Climate Change in the Global Workplace: Labour, Adaptation and Resistance 9781000377903, 1000377903

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Climate Change in the Global Workplace

This book offers a timely exploration of how climate change manifests in the global workplace. It draws together accounts of workers, their work, and the politics of resistance in order to enable us to better understand how the impacts of climate change are structured by the economic and social processes of labour. Focusing on nine empirically grounded cases of labour under climate change, this volume links the tools and methods of critical labour studies to key debates over climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to highlight the active nature of struggles in the climate-impacted workplace. Spanning cases including commercial agriculture in Turkey, labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia, this collection offers a novel lens on the changing climate, showing how both the impacts of climate change and human adaptations to it emerge through the prism of working lives. Drawing together scholars from anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change adaptation, labour studies, and environmental justice. More generally, it will be of interest to anybody seeking to understand how the changing climate is changing the terms, conditions, and politics of the global workplace. Nithya Natarajan is Lecturer in international development at King’s College, London. Her work focuses on South India and Cambodia, and explores agrarian change, rural-urban livelihoods, labour precarity, gender, and debt. Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work examines the contested politics of climate change on socio-economic inequalities, patterns of work, and mobilities.

Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research

Political Responsibility for Climate Change Ethical Institutions and Fact-Sensitive Theory Theresa Scavenius Insuring Against Climate Change The Emergence of Regional Catastrophe Risk Pools Nikolas Scherer Climate Justice and Community Renewal Resistance and Grassroots Solutions Edited by Brian Tokar and Tamra Gilbertson Teaching Climate Change in the United States Edited by Joseph Henderson and Andrea Drewes Climate Change Law in China in Global Context Edited by Xiangbai He, Hao Zhang, and Alexander Zahar The Ethos of the Climate Event Ethical Transformations and Political Subjectivities Kellan Anfinson Perceptions of Climate Change from North India An Ethnographic Account Aase J. Kvanneid Climate Change in the Global Workplace Labour, Adaptation, and Resistance Edited by Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Climate-Change-Research/book-series/RACCR

Climate Change in the Global Workplace Labour, Adaptation, and Resistance Edited by Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42232-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76232-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82290-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figuresvii List of tablesviii Contributor biosix Forewordxiv ANDREW HEROD

Acknowledgementsxviii   1 Introduction: climate change in the global workplace: labour, adaptation, and resistance

1

NITHYA NATARAJAN AND LAURIE PARSONS

PART 1

Labour13   2 Thermal inequality in a changing climate: heat, mobility, and precarity in the Cambodian brick sector

15

LAURIE PARSONS

  3 Climate change adaptation through agroecology in Senegal: enhanced farmworkers’ autonomy or new forms of vertical labour control?

32

PATRICK BOTTAZZI, SÉBASTIEN BOILLAT, FRANZISKA MARFURT, AND SOKHNA MBOSSÉ SECK

  4 Routes to food security: strategies of survival of marginalised communities in North-western Bangladesh TANEESHA MOHAN

49

vi  Contents PART 2

Adaptation71   5 Old ways and new routes: climate threats and adaptive possibilities in the Indian Himalayas

73

RICHARD AXELBY AND MAURA BULGHERONI

  6 From climate adaptation to social reproductive resistance: examining the gendered climate-labour migration nexus in Southeast Asian mobilisations for environmental justice

93

SYMON JAMES-WILSON

  7 Hands that adapt: seasonal labour migration, climate change, and the making of adaptable subjects in Turkey

110

ETHEMCAN TURHAN

PART 3

Resistance129   8 Workers and environmentalists of the world unite? Exploring red-green politics in union support for Heathrow expansion

131

MAYA GOODFELLOW AND NITHYA NATARAJAN

  9 A changing climate: indigenous participation in the extractive industry

152

KIMBERLEIGH SCHULTZ

10 Climate change is class war: global labour’s challenge to the Capitalocene

172

SABINA LAWRENIUK

11 Conclusion: towards a reworking of climate adaptation as labour “resistance”

189

LAURIE PARSONS AND NITHYA NATARAJAN

Index196

Figures

1.1 2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 9.1

Global gross domestic product (US$), 1960–2019 4 Urban-rural remittances by occupation (N = 308)26 Location map of study site, Khansama, Bangladesh 52 Mean Likert scale response scores for the HRG and LRG, Khansama region 57 Disaster resilience map: LRGs, women, Musahar Para 65 Disaster resilience map: LRGs, women, Okhrabari 66 Routes of Gaddi shepherds in Chamba, Kangra, and Kullu Bharmour 76 Poster of Adana Agricultural Workers’ Convention in 2005 121 British trade union membership rates, 1892–2017 133 UK trade union membership compared with employment, 1971–2017134 UK trade union membership by region, 1995–2019 140 English trade union membership by region, 1995–2019 141 Proportion of UK union members by age, 2019 145 UK labour market by age, 1992–2019 146 “Delineating northern and southern Canada” 155

Tables

2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3

Percentage perceiving climate change impacts (N = 308)20 Focus group discussions in Khansama, Dinajpur 53 Socio-demographic distribution in Khansama, Dinajpur 54 Disturbance scenarios 64

