Search

Agricultural land reforms are crucial to promote investments in sustainable land management and food production amidst accelerating urbanization and increasing population growth. However, notable gaps remain in the literature regarding how land reforms designed at the national level are implemented in localized contexts, especially as they interplay with customary tenure regimes. Adopting an institutional bricolage perspective, we explore interactions between local tenure arrangements and government land reforms and the resulting implications for food production in rural Mali. We show that specific market-based land tenure arrangements in the study area emerged from a combination of urbanization pressures and government-designed land reform. We find that tenure security is linked to agricultural investment decisions, as also documented by previous studies. We likewise show that anxieties and ambiguities stemming from state-mandated land registration foster the emergence of monetized forms of access to collective land. These new market-based systems drive greater out-migration of productive community members, leading to labour shortages and weakening the social cohesion and mutual support systems upon which the most vulnerable depend. The findings show that top-down land reforms in rural Mali lead to disruptions of the social fabric, along with re-organizations of tenure systems to accommodate social norms and priorities. We illustrate how, in the context of centralized policy making with limited local consultation, community members resist cooperating and creatively search for alternatives to achieve their social goals. Empirical investigations of socio-institutional challenges such as land tenure arrangements are critical for effective scaling of agricultural innovations and sustainable food production.

The connections between climate change and conflict inherently raise questions related to space, scale, and nature-society relations, all themes central to modern geographic thought. The geographic and political ecological literature—and the literature informed by geography and political ecology—generally explores the relationship between climate change and conflict through case studies, employing a wide range of methods that enable understandings not accessible through exclusively large-n quantitative studies. As a result, this literature focuses on questions and challenges that are generally overlooked in the wider climate-conflict literature, including the importance of spatial and temporal scale and the ways in which vulnerability and resilience frame this relationship. This literature uniquely challenges the dominant “threat multiplier” framing of climate change’s impact on climate, questioning this narrative’s unidirectional flow from climate vulnerability to conflict, exploring how climate change can create opportunities for peacebuilding as well as conflict, and identifying how climate adaptation activities can themselves become catalysts for conflict. While geographic and political ecological lenses on the relationship between climate change and conflict do not have all the answers needed to address the challenges and opportunities presented by this relationship, the framings these lenses offer are essential to building meaningful, actionable understandings going forward.

Rapidly expanding global trade in the past three decades has lifted millions out of people out of poverty. Trade has also reduced manufacturing wages in high income countries and made entire industries uncompetitive in some communities, giving rise to nationalist politics that seek to stop or reverse further trade expansion in the United States and Europe. Given complex and uncertain political support for trade, how might changes in trade policy affect the global food system’s ability to adapt to climate change? Here we argue that we can best understand food security in a changing climate as a double exposure: the exposure of people and processes to both economic and climate-related shocks and stressors. Trade can help us adapt to climate change, or not. If trade restrictions proliferate, double exposure to both a rapidly changing climate and volatile markets will likely jeopardize the food security of millions. A changing climate will present both opportunities and challenges for the global food system, and adapting to its many impacts will affect food availability, food access, food utilization and food security stability for the poorest people across the world. Global trade can continue to play a central role in assuring that global food system adapts to a changing climate. This potential will only be realized, however, if trade is managed in ways that maximize the benefits of broadened access to new markets while minimizing the risks of increased exposure to international competition and market volatility. For regions like Africa, for example, enhanced transportation networks combined with greater national reserves of cash and enhanced social safety nets could reduce the impact of ‘double exposure’ on food security.

