acknowledge and embrace it if any real progress is to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I seek to review the literature regarding the spaces of memory and forgetting outside the geographical core of the Western discipline. This takes in two bodies of literature. First, works from outside the geographical discipline on memory and forgetting, as conceived at both the individual and the collective scale. Second, I move beyond the scope of ‘developed’ countries to look at works on memory in India, where subaltern, communal, and rural memories have been explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key virtue of urbanization is the possibility of using the market value of land to pay for its development costs. Many urban-redevelopment strategies, such as urban renewal, land readjustment, and land sharing, are based on this principle. Mumbai's tenement, or chawl, redevelopment programme is also a variation on the theme. The key promise of the programme is the resettlement of tenement residents in new, cross-subsidized housing on the original sites. The city's property readjustment strategy is ambitious, but deals with difficult contexts—contested claims by tenants and owners, potential for disagreements and conflicts, underdeveloped housing-finance institutions, reliance on real-estate values, and the risk of failure, overburdened infrastructure, and so on—and is hard to implement. Nonetheless, an advantage of the approach, and a partial explanation for the difficulties in implementation, is the ability to redistribute wealth to tenants. My normative position in this paper is that the pace of implementation should not be increased at the cost of the welfare of tenants. Although the strategy is far from being a panacea, I focus on public-policy recommendations to support redevelopment led by tenants' cooperatives, including technical assistance, conflict resolution, access to information, and housing-development finance. I illustrate and elaborate these arguments through a single redevelopment case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the growing field of urban political ecology, so far not much attention has been paid to air-quality and related policies. In this paper I examine the recent far-reaching air-pollution policies in India's capital, as well as the role of environmental nongovernmental organizations and judicial activism, in view of their implications for different groups of the urban population. I analyze these policies in the wider context of Delhi's ongoing strive for ‘city beautification’ and for changing (environmental) governmentalities, and reveal a marked middle-class bias in the environmental and judicial activisms practised, which also contributes to the refining of the boundary between public and private environments. Furthermore, it is argued that air quality with its complex sociospatial patterns plays a significant part in the coproduction of urban ‘socioenvironments’ that needs to be addressed in political-ecological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on a global value chain (GVC) for organic basmati rice, we study how farmers' practices are governed through product and process standards, organic certification protocols, and contracts with buyer firms. We analyze how farmers' entry into the GVC reconfigures their agencements (defined as heterogeneous arrangements of human and nonhuman agencies which are associated with each other). These reconfigurations entail the severance of some associations among procedural and material elements of the agencements and the formation of new associations, in order to produce cultivation practices that are accurately described by the GVC's standards and protocols. Based on ethnography of two farmers in Uttarakhand, North India, we find that the same standards were enacted differently on the two farmers' fields, producing variable degrees of (selective) compliance with the 'official' GVC standards. We argue that the disjuncture between the 'official' scripts of the standards and actual cultivation practices must be nurtured to allow farmers' agencements to align their practices with local sociotechnical relations and farm ecology. Furthermore, we find that compliance and disjuncture were facilitated by many practices and associations that were officially ungoverned by the GVC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Producer companies can help smallholder farmers participate in emerging high-value markets, such as the export market and the unfolding modern retail sector in India. As elsewhere in the developing world, in India, small farmers' livelihoods are being threatened due to the liberalization and privatization of Indian agriculture and the increasing interest of private capital in the agribusiness sector. The withdrawal of the state from productive and economic functions, and changes in the organization of marketing channels, present new challenges for small-scale farmers. In this environment of greater instability and competition, organization and collective action can help to enhance farmers' competitiveness and increase their advantage in emerging market opportunities. We build on the ideas of value-chain governance and collective-action literature and introduce the functions and organizational structure of producer companies in India within this context. On the basis of a case study of a specific producer company in Maharashtra, which produces and markets mango and cashew nuts, we discuss the potential benefits for rural communities and the reempowering effect of this form of farmer organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]