Contributor bios

Nithya Natarajan, Lecturer in international development, Department of International Development, King’s College London Dr Nithya Natarajan is Lecturer in international development at King’s College, London. Her work focuses on South India and Cambodia, and explores agrarian change, rural-urban livelihoods, labour precarity, gender, and debt. She completed an ESRC-funded PhD at SOAS, University of London, and a postdoctoral research position at Royal Holloway as part of the ESRCDfID-funded “Blood Bricks” research project. Nithya is currently a coinvestigator on the GCRF-funded project “Depleted by debt? Focusing a gendered lens on climate, credit and nutrition in translocal Cambodia and South India”. Her work features in a range of journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes. She has also engaged with policy and activist outputs in disseminating her research, notably in Open Democracy, through a Home Affairs Select Committee submission regarding the UK Modern Slavery Act. Laurie Parsons, Lecturer in human geography, Royal Holloway, ­University of London Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work examines the contested politics of climate change on socioeconomic inequalities, patterns of work, and mobilities. Strongly committed to policy engagement, Laurie has conducted large-scale projects examining inequalities in Cambodia’s economic development for Transparency International, Plan International, Save the Children, CARE International, ActionAid, the IDRC, and the Royal University of Phnom Penh, among others. His first book, Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Andrew Herod, Distinguished Research Professor, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia Andrew Herod is a human geographer and political economist interested in how the economic geography of capitalism is made. Within that broad description, he has been particularly focused upon exploring how working

x  Contributor bios

people play active roles in shaping economic landscapes under capitalism and how, in turn, the physical and ideological form of the landscape can ­sometimes enable and sometimes constrain the possibilities for working ­people’s actions. His research has involved such diverse topics as how US East Coast dockers struggled to control the location of work once technological innovations like containerisation began to affect their industry in the 1950s; how dockers also went about building new geographical scales of organising in response to the growing national spatial integration of the cargohandling industry; how autoworkers were able to bring General Motors’s operations to a grinding halt in the late 1990s by striking at several strategic choke points in the corporation’s structure; how Western unions went about working with unions in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s to help rebuild the labour movement there after the collapse of Communism; the role played by the US labour movement in fighting Communism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and what this meant for the subsequent ­globalisation of US capital; and the challenges faced by precarious workers in industries such as cleaning and how they are fighting to resist the pressures being brought to bear upon them by neoliberal capitalism. Maya Goodfellow, PhD candidate, Department of Development ­Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK Maya Goodfellow is a Leverhulme Early Career researcher at SPERI, University of Sheffield. Her research project examines  the relationships between race, bordering, and capitalism, with a particular focus on the politics of “the centre” and the material elements of racism. Her work to date has primarily been concerned with processes of racialisation in relation to both immigration and international development. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (2019) and is a regular broadcast commentator and writer. Dr Sabina Lawreniuk, Nottingham Research Fellow, Department of Geography, Nottingham University, UK Sabina Lawreniuk is Nottingham Research Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. She works on the intimate geopolitics of workers’ rights and women’s rights in the global garment and footwear industry. Her ongoing projects explore women’s trade union representation (funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, 2017–2020), women’s health and safety (funded by a Nottingham Research Fellowship, 2020– 2023), and Covid-19 impacts on women workers (funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund, 2020–2022) in Cambodia’s garment and footwear manufacturing sector. Professor Patrick Bottazzi, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland Patrick Bottazzi is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geography and member of the Centre for Development and Environment, both at the University of Bern. He leads the group Labour and Social-Ecological Transition

Contributor bios  xi

(LASET). His researches have been mainly dedicated to small-scale community impact, adaptation, and resilience to global environmental change and policies. He currently focuses on the societal conditions to a transition to sustainable food systems from the perspective of human work, social justice, and governance. Kimberleigh Schultz, PhD candidate, School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Canada Kim is a doctoral candidate at McMaster University and a proud Métis mother of one. Although born in Toronto, Kim has spent time living and working in northern and remote communities across Canada. Her research explores Indigenous livelihoods in the context of resource development and climate change. Kim strives to undertake research that supports Indigenous communities engaged in development to meaningfully participate in the planning process and in the negotiation of agreements that will lead to the outcomes they want. Before starting her doctorate, Kim spent nearly ten years working with Indigenous communities and organisations to inform and develop public policy approaches and initiatives to address a variety of issues, including homelessness and the overrepresentation of First Nations and Métis and Inuit children and youth in the child welfare system. She also has a background in Indigenous community development and a strong personal interest in Indigenous approaches to sustainable development. Symon James-Wilson, research assistant, Department of Geography and OISE, University of Toronto, Canada Symon James-Wilson is an author, poet, and teacher. Her undergraduate and graduate research in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto explored questions of migration and mobility, social reproduction, race and segregation, and critical geographies of education. She has previously contributed chapters to edited books, including Digital Lives in the Global City, the Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, and the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Taneesha Mohan, post-doctoral research associate, Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York, UK Taneesha Mohan is a senior researcher and her work focuses on political economy, gender, climate resilience, migration, labour relations, and agrarian change in India and Bangladesh. Taneesha’s contribution emerges from her work as Post-Doctoral Research Associate for the GCRF-funded project (2017–2019), “Equitable Resilience in Local Institutions”, based across the Stockholm Resilience Institute and the University of York. She completed her funded PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2016; a thesis that explored enduring aspects of gendered labour tying in India. She has previously worked as a researcher in various research projects in both LSE and the Centre for Women’s Studies in Delhi, India. She has also undertaken graduate teaching at both Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and

xii  Contributor bios

LSE. Taneesha has a burgeoning publication record, across journals, book chapters, and a policy report. Dr Ethemcan Turhan, Assistant Professor of environmental planning at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Ethemcan Turhan is Assistant Professor of environmental planning at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen (the Netherlands). He previously held positions in KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (Sweden) and Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University (Turkey). His research focuses on the broadly defined political ecology realm, mainly on topics at the intersection of climate justice and energy democracy. He received his master’s and PhD degrees in environmental studies from ICTA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and BSc degree in environmental engineering from Middle East Technical University. He is the co-editor of  Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey: Landscapes, State and Environmental Movements (Routledge, 2019). Dr  Richard Axelby, Programme Manager/Senior Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London Richard Axelby is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS. Richard’s research interests have taken him from the Indian Himalayas to the subterranean basement levels of the British Library, and he has written on environmental history, natural resource management, and the anthropology of development. More recently, he has studied political communication and democratic cultures in India and the UK. Maura Bulgheroni, PhD candidate, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Free University, Berlin, Germany Maura Bulgheroni is a doctoral candidate in ethno-ecology under the codirection of Prof. Véronique Daou Joiris (Center of Cultural Anthropology) and Prof. Edwin Zaccai (Centre for Studies on Sustainable Development) of the Free University of Brussels. Her objective is the study of the emic perception of climate change and the so-called human adaptation to climate change through the case study of the Gaddis people of the Indian Himalayas. From a perspective which considers the human relation to the environment as being the result of practical engagement, her work focuses on, first, the different lenses (from individual daily activities to local cosmology) through which people perceive changes in their climate and, second, the local discourses on the recent evolutions of households’ activities. By showing that humans and climate are constantly and dynamically co-evolving, she explores the subjectivity in causal approaches and definitions of change.