To meet society’s need to better understand and respond to ever-more complex, interwoven problems of environment, development, and society—including environmental health risks, climate change adaptation, and sustainable development—we applied an integrative frame to re-imagine, re-design, and deploy a professionally oriented, academically rigorous 2-year/12-unit Master of Science program. Our scholar–practitioner faculty uses the framework to tackle complex, real-world problems, emerging from a strong interdisciplinary ethos. It thus acts as a pragmatic system to guide pedagogy, curriculum, research and practice, and student experience. The frame weaves together six domains (6-D): (1) project framing, concept, and design; (2) development topics and sectors; (3) stakeholder interests, assets, and relationships; (4) knowledge types, disciplines, models, and methods; (5) variable temporal and spatial scales and networks; and (6) socio-technical capacities. At our institution, the need to replace 2.0 of 3.5 tenure/tenure-track program faculty posed both a challenge and an opportunity to re-think one of the oldest environmental science and policy programs in the USA which began in 1971. We pose and answer: What kinds of integrative educational experience, curriculum, and research practicum can best prepare environmental MS students in the twenty-first century? Two examples—one domestic, one international—illustrate the practicum.

Weather and climate services (WCS) are expected to improve the capacity of Africa's agricultural sector to manage the risks of climate variability and change. Despite this, a lack of evidence prevents a realistic analysis of whether such services are delivering on their potential. This paper reviews 66 studies that have evaluated outcomes and/or impacts of agricultural WCS in Africa, highlighting areas that have received relatively more attention as well as persistent gaps. While the evaluation of WCS outcomes is relatively straightforward, estimates of the number of people who access and use these services are uneven (covering a small number of communities in 23 of 54 African countries) and highly variable (with access estimates ranging from ~2 to 86%, depending on the service and the population). Meanwhile, 22 documents estimate the impact of WCS with respect to yields and/or income. Developed with a variety of methods, these estimates are also wide ranging and illustrate how impact is conditioned on a number of characteristics of the service, the user, and the context in which both operate. The paper uses lessons developed through this review to develop a “learning agenda,” or evidence‐building roadmap, to establish priorities that can guide work to improve the design, delivery, and impact of agricultural WCS in Africa. Priority learning areas include activities that can strengthen the evidence of access, use, and impacts of WCS, along with those that can advance the use and usability of evidence so as to improve the design and targeting of WCS services. This article is categorized under: Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies

We consider the question of what is needed for climate services to support sub-Saharan African farmers’ adaptation needs at the scale of the climate challenge. Consistent with an earlier assessment that mutually reinforcing supply-side and demand-side capacity constraints impede the development of effective climate services in Africa, our discussion of strategies for scaling up practices that meet farmers’ needs, and opportunities to address long-standing obstacles, is organized around: (a) meeting farmers’ climate information needs; (b) supporting access, understanding and use; and (c) co-production of services. A widespread gap between available information and farmers’ needs is associated with entrenched seasonal forecast convention and obstacles to using observational data. Scalable innovations for producing more locally relevant historical and forecast climate information for farm decision-making are beginning to be adopted. Structured participatory communication processes help farmers relate complex climate information to their experience, and integrate it into their management decisions. Promising efforts to deliver rural climate services strategically combine communication channels that include participatory processes embedded in existing agricultural advisory systems, and innovations in interactive broadcast media. Efforts to engage farmers in co-production of climate services improve delivery to farmers and dialogue among stakeholders, but often with little impact on the usability of available information. We discuss challenges and options for capturing farmers’ evolving demands, and aggregating and incorporating this information into iterative improvements to climate services at a national scale. We find evidence that key weaknesses in the supply and the demand sides of climate services continue to reinforce each other to impede progress towards meeting farmers’ needs at scale across Africa. Six recommendations target these weaknesses: (1) change the way seasonal forecasts are produced and presented regionally and nationally, (2) use merged gridded data as a foundation for national climate information products, (3) remove barriers to using historical data as a public good, (4) mobilize those who work on the demand side of climate services as an effective community of practice, (5) collectively assess and improve tools and processes for communicating climate information with rural communities, and (6) build iterative co-production processes into national climate service frameworks.