Contributor bios  xiii

Sokhna Mbossé Seck, PhD candidate, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland Sokhna Mbossé SECK is a PHD student in Social Sciences of Environment/ Geography at the University of Cheikh Anta DIOP of Dakar (Senegal). Her doctoral research project focuses on questions related to farmers' motivations for the adoption of agroecological practices in Senegal and builds on her former work on agro-environmental and socio-technical dimensions of agro-ecological transitions in the Niayes region in Senegal. Franziska Marfurt, PhD candidate, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland Franziska Marfurt is an anthropologist and PhD student at the Institute of Geography of Bern University. Her PhD project focuses on situated ideas of good work in Senegal. Further research interests include feminist political ecologies and economies and participative method(ologie)s. She has previously worked on access to common pool resources in contexts of large-scale land acquisition projects in West Africa. Dr. Sébastien Boillat, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland Sébastien Boillat is an environmental scientist and geographer. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography of the University of Bern, Switzerland. His research interests include environmental justice, political ecology, land systems, sustainability transitions, agroecology and nature conservation in the Global South.

Foreword

It is a truism that contemporary capitalism has significant consequences for human life, producing as it does at least two types of precarity – an economic precarity for hundreds of millions of people who toil with little to no financial security and a biological precarity as global climate change and environmental destruction threaten to annihilate life as we know it. Frequently, these two forms of precarity have been viewed independently of one another. Yet both are fundamentally shaped by the character of the capitalist accumulation process, a fact which suggests that our contemporary era is perhaps better labelled the “Capitalocene” than it is the recently popularised “Anthropocene”! On the one hand, for myriad workers in both the global South and the global North who had become used to a certain level of economic well-being through their participation in the formal economy, the closure of factories and having their jobs automated out of existence as part of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (i4.0) have brought about great hardship and consternation. At the same time, for those who were never ensconced in the formal economy but who often supported it through their labour, life has also become more tenuous as they have had to bear ever greater pressures to reduce the cost of supplying goods and services forced upon them by a rapacious capital. Meanwhile, for virtually all working people and peasant farmers, whether employed or not, the dismantling of social safety nets and the unleashing of “the free market” under the logic of neoliberalism have made life harder and more uncertain. On the other hand, the environmental destruction wrought by the search for raw materials from which to make the commodities being pumped out of the world’s factories – commodities whose half-lives seem to get ever shorter, thanks to the planned obsolescence upon which capitalist accumulation depends – and the heating of the planet caused by our collective reliance upon the burning of hydrocarbons to produce the energy required to make the whole accumulation system function threatens to bring about the extinction of myriad forms of life, including that of homo sapiens. In order to truly understand how these two types of precarity are linked, we must deeply examine the politics of capitalist production – both the production of commodities and the production of Nature.1 With regard to the former, as capitalists have sought to address crises of accumulation and the challenges of

Foreword  xv

globalisation, they have increasingly turned to using more ephemeral workforces. Their need to respond to growing competition from rivals across the planet has led many to seek numerical and functional flexibility – a workforce that is more easily hireable and fireable and in which workers can be expected to do multiple tasks rather than a single one, thereby reducing labour costs, allows capitalists to more readily adapt to the market forces which come at them ever more quickly in an age of global time-space compression and fast(er) capitalism. The cost of this flexibility, though, is being paid in the form of reductions in workers’ economic security and standards of living and a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Equally, the natural world is also bearing the burden of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, not least because the planet-warming pollution and the environmental destruction generated by the production process in the pursuit of surplus value are typically considered negative externalities not accounted for in the cost of commodities’ manufacture. This is being exacerbated by the displacement of crises of accumulation from the arena of production into the built environment – what David Harvey has called a “shifting of crisis from the primary to the secondary circuit of capital”. Hence, as the collapse of the US housing bubble in the late 2000s led to dramatic declines in demand for manufactured goods coming from China, the government there, fearful of social unrest that might be generated by having hundreds of thousands of workers laid off in the nation’s export processing zones, engineered a paroxysm of building to soak up unemployment. This intensified the already massive speculative construction that had been evident for several years and which has led to the building of dozens of so-called ghost cities.2 Indeed, one measure of the massive extent of China’s recent city building is a startling statistic relayed by Vaclav Smil in his 2013 book Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization, wherein he notes that whilst the United States used 4.5  billion tons of cement during the entire twentieth century, China used 6.5 billion tons between just 2011 and 2013! This building mania to address economic crisis has produced colossal quantities of carbon dioxide, as coal is burned to fuel city construction – even what are probably low-balled official figures show that Chinese coal consumption increased nearly threefold between 2002 and 2015, from 1.5  billion tons per year to 4.0  billion tons, whilst the country added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants, week in and week out, between 2005 and 2011.3 Myriad other countries have embarked upon similar building programmes to stimulate their economies, and hundreds of brand new cities have sprouted across Asia and Africa in particular in recent years. The link between economic crisis, speculative urbanisation, and environmental catastrophe could not be more clear. Given that problems of economic and biological precarity arise out of how production is organised under capitalism, challenging such precarity will require a more democratic control of production to ensure that the necessities of human social and biological reproduction are created in a manner that does not threaten either the economic welfare of the bulk of the population or the environmental health of the planet which we all inhabit. Being as working