While climate services have the potential to reduce precipitation- and temperature-related risks to agrarian livelihoods, such outcomes are possible only when they deliver information that is salient, legitimate, and credible to end users. This is particularly true of climate services intended to address the needs of women in agrarian contexts. The design of such gender-sensitive services is hampered by oversimplified framings of women as a group in both the adaptation and climate services literatures. This paper demonstrates that even at the village level, women have different climate and weather information needs, and differing abilities to act on that information. Therefore, starting with preconceived connections between identities and vulnerability is likely to result in overgeneralizations that hinder the ability to address the climate-related development and adaptation needs of the most vulnerable. Instead, as is demonstrated in this paper, the design and implementation of effective gender-sensitive climate services must start with the relevant social differences that shape people’s livelihoods decisions and outcomes, including but not limited to gender.

Gender-disaggregated, household survey data for Uganda are used to examine how gendered roles and responsibilities influence adoption of drought-tolerant (DT) maize, a new technology that can help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa adapt to drought risk. Multinomial logit (MNL) regression results indicate that, compared to men farmers, women farmers have much lower adoption of DT maize, mainly due to differences in resource access, notably land, agricultural information, and credit. Differentiation of women and men farmers by various characteristics reveals that whether a male farmer was younger or older, or poor or non-poor has no significant influence on DT maize adoption; but important differences among different categories of women farmers are identified. For example, the farmer group found least likely to adopt DT maize is young, poor women household heads. MNL results also show that wives strongly influence adoption of DT maize on plots controlled by their husbands. We discuss the implications of study findings for the development of well-targeted and socially-inclusive adaptation policies.

Much as development’s understanding of livelihoods became intertwined with notions of sustainability in the late 1990s, today livelihoods analysis is taking up the rise of resilience in the development and climate change adaptation communities of practice. The emergent concept of resilient livelihoods risks perpetuating problematic framings of both socio-ecological and livelihoods dynamics that limit the effectiveness of development and adaptation interventions. In this paper, I connect recent contributions to the livelihoods and socio-ecological resilience literatures to define resilient livelihoods as projects aimed at the achievement of well-being in a manner that preserves existing systems of meaning, order, and privilege. These projects (re)produce socio-ecologies, deeply human assemblages of socio-cultural and biotic elements. So framed, the idea of resilient livelihoods centers meaning, power, difference, and agency in both livelihoods and socio-ecological dynamics. It opens up new understandings of the character, sources, and importance of resilience in livelihoods, allows for the identification of new indicators of livelihoods fragility, points to previously-overlooked sources of potential livelihoods transformation and change, and suggests sites of productive engagement between development and adaptation interventions and transformation and change.

The field of climate services for development (CSD) is growing rapidly, presented by donors and implementers as an opportunity to address the needs of the global poor, whether informing agricultural decisionmaking in rural communities, facilitating disaster preparedness or promoting public health. To realise this potential, however, CSD projects must understand the information needs of their intended users. This raises a critical epistemological challenge for CSD: how can we know who is vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change, and why are they vulnerable to particular impacts? In this paper, we consider both the epistemological tension arising over the construction of vulnerability that emerges at the intersection of the physical and social science communities within CSD and a second, less-discussed epistemological stress surrounding how user identities are understood within the social science community engaged in CSD-related research and implementation. We illustrate these tensions through the example of a climate services programme that delivers agrometeorological advice to farmers in Mali, demonstrating the ramifications of these epistemological issues for the design and delivery of services that further development and adaptation goals.

The design of effective climate services requires the identification of a problem that might be addressed through the provision of weather and climate information, and the design and delivery of actionable information to a set of appropriate users. The utility of weather and climate information for a given user is shaped not only by exposure to particular weather, climate, and market shocks and stresses, but also the sensitivity of that user’s livelihoods to particular shocks and stresses and whether or not their adaptive capacity includes the ability to use such information. Therefore, effective climate services are very place-, time-, and vulnerability-specific, and required careful social scientific investigation into user needs as part of the design process. Such investigation is also critical to the monitoring and evaluation of such projects, for they may lose their efficacy when applied to challenges or user communities other than those for which they were designed. This article uses the example of Mali’s agrometeorological advisory program to illustrate these points. This program, designed during a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sought to address acute food insecurity by boosting food availability through yield increases. This design achieved its goals by targeting the users (senior men who owned their own agricultural equipment) who were most able to make rapid changes to the production of staple grains. It is only in the contemporary context of resilience programming and an increasing concern for climate change adaptation that the relatively small, highly gendered set of users able to engage with this climate service became a lens through which to view this program as a failure. The contemporary challenge for the program, and indeed any climate service aimed at addressing vulnerabilities produced by a variable, changing climate, lies in how it might remain relevant as our understanding of the dynamics of food security have shifted away from a focus on food availability, the weather- and climate-related stresses most important to agrarian populations shift with the changing climate, and our concerns for resilience demand that this program reach a much wider set of users and serve a broader set of needs than initially imagined.

In this paper, four researchers who share a commitment to applied research and fieldwork methodologies reflect on the ambiguities associated with maintaining and adapting this commitment to changing professional, personal, and contextual situations. The authors focus on the use of fieldwork for the study and support of agricultural change in sub-Saharan Africa, as an example of a setting and topic in which long-term work in the field can improve understanding and support contextualized development. In analyzing a range of experiences associated with maintaining and adapting fieldwork approaches, we complicate and build upon the assertion that professional development pulls international development practitioners and applied researchers away from the field. The experiences analyzed in this paper suggest that the situation of changing orientations toward the field is not dichotomous, and that instead, a commitment to fieldwork can result in innovative approaches to remaining at least partially focused ‘outw...

Two decades after their rapid rise to prominence, the place of livelihoods approaches in contemporary development conversations and programming is unclear. This status is in many ways deserved, as such approaches have often failed to deliver rigorous explanations of observed livelihoods decisions and outcomes. However, as development, humanitarian assistance, and climate change organizations refocus their efforts around the concepts of resilience and vulnerability, there is increasing demand for methods with the holism of livelihoods approaches. If livelihoods approaches are to fill this need, they must evolve to embrace explicit theories of livelihoods decision-making, and means of applying this theory to specific research and implementation challenges. This paper presents the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach as one such linking of theory and application. LIG captures a wider range of motivations for observed decisions and behaviors than possible under the more instrumental livelihoods approaches that currently dominate the scene, a critical need if we are to productively address complex questions of vulnerability and resilience. This article lays out the theory behind LIG and connects this theory to practice through a step-by-step manner with reference to livelihoods decisions in Ghana's Central Region, closing with a brief discussion of what LIG, and indeed revitalized livelihoods approaches more generally, can contribute to contemporary development and climate change research, policy, and implementation.

The impacts of climate variability and change impinge upon different lives and livelihoods within agrarian populations in complex ways. While academic, donor, and implementer efforts to understand and act on this complexity have been profoundly influenced by gender analysis, most contemporary analyses are predicated on a construction of gender as binary (men versus women). This approach runs contrary to current understandings of gender and identity in the wider social science literature, which treats gender as a social categorization that takes meaning from its intersection with other identities, roles, and responsibilities. An emerging adaptation literature takes on this intersectional approach to gender, making conceptual, methodological, and empirical arguments against assessing the vulnerability of agrarian populations to the impacts of climate variability and change through binary gender categories. This literature argues that binary approaches are likely to overlook the specifi cc hallenges facing significant portions of any agrarian population, and therefore can result in maladaptive interventions that enhance, instead of ameliorate, the vulnerability of the most marginal and vulnerable. Though this emerging literature makes a compelling case for change, efforts to convince the academic and implementation communities focused on agrarian adaptation to adopt intersectional gender analyses point to two broad research frontiers. First, convincing these communities of the value of this shift will require an expanded, rigorous empirical base of evidence forwho is overlooked by binary gender analysis relative to intersectional analysis in particular places. Second, facilitating the implementation of intersectional approaches will require methodological innovations that have thus far been under-addressed in this literature.