xvi  Foreword

people lie at the heart of the production process, they have the potential to shape how both economic and biological precarity unfolds and there are plenty of examples – both historical and contemporary – of workers taking control of production, from Italy’s Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919 and 1920, when workers ran hundreds of factories in the country’s north-west, to the famous Lucas Plan of 1970s Britain to the factory occupations of Argentina, undertaken under the aegis of the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, as well as those of Greece, Serbia, South Korea, and several other countries at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For sure, just having worker control over the means of production should not be taken to imply that they, too, will not make some poor decisions in this regard – that is, after all, the essence of human agency! But it does change the structural context within which decisions about production are made and so opens up the possibility of engendering different outcomes than those made solely in the pursuit of profit by a handful of factory owners and their managers reacting to market, rather than human, needs. In particular, it more readily allows us to collectively ask in what kind of economy we want to live and how we want to produce the Nature upon which we rely, with some hope that we may move towards such a vision. The essays in this book, then, provide an important starting point from which to consider some of these issues. Linking economic and biological precarity, they collectively explore how growing income insecurity and environmental destruction are affecting working people and peasant farmers in different parts of the globe and how they are responding to these challenges. As the editors note in their introduction, by foregrounding labour the essays provide a way through which we can consider questions of resistance and agency, as workers and peasants grapple with the impacts of economic tribulations and ecological devastation. Thus, whilst climate change is affecting myriad aspects of life, including cropping patterns and agricultural productivity, access to water, and whether or not they are exposed to greater levels of heat stress as they toil, ­workers and peasant farmers are developing various strategies to survive and transform the settings within which they find themselves  – migrating to other areas, growing different crops, implementing new irrigation schemes, ­challenging hydrocarbon burning activities, and a host of other things. N ­ aturally, these each have different sets of both positive and negative consequences – migration may lead to political conflicts, as climate refugees are perceived as threats by longstanding residents, whereas cultivating new crops may require different inputs and labour demands, which favours some suppliers and agricultural labourers and disfavours others. Equally, some of these are likely to be more successful than are others. Collectively, though, they represent adaptations and resistances to the threats posed by capitalism’s present model of accumulation. At the same time, however, even as we focus upon labour agency, these tensions show us that we must recognise that workers’ and peasants’ interests are not monolithic – for instance, the low-carbon economy that is necessary to fight planetary warming may threaten the short-term employment futures of those living in regions dependent upon coal and oil production, such that workers

Foreword  xvii

and peasants from these areas may resist efforts to implement any transition to a green economy. Given that any attempts to secure a transition to a more democratic control over the means of production and to reduce the negative economic and environmental consequences of production will have to engage with the highly unevenly developed geography of contemporary capitalism, especially concerning how different groups of working people are embedded within this economic landscape and differentially connected across it, together with how the present configuration benefits some and disadvantages others, those interested in so doing will need to develop a spatial sensibility if they are to be successful. As Doreen Massey told us so many years ago: geography matters! Not all places and people will necessarily see changes in the status quo as being in their immediate best interests, even if they recognise that, in the long term, planetary environmental destruction and the continuation of an unstable and unsustainable economic model, one wherein the bulk of the population becomes so impoverished that it cannot purchase the goods factories are churning out, will likely doom us all collectively. Whatever else it may require, then, any sort of coordinated anti-precarity politics must be geographically sensitive and coordinated if it is to be successful. Andrew Herod

Notes 1 More precisely, we should really be talking of the production of Second Nature, that “nature produced by human activity, in opposition to the inherited non-human nature” (Smith, N. (2008). Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space (3rd ed., p. 66). Athens: University of Georgia Press). 2 A 2013 survey conducted by Beijing’s National Development and Reform Commission noted that in just 12 of China’s 32 provincial-level administrative divisions over 200 new towns were under development, whilst the number nationwide was probably double that (see Shepard, W. (2017, December 12). Why hundreds of completely new cities are being built around the world. Forbes. 3 Han, S., Chen, H., Long, R., & Cui, X. (2018). Peak coal in China: A literature review. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 129, 293–306; Larson, C. (2014, January 27). China’s growing coal use is world’s growing problem. Climate Central. Retrieved from www. climatecentral.org/blogs/chinas-growing-coal-use-is-worlds-growing-problem-16999

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the chapter authors for their excellent contributions. Thanks also to Katherine Brickell for her drive and encouragement in ensuring we complete this project. Finally, we extend our gratitude to the many respondents who allow all of us to continue developing our work.

1 Introduction Climate change in the global workplace: labour, adaptation, and resistance Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons Global temperatures rose by 1oC from the late 1800s to 2017 and continue to ascend. “Profound alterations to human and natural systems” are underway, posing “unprecedented risks to vulnerable people and populations” (IPCC, 2018, p. 53). From political leaders to the media, calls are growing in volume for a plan by which human populations might be able to adapt to these worsening conditions. Because we cannot stop what is already underway, it is imperative that we learn to adapt. This pressing need to respond to the changes in our environment has seen the concept of adaptation assume a leading role in the response to climate change. Yet despite its prominence, adaptation is a contested topic. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate adaptation as “actions taken to manage the impacts of climate change by reducing vulnerability and exposure to its harmful effects and exploiting any potential benefits” (IPCC, 2018, p. 51), a relatively ambiguous definition that is left open theoretically to any number of political paths. Yet in practice, climate adaptation – a well-funded global architecture of multilateral institutions, local and national governments, and private business – centres on a methodological individualism, limiting the scope of formulation. As Taylor (2015, p. xi) states: Extracted from its roots in biology and transposed into the context of contemporary climate change, adaptation is now held to represent an equally innate process of social adjustments to external climatic stimuli. Facing the assuredly grave consequences of global climatic change, the pressing need for immediate and comprehensive adaptation is seemingly self-evident Framed thus, the process of adaptation appears natural, individually centred, and apolitical. Climate change acts as an external threat upon society, and adaptation processes serve to adjust to it. As Taylor suggests (2015), such a notion of climate adaptation, with its core focus of maintaining the status quo and naturalising change, serves to radically depoliticise the process of addressing climate change. We write as countries across the world begin to reawaken from state-enforced lockdowns following the Covid-19 crisis. The long-standing arguments from