Current approaches to vulnerability assessment for disaster-risk reduction (DRR) commonly apply generalised, a priori determinants of vulnerability to particular hazards in particular places. Although they may allow for policy-level legibility at high levels of spatial scale, these approaches suffer from attribution problems that become more acute as the level of analysis is localised and the population under investigation experiences greater vulnerability. In this article, we locate the source of this problem in a spatial scale mismatch between the essentialist framings of identity behind these generalised determinants of vulnerability and the intersectional, situational character of identity in the places where DRR interventions are designed and implemented. Using the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach to identify and understand different vulnerabilities to flooding in a community in southern Zambia, we empirically demonstrate how essentialist framings of identity produce this mismatch. Further, we illustrate a means of operationalising intersectional, situational framings of identity to achieve greater and more productive understandings of hazard vulnerability than available through the application of general determinants of vulnerability to specific places and cases.

In this paper, we argue that REDD+ is more than an impartial container for the various tools and actors concerned with addressing anthropogenic climate change. Instead, even as it takes shape, REDD+ is already functioning as a form of governance, a particular framing of the problem of climate change and its solutions that validates and legitimizes specific tools, actors and solutions while marginalizing others. This framing raises important questions about how we might critically evaluate REDD+ programs and their associated tools and stakeholders in a manner that encourages the most effective and equitable pursuit of its goals. We bring the issue of governance under REDD+ to the fore through a focus on the objects to be governed, the tools of governance, and the forms of environmental, economic and social knowledge that are considered legitimate under this framework. We then turn to the example of indigenous people's participation in REDD+ to illustrate how this framework attempts to bring about environmental governance by aligning the interests of a wide range of stakeholders in this process to bring about desired environmental outcomes. This consideration is critical for the implementation of REDD+, for as we illustrate, this alignment has thus far been incomplete, suggesting an emerging crisis of governance within REDD+ that will compromise future project and policy goals, and thus the well-being of many stakeholders.

There is no abstract for this paper.

Through a discussion of the sounds and statements of Bono and U2, this paper explores the ways in which music can work in particular spatial contexts, contributing towards both personal and population-wide health and wellbeing. We engage critically with the idea of celebrity diplomacy, and look beyond this notion to suggest ways in which the production, circulation and consumption of music warrants greater attention within the unfolding domain of health geography.

The stories that we hear as we conduct development research or implement development projects are often relegated to the margins of development studies. This article argues that these stories require our attention, for they are windows on to indigenous narratives of development and our placement in those narratives. Examining these stories as efforts to emplot experiences of development and encounters with development professionals within particular narratives enables us to better understand our own positionality in the communities in which we work, and therefore better understand the opportunities and challenges that our research/interventions present to the emergence of a truly participatory development.

Management challenges related to therelationship between nature and societyare nothing new in the U.S. South. Tech-nical studies of rural sprawl (Wear andGreis 2002; Cho et al. 2003), coastal de-velopment (Allen and Lu 2002), environ-mental change (TNC 2005; Early 2006),and conservation have, at some level, ad-dressed such challenges. So, too, a num-ber of geographers have explored the rolethat particular human-environment re-lationships have played, for example, inurban development in New Orleans andthe distribution of environmental risks(Colten 2005). What then, is the purposeof calling for, and writing on, a politicalecology in the U.S. South? We argue thatpolitical ecology is more than a new termfor nature-society studies (though thenebulousness of the contemporary litera-ture might suggest otherwise), but funda-mentally about the relations of power andknowledge that emerge in the context ofparticular nature-society relationships.This is not to say that the studies citedabove do not engage with issues of power,authority and legitimacy, but to point outthat previous considerations often havecome in the context of separate literaturesand concerns, aimed at different audi-ences, journals and conferences, andtherefore do not truly speak the same lan-guage. While such intellectual hetero-geneity can be an important opportunityfor innovation, the absence of an integra-tive conceptual framing across these liter-atures creates a situation where studies inone literature contain moments of incom-mensurability with studies from other lit-eratures. In these moments, somethinggets lost in translation between, for exam-ple, a study of rural sprawl and a study ofthe politics of conservation.It is this outcome, these moments ofincommensurability that led us to thinkabout a political ecology of the U.S. South.By linking these papers under the headingpolitical ecology, we are able to see howthey speak to issues much larger than thecases raised in each individual paper. Inthis sense, we can move beyond illustra-tive independent case studies and movetoward a broader understanding of the is-sues and processes that shape the out-comes of socionatural relationships, bothin the South and in broader contexts. Thissort of systematic linking is necessary, if

In a previous paper [McCusker, B., Carr, E.R., 2006. The co-production of livelihoods and land use change: Case studies from South Africa and Ghana. Geoforum 37 (5), 790–804], we argued that land use and livelihoods could best be understood as co-produced, where land use and livelihoods are not separate objects of knowledge related to one another through abstract processes, but different manifestations of social processes through which individuals and groups come to understand the challenges facing their everyday lives, the various resources available to them to negotiate these challenges, and the strategies by which they can conduct that negotiation. In this paper, we examine the theoretical basis for “co-production” with the goal of using this approach to inform development interventions.

Developing indicators to more effectively evaluate poverty–environment dynamics and inform policy is an urgent research priority. It is critical that these indicators are used in ways that accurately represent the relationship they are meant to inform. This article evaluates the theory and use of poverty–environment indicators, a relatively new tool developed to aid in the design and evaluation of poverty reduction strategies in the context of environmental change. We argue that while they have great potential, in their current form and use, poverty–environment indicators may contribute to critical misunderstandings of processes on the ground. These issues stem from a problematic and largely unacknowledged process of simplifying particular poverty–environment relationships. This article lays out the problematic character of this simplification process, and suggests how we might address these problems to create more useful understandings of poverty–environment dynamics to inform policy.

This paper is a response to a recent special issue of Regional Environmental Change, “Quantifying vulnerability to drought from different disciplinary perspectives” (vol. 8, number 4, 2008). In this paper, we examine some of the challenges facing efforts to understand vulnerability to drought through quantification as they are manifest in some of the articles in this special issue.

This article argues that the practice of poverty alleviation is greatly limited by a vision of poverty that fails to capture the locally specific causes of and solutions to the challenges that threaten human well-being. This problematic vision of poverty takes real-world form in such initiatives as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. It is a key reason why this and other contemporary poverty-alleviation efforts do not show greatly improved results compared with previous efforts. By reframing our understanding of the challenges to human well-being from poverty to ‘poverties’, however, we might envisage a new approach to policy development in relation to poverty that moves us towards a truly sustainable development.

This article examines adaptation decision-making through a diversified livelihoods strategy that distributes risk across market and subsistence production in Ghana's Central Region. Specifically, it asks how this strategy, which is an adaptation to a relatively recent convergence of economic and environmental uncertainty in this context, is accepted and reproduced by society at large, even as this adaptation results in unevenly distributed benefits and costs. An examination of the case in question suggests that the persistence of this adaptation has little to do with its material outcomes. This adaptation persists because, despite its unequal and less-than-optimal material outcomes, it is rooted in the ability of men to link this adaptation to existing gender roles, thereby legitimizing the adaptation and the gendered roles it relies upon. This finding calls into question the very idea of a successful adaptation, and suggests that much more attention must be paid to the persistence of particular adaptations if we are to understand existing adaptations and build upon them to enhance local capacities for managing economic and environmental change.

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) has come to embody hope for a new development path that might succeed where previous efforts have failed. A closer consideration of this project, however, suggests that this hope might be misplaced. Because of a general dearth of critical thought in key areas of project conceptualization, the MVP risks reproducing the problems of previous top-down, expert-driven development efforts. This article examines the conceptual issues raised by this absence of critical thought, and the reasons why project supporters have generally overlooked these issues. It then presents a critical grassroots framework which, if incorporated into existing MVP practices, might allow for the creation of a realistic, sustainable development path in Africa.