2  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

governments lamenting the impossibility of state intervention around climate change appear frailer than ever, as we live through one of the most far-reaching periods of state control in recent times. A number of commentators have compared the now sizeable bailout and welfare packages being pushed by state governments across the world to the need for increased state spending on the climate, and calls to do this in recent decades (see, for example, Watts, 2020). Yet this misses the key point about what current state spending represents in terms of capitalism. That is, whilst Covid-19 bailout packages for businesses and wage replacement schemes for workers represent a means of supporting, stabilising, and eventually relaunching capitalist growth in its current form, the calls from much of the climate movement ask for an end or radical restructuring of the current system. This is precisely the difference between climate adaptation, as revealed by Taylor, and climate resistance. Whilst the former advocates individualised adjustments in the face of climate impacts, the latter, we contend, speaks to a political act, addressing the structural roots of both climate change and labour exploitation through reworking the relations of degradation, appropriation, and exploitation. Such an approach foregrounds how climate change and capital are inextricably intertwined. The creation of wealth under capitalism is reliant upon the plunder of natural resources, at rates that outpace natural cycles of recharge and in ways that cause untold emissions of harmful substances, all enabled through the exploitation of labour (Foster, 2000). Therefore, in asking how the poorest and most marginalised adapt to climate change, this volume adopts a labourcentred lens, attentive in particular to linkages between the drivers of climate change and the forces engendering poverty. Indeed, as it becomes increasingly clear that “the world of work is intimately connected with the natural environment” (ILO, 2019, p. 16), those who are relatively socially disadvantaged are likely to find themselves “disproportionately affected by temperature extremes” (Hansen, Bi, Saniotis,  & Nitschke, 2013, p. 2), with ethnic and political disadvantages acting as key channels for the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, this remains a largely neglected scholarly nexus. Indeed, in general, “environmental studies have largely ignored labour issues, while labour studies have paid little attention to climate change issues” (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011). Therefore, in order to properly understand the durable vulnerabilities that exist and persist at this intersection, it is necessary to broaden the scope of analysis in relation to both economic development and climatic change. This book provides a set of perspectives aimed at bridging this disjuncture, bringing together authors from a range of disciplines to shed light on the nexus of labour and climate change. Seeking to structure this inquiry in terms of key areas of relevance to climate change scholarship, it does so in three parts: labour, adaptation, and resistance. In the first of these, three authors offer perspectives on how labour is shaped by climate change, highlighting not only the empirical need to attend to this question but also the conceptual adjustments necessary to effect its proper resolution. In the second part, on adaptation, three further

Introduction  3

contributions speak to the need to reframe and deepen conceptualisations of adaptation within climate change scholarship, highlighting the complex, multiscalar factors which shape how people respond to their environment and the outcomes of those responses. The final part of the book addresses the key question of agency and resistance under climate change, calling across its three chapters for a more nuanced and economically embedded understanding of ­climate resistance, capable of articulating the everyday struggles and contestations that shape workers’ lives and livelihoods in a changing climate.

Labour under climate change The working poor constitute the mainstay of the global economy (Breman & van der Linden, 2014). With repeated assertions from the IPCC (IPCC, 2014, 2018), to the United Nations Development Programme (2020), to radical organisers (Pettit, 2004), that the most vulnerable will be those that face the most adverse impacts of climate change, we argue here for a more coherent focus on what constitutes vulnerability – labour – what work and workers look like today, and what this tells us in terms of efforts towards addressing climate impacts. Today, the majority of work across the global South and parts of the global North is low-paid, insecure, and lacking in social protections. As Breman and van der Linden argue (2014), in Western Europe, improvements around improved working conditions, social safety nets, and wages that were won through collective bargaining in the past two centuries were eroded through the onset of neoliberal policies from the 1970s. In particular, the “full employment capitalism” promoted in the post–Second World War (WWII) era across the West came to an end, replaced instead by “flexibilization”, and a rise in precarious jobs (Breman & van der Linden, 2014, pp. 923–924). Alongside this, the past four decades have seen a decline in the state social safety net – through welfare, public utilities and infrastructure, and public finance  – all of which have increased the living costs for the working poor. As Munck argues (2013), this informal landscape of work has arguably always been the norm in the global South. However, a similar process of ­erosion in terms of social safety nets has also taken place. In the post–WWII era, post-colonial countries across the global South have largely transformed from agrarian to industrial and services sector–led growth economies, with this uneven process of transformation beginning for many during colonial regimes ­(Bernstein, 1996). Crucially, the many global South countries compelled to take on Structural Adjustment Programme loans from the International ­Monetary Fund from the late 1970s onwards have seen an acceleration of capitalist development. Agrarian commercialisation, characterised by land titling, commodification of agricultural inputs, and the entry of global capital into agricultural commodity chains, has seen a deepening of class differentiation in the countryside, as the rural poor are dispossessed and forced to seek work in the non-farm sector (Bernstein, 2006; Li, 2009). Yet the transition

4  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

towards industrial and service sector–led growth in many of these countries has not seen the creation of adequate jobs. Instead, in many regions of the global South where growth continues apace without adequate labour absorption, large populations of poor are rendered “surplus to capital’s requirement” (Li, 2009, p. 69). Under such circumstances, reproducing the household often involves labour migration, within and across national borders, with remittances now advocated as a key strategy of global development (Kunz, 2011). Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of informal labour markets and their causes across the world, these broad trends of declining social safety nets, the ascendancy of capitalist growth without job creation, and the erosion of working conditions and wages for existing jobs speak to a rising landscape of precarity. Crucially, the rise of this landscape corresponds with a period of unrivalled global wealth creation, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1  Global gross domestic product (US$), 1960–2019 Source: World Bank (2020).