The DPSIR framework was devised in the late 1990s as a tool for the reporting and analysis of environmental problems, ranging in scale from global systems to localized watersheds. Since then, international organizations have begun to apply this framework to the evaluation of sustainable development initiatives, to better understand and overcome barriers to sustainability. While this may seem a logical application for an integrated environmental assessment tool, the use of DPSIR in sustainable development will likely perpetuate the least satisfactory outcomes of development. DPSIR cannot address the impact of aggregated, informal responses on the drivers and pressures related to environmental problems and sustainability challenges. This problem is not merely an oversight of the framework, but an issue that emerges within the structure of DPSIR itself through the unexamined, unacknowledged hierarchy of actors that this framework implicitly creates with its typology. Therefore, a DPSIR-centered approach is n...

Food security—the ability to obtain and use sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food—is a fundamental human need. Climate change is very likely to affect global, regional, and local food security by disrupting food availability, decreasing access to food, and making food utilization more difficult. Food security exists “when all people at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” and affects people through both under- and overconsumption. Food security requires that food be simultaneously (1) available—that it exist in a particular place at a particular time, (2) that people can access that food through economic or other means, (3) that people can utilize the food that is available and accessible to them, and (4) that each of these components be stable over time. Constrictions within any of these components can result in food insecurity. Food is provisioned through a food system that manifests in diverse ways across the globe. The food system includes all activities related to producing, transporting, trading, storing, processing, packaging, wholesaling, retailing, consuming, and disposing of food. Whether an individual food system includes few, many, or all of these elements, each is susceptible to risks from a changing climate. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, have increased global greenhouse gas concentrations; atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late 1700s to today’s level of about 400 ppm. Concentrations continue to rise, though future levels depend on choices and development pathways yet to be determined. Additionally, the future condition of the food system depends upon socioeconomic trajectories that are external to the food system itself. For these reasons, a range of possible emissions futures and socioeconomic pathways have been considered by this assessment. The Climate Change, Global Food Security, and U.S. Food System assessment represents a consensus of authors and includes contributors from 19 Federal, academic, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations in four countries, identifying climate-change effects on global food security through 2100, and analyzing the United States’ likely connections with that world. The assessment finds that climate change is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruptions leading to local availability limitations and price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety, among other causes. The risks are greatest for the global poor and in tropical regions. In the near term, some high-latitude production export regions may benefit from changes in climate. As part of a highly integrated global food system, consumers and producers in the United States are likely to be affected by these changes. The type and price of food imports from other regions are likely to change, as are export demands placed upon U.S. producers and the transportation, processing, and storage systems that enable global trade. Demand for food and other types of assistance may increase, as may demand for advanced technologies to manage changing conditions. Adaptation across the food system has great potential to manage climate-change effects on food security, and the complexity of the food system offers multiple potential points of intervention for decision makers at every level, from households to nations and international governance structures. However, effective adaptation is subject to highly localized conditions and socioeconomic factors, and the technical feasibility of an adaptive intervention is not necessarily a guarantee of its application if it is unaffordable or does not provide benefits within a relatively short time frame, particularly for smaller operations around the world with limited capacity for long-term investments. The accurate identification of needs and vulnerabilities, and the effective targeting of adaptive practices and technologies across the full scope of the food system, are central to improving global food security in a changing climate.

Land use change and livelihood systems are often analyzed separately or with one “driving” the other. This “driver-feedback” relationship has been buttressed by approaches to social process that are often far too static. Actors are confronted with a bundle of choices that they must negotiate as they create pathways of change. These choices are always bound up in relations of power and the knowledges that are the conditions for and results of these relations. We suggest that land uses and livelihood are different manifestations of the social processes by which individuals and groups negotiate the everyday conditions that shape their lives. We propose a framework that extends current understandings of the relationship between land use change and livelihoods by treating social relations of power as the entry point into this complex relationship. We underpin our arguments with empirical examples from South Africa and Ghana that locate power/knowledge relations in the context of social change in both study areas.