Wealth in the neoliberal era is therefore built in part through the complex and myriad means through which workers are adversely incorporated into new circuits of capitalist accumulation (Hickey & Bracking, 2005), on precarious terms and without adequate social support. The system that undermines the working poor thus undergirds the success of capitalist accumulation. During the last four decades, these conditions have seen ‘the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time’ (Castree, 2010, p. 185) enact a bilateral vice on labour, especially in the global South contexts most recently integrated into global production. Indeed, as we contend, the forms of precarity

Introduction  5

effected by environmental factors on the one hand and economic factors on the other are so deeply intertwined that they should no longer be seen as separate. Rather, in an era where climate change has become fully embedded in worker livelihoods, a perspective is needed that acknowledges this everyday uncertainty and risk as the norm, rather than the exception in capitalist practice. In the first chapter of Part I, Chapter  2, Parsons explores this contention through the lens of the uneven geography of heat in the global workplace. Applying a novel “thermal inequality” lens to explore the processes by which vulnerability to heat stress is mediated through channels of socio-economic and cultural disadvantage, the chapter draws on the context of brick workers in the Cambodian construction industry to examine the translocal dimensions of heat stress. From this standpoint, it shows how those most exposed to excess heat in rural areas experience linked vulnerabilities in urban and modern sector work. Thus, Parsons argues, the impacts of climate change are embodied by individuals and rendered mobile by structural inequalities. They are therefore not only unequal but durably unequal in their manifestation. Chapter 3 tackles these issues from a different perspective, switching a translocal for a vertical lens to explore the power relations shaping transitions to sustainable agriculture. Arguing that the literature on agroecology has tended to ignore the persistent role of top-down power structures in managing labour during such transitions, Patrick Bottazzi, Sébastien Boillat, Franziska Marfurt, and Sokhna Mbossé Seck explore how vertical channels of labour impede workers from becoming genuine agents of transformation, casting them instead as “technical demonstrators” rather than becoming agents of transformation. As they show, this is a gap that resonates with a widespread lack of attention to questions of power and social inequality in sustainable agriculture research, in particular climate-smart agriculture, which tends to focus exclusively on technical and farm-level issues. The final chapter of the labour part, Chapter 4, seeks once again to broaden the scope through which impacts of climate change are assessed. Arguing for the need to expand the scope of development and disaster risk management to include a political economy framework, Taneesha Mohan draws on the experiences of two marginalised communities in Bangladesh to show how the impact of disasters in this, one of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries, is inextricable from the growing insecurity of work. Exacerbated by exclusionary government policies that have left the marginalised worse-off in Bangladesh, the impacts of climate change are therefore moulded by macro-political factors and imbricated into wider processes of agrarian neoliberalism which have created a “crisis of labour” marked by exploitative working conditions (Bernstein, 2001). What draws these three contextually diverse accounts of labour together, therefore, is a shared commitment to extending the frames governing the analysis of labour in a changing climate. Whilst Parsons advocates a translocal framing, in order to capture the durability and transportability of climatic impacts, Bottazzi et al. advocate a vertical lens to account for the power relations governing sustainable transitions. Mohan, similarly, calls for an expansion of analytical scale, placing labour under climate change within the precarities and inequalities of the wider political economy. Across these three intersecting

6  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

perspectives, each chapter therefore speaks to a common concern with the insularity of labour analysis under climate change, showing it to be inseparable from the wider power relations within which labour relations are played out more generally. Not only does “climate change exacerbate precariousness, disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk” (Newman & Humphrys, 2019, p. 1), but it does so in highly structured ways, reflective of living and working, as well as of environmental conditions.

Climate adaptation One of the most widely used terms in climate change analysis and policy, the concept of adaptation is as broad as it is influential. In recent years, the heightened impacts of climate change upon poorer populations in both rural and urban settings have gained greater attention (see, for example, Morton, 2007; Bahadur & Tanner, 2014; Natarajan, Brickell, & Parsons, 2019). Furthermore, as highlighted earlier, a rich literature on global labour offers insight into how work is (re)structured through processes of erosion and flexibilisation under neoliberal growth. Yet in linking these two areas of thinking, the climate adaptation literature arguably falls short. Certainly, a broad literature addresses the politics of climate adaptation. In particular, the concept of “vulnerability” has taken root as a means of theorising the poorest and most marginalised (Kelly & Adger, 2000). Yet as Taylor (2015) has convincingly argued, too often, the term “vulnerable” is applied with little understanding of how vulnerability is forged through wider systems of power. A strain of thinking and activism around climate justice offers something of a corrective in this regard, reframing climate impacts through the lens of social justice, with attention to how the impacts of climate change can be addressed through a human rights framework (Robinson & Shine, 2018). Yet there remains, we argue, insufficient links made between historical literature in processes of uneven development and the rise of poverty and inequality within this, and the varied impacts of climate change. What lessons have these novel strands of literature brought to the analysis of adaptation? The first very basic point is that the broader system which holds up global growth-led development – multilateral institutions, international finance and trade institutions, non-governmental organisations, states, and so forth – is the very same calling for adaptation to the climate. The basic question of interests is thus salient: it is not in the interests of the global development architecture to interrogate the underpinnings of climate change any more than it is in their interest to explore the structural drivers of impoverishment. In thinking then about the drivers and impacts of climate change, and “adaptation” in relation to this, we argue here for an approach that pays heed to its rootedness in a broader capitalist set of relations. Environmental scientists heralded a new “Anthropocene” epoch towards the start of the twenty-first century, acknowledging that humans and societies are the most powerful global force in altering the climate (Crutzen  & Stoermer, 2000). Yet despite the undoubted

Introduction  7

strides that such an approach to climate-society relations represented in mainstream thinking, it still falls short of interrogating the specific social system which underpins climate change. As Malm (2015) argues, “Ours is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital.” The social relations underpinning environmental degradation and emissions in the past two centuries are specifically capitalist, driven by the need for exponentially rising profits, through the search for new spaces of accumulation, a push to cheapen raw materials, and through the drive to control and order nature in the production process (Weis, 2010; Moore, 2015). Returning then to the question of climate adaptation, we highlight here the overlapping crises of climate and labour, as a starting point to this volume. Ecosocialist thinkers have highlighted through an excavation of Marx’s thinking how climate change is produced through social relations of capitalist production (Burkett, 1999; Foster, 2000). We turn our attention in our second part to how its impacts are experienced, embodied, and reproduced unevenly among the world’s population, falling disproportionately onto those that cannot bear the greatest burdens. Grounded analysis of how the impacts of climate change are felt, how they are reshaped through wider processes of social and economic change, and how people make sense of such changes and in some cases alter their livelihoods in response, all complicate linear narratives of adaptation as a natural process. Indeed, as the authors in this part aim to demonstrate, to have “adapted” is often to have been dispossessed through long-standing, rather than novel, systems of inequality and exclusion. In exploring this theme, Chapter 5, by Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni, takes us to the Indian Himalayas. Drawing on the experience of Gaddi agro-pastoralists, the authors show how traditional sheep-herding practices have responded to significant seasonal and climatic volatility in recent years as storms, flash floods, landslips, and drought have intensified as a result of climate change. Yet despite the Himalayan region’s unusually high degree of impact from environmental change, Axelby and Bulgheroni show how this heightened environmental vulnerability must be set against the wider contexts of marketintegration and state-making processes. They situate contemporary environmental change within the broader historical context of colonial land settlement and resource extraction, the top-down technocratic interventions favoured by a developmental state, and the imbalanced economic relationships promoted as India has aligned itself to a neoliberal economic order. They therefore highlight how even in the most climatically vulnerable regions, historical and politicaleconomic factors play a key role in shaping the course of small-scale adaptation. Following on from this exposition of the political-economic and cultural factors that shape adaptation, Symon James-Wilson’s goal in Chapter 6 is to draw together and cohere this range of factors into a cogent theoretical framework. Approaching labour studies through the lens of feminist geography, this chapter draws on nexus thinking approaches to global climate change–induced migration in order to trouble the historically objectifying focus on “the vulnerable” (female labour migrants) and “the apocalyptic” (female climate migrants). As James-Wilson argues, this approach draws together a striking constellation

8  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

between participatory justice and integrative horizontal and vertical social movements at the nexus of gendered climate migration and gendered labour migration. It thus offers exciting considerations for how socio-ecological justice might be more critically practised within geography, labour studies, and environmental justice studies. In accordance with James-Wilson’s emphasis on the nexus of cultural, economic, and climatic vulnerabilities, our final chapter on adaptation seeks again to foreground a heuristic convergence within the landscape of ­adaptation. Focusing on Turkey’s seasonal agricultural workers, the chapter highlights the need to mobilise accounts of adaptation, moving beyond ­unilinear models towards a more dynamic conceptualisation of change within rigid constraints. As Ethemcan Turhan shows in Chapter 7, the life worlds of migrants working temporally and seasonally in agriculture are characterised by distinctive spatio-temporalities resulting from negotiated power relations between seasonal workers, landowners, and state authorities. The emergence of these climatically shaped relations in the everyday practices of work as particular “time-spaces of precarity” (Strauss, 2018, p. 625) – from food quality to occupational safety  – demonstrates the need to go beyond incremental spatial (Harvey, 1981) and spatio-temporal fixes (Jessop, 2006), towards a better understanding of the underlying interests and values that structure adaptation. Taken together, therefore, these three chapters confound simplified narratives of adaptation, highlighting interwoven adaptive processes within culturally embedded systems of capital accumulation. Each chapter reveals a different dimension to this complexity, yet their overarching message concerns the embeddedness of climate change adaptation within historically situated political economies of production. A focal reorientation is therefore called for away from the top-down technicalities of adaptation frameworks, and towards the “hands that adapt” themselves. Indeed, as we argue, typologies of mobility and economic development increasingly framed under the aegis of climate adaptation may be better understood through the lens of the everyday complexities through which workers navigate environmental transitions.

Climate resistance A key reason for compiling this collection is the relative invisibility of labour relations in relation not only to the analysis of climate change but also efforts to combat it. As we argue, it is not climate change in a direct sense but rather climate change understood to result from broader processes of capitalist growth which have concomitantly entrenched hundreds of millions of workers in insecure work. Elucidating these hidden relations, this collection draws together insights from labour studies and critical development which speak to the engendering of and resistance to precarious work and displacement among the working poor, with insights from climate adaptation literature which recasts the objects of climate change as agents in the (re)making of climate impacts.