Food security studies, while giving ever more attention to issues of perception and local knowledge in food outcomes, have yet to engage in a systematic discussion of the role played by society in food outcomes. While contemporary studies of food outcomes address issues of the social, especially as social structures relate to access to and production of food, this literature lacks an accompanying theory of the social that might lend it broad, cross-contextual coherence. This article identifies a means of systematically approaching how actors apprehend and negotiate the complex factors and connections from which they fashion food outcomes by applying postmodern theories of power and knowledge to the study of society’s role in food outcomes. In developing this approach, I employ postmodern theory not merely to critique current approaches to the study of food outcomes, but to further a modernist goal, a world with less hunger.

This paper examines the role of environmental change as a driver of migration, a central concern of areas of inquiry ranging from the Human Dimensions of Global Change research to population geography and development studies. Although much of the literature on the role of the environment in migration reflects a general awareness that environmental factors are but one of a suite of influences shaping migration decisionmaking, a framework within which to place social, economic, and environmental issues with regard to particular migration decisions is absent from this literature. Drawing upon recent contributions to the literature on migration, and political ecological concerns for access to and control over resources, in this paper I present a framework for placing such issues founded on a Foucauldian conceptualization of power. This framework treats environment, economy, and society as both products of and productive of social differentiation, instrumental modes of power, and resistance. These forms shape actors' understanding and negotiation of their social, economic, and environmental contexts, and therefore their migration decisionmaking. I illustrate the application of this framework through the example of three villages in Ghana's Central Region, where rural environmental and economic changes appear to have driven a complex pattern of out-migration over the past thirty-five years. This migration shows the ways in which environmental change becomes inseparable from local perceptions of economy and local politics through local manifestations of power.

Over the past two decades development has been shifting its focus toward smaller scales and particular problems. As a result, the household has become an increasingly important institution for development, and has come under increased scrunity as development practitioners and scholars seek to better understand this institution’s functions and foundations, trying to ‘get the household right’. These efforts, rather than clarifying the character and the function of the household, have contributed to its indeterminacy by reifying the very institution they seek to analyse. Arguing that these efforts fundamentally miss the point of examining the household, this paper introduces a different framework of analysis that addresses the household not as a fixed object of research, but as a local construction that embodies flows of power and knowledge both within and transcending the local. Using the example of varying constructions of the household in two villages in Ghana’s Central Region, this article illustrates how such an approach allows us to address the various functions of the household as particular embodiments of these flows, an approach that better explains the endurance or ephemerality of these functions. Such an approach provides a stronger foundation for the consideration of how particular constructions of this institution may have troubling implications for issues like gender equity and sustainability.

In early 17th-century Virginia, three people constructed houses unlike anything built in the Chesapeake before or since. These earthfast structures, owned by men of the “better sort” and framed at the bottom of cellar holes, have thus far defied explanation because of interpretive constraints inherent in the positivist underpinnings of archaeological analysis. This article challenges these constraints by engaging the rich contexts highlighted in recent work by “storytelling” archaeologists through poststructural semiotics. Rather than search for a single driving factor that explains these houses, it is argued that it is only when one grapples with the complexity of the context that one can understand how these houses were constituted by/constitutive of their context.

When I first started working in these villages, elderly residents of Dominase claimed an early chief of the village had been one of those who greeted Portuguese explorers who reached the coast five miles to the south in 1471. Since my arrival I have conducted fairly extensive archaeological investigations in both Dominase and Ponkrum, but have yet to find any evidence of occupation that dates to the late 1400s, when European contact occurred. The earliest materials I have uncovered that relate to the current settlements date to sometime around 1825.1 Artifacts from the late 1800s and early 1900s are far more numerous than those from the early 1800s, as might be expected from a settlement that was growing after its founding. The bulk of structures standing here by the mid-twentieth century were constructed in or after the late 1800s.