Introduction  9

Complementing wider work on climate justice, the chapters in this volume therefore aim to frame climatic change and capitalist labour relations as mutually influential interlocutors in the construction of adaptation. In foregrounding labour in the analysis of climate impacts, our aim has been to reanimate the decisions made by workers in a changing climate and in doing so to return agency to their formulation. Not only does this mean examining the wider structures of power within and through which adaptation decisions are made but also the means by which those structures may be resisted. Thus, Part 3 of this book begins by thinking beyond the strictures of the “adaptation” discursive framing to the idea of climate resistance: a phenomenon viewed here not only through the lens of activism and protest but also in the everyday oppositions and refusals through which shifting labour relations are constituted in a changing climate. As such, we use the term “resistance” here loosely, given its rooting in a tradition of labour studies literature and the heterogeneity of contributors to this volume. We are inspired by Katz’s (2004, p. 242) reframing of “resistance”, which valorises both organised forms of resistance against structures of oppression, all the way to “restorative and strengthening acts” that may but do not necessarily provide the groundwork for deeper transformation. Drawing on this more holistic and encompassing view of resistance, we explore here how labourers enmeshed in differential relations of oppression and impacted by the climate in varied ways are making sense of their conditions and, in some cases, resisting them. The third part of this volume therefore aspires to pave the way for a new area of studies on climate resistance, with a focus on climate change as an issue of labour. With this goal in mind, the first chapter of this part, Chapter  8, departs from the adaptation lens employed in Part 2 to explore resistance in relation to climate change mitigation in the global North. Set in the context of contestations over the expansion of London’s Heathrow airport, Maya Goodfellow and Nithya Natarajan interrogate the decision by the UK Union UNITE to support the addition of a third runway. As they argue, UNITE’s decision highlights a disjuncture between climate activism and the labour movement rooted in a failure to consider members’ wider interests. Whilst the expansion may create jobs in the short term, the failure to engage meaningfully with a green agenda with far greater long-term benefits to labour exposes the tensions within the left’s engagement with and mobilisation around climate change. A true redgreen agenda, they conclude, will require an integrated outlook from both sides, in order to achieve concordant rather than contested resistance to the pressures on labour under climate change. Transposing its analysis of environmental conflict from London to the Canadian arctic, Chapter 9 thereafter explores the conflict of interests faced by Indigenous communities subject to both the ratcheting vulnerabilities of climate change and growing pressure to participate in the extraction of resources within their territories. As Kimberleigh Schultz outlines, this is a choice shaped by historical struggles: Indigenous communities in Canada have a long history of resisting large-scale oil, gas, and mining development that risks the ecological degradation of their lands and territories. Yet with climate change hitting traditional livelihoods hard

10  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons

and resource development expanding across the north, Indigenous communities face increasing pressure to participate to stimulate economic development and create employment opportunities in and for their communities. Their choice is therefore to resist and persist in the pursuit of rapidly degrading livelihoods, or break with their habitual opposition by participating in the potentially lucrative destruction of their local environment. Tying together themes that have emerged in the part on resistance and the book more broadly, the final empirical chapter, Chapter  10, makes a case for viewing labour activism as climate activism by proxy. Reconceptualising resistance to climate change as a form of agency embedded within capitalist labour relations, Sabina Lawreniuk eschews the well-publicised movements upon which the international media spotlight has fallen in recent years, most notably Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future movement and Extinction Rebellion (XR), in favour of a lens sited firmly within the global workplace. Drawing on evidence from Cambodia, the chapter argues that the “startlingly quiet” figure cut by global Southern workers in the struggle against climate change does not denote their absence from the fight. Rather, the climate agency of subaltern groups in the global South, whose homes, livelihoods, and ways of life are being already eroded and undermined by climate breakdown, is being systemically overlooked in contemporary media and academic discourse. Lawreniuk follows Goodman (2017) in arguing that “the question of climate change and social movement participation is centrally important” to addressing climate breakdown. She therefore advocates a reframing of resistance to climate change away from high-profile demonstrations and into the fields and factories of the global South, where translocal labour relations render climate struggles and labour struggles contiguous and mutually reinforcing. Across these nine empirical chapters, then, a picture emerges of climate change as a phenomenon rooted across and between the traditional binaries of rural and urban, North and South, adaptation and mitigation. By adopting, in each case, an innovation in the framing of climate change, the categories according to which we understand it are variously contested and overturned by the lived experiences of worker experiences and struggles in a changing climate. In their place, this book offers up the frame of capital through which to understand the climate’s impact, highlighting how its inequalities, inconsistencies, and geographies act as conduits through which environmental vulnerabilities are channelled and intensified. Viewed thus, the climate ultimately mirrors the inequities of the global political economy, placing the worst-off in the position of greatest precarity. Yet the corollary offers hope. Understanding the intersection of climate change and labour means understanding also how widespread and wide-ranging are the challenges to climate change: from factories, fields, and families, and almost always from below.

References Bahadur, A.,  & Tanner, T. (2014). Transformational resilience thinking: Putting people, power and politics at the heart of urban climate resilience. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 200–214.

Introduction  11 Bernstein, H. (1996). Agrarian questions then and now. Journal of Peasant Studies, 24(1–2), 22–59. Bernstein, H. (2001). “The peasantry” in global capitalism: Who, where and why? Socialist Register, 37. Bernstein, H. (2006). Once were/still are peasants? Farming in a globalising “South”. New Political Economy, 11(3), 399–406. Breman, J., & van der Linden, M. (2014). Informalizing the economy: The return of the social question at a global level. Development and Change, 45(5), 920–940. Burkett, P. (1999). Nature’s “free gifts” and the ecological significance of value. Capital & Class, 23(2), 89–110. Crutzen, P. J.,  & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The “anthropocene”. Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17. Foster, J. B. (2000). Marx’s ecology: Materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. Goodman, J. (2017). Social movement participation and climate change. In Oxford research encyclopedia of climate science. Retrieved April  23, 2020, from https://oxfordre.com/ climatescience/. Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix – Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode, 13(3), 1–12. Hickey, S., & Bracking, S. (2005). Exploring the politics of chronic poverty: From representation to a politics of justice? Exploring the Politics of Poverty Reduction: How Are the Poorest Represented? 33(6), 851–865. IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. (2014). Climate change 2014: Synthesis report. Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Geneva: Author. IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. (2018). Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelly, P. M., & Adger, W. N. (2000). Theory and practice in assessing vulnerability to climate change and facilitating adaptation. Climatic Change, 47, 325–352. Kunz, R. (2011). The political economy of global remittances: Gender, governmentality and neoliberalism. Abingdon: Routledge. Li, T. M. (2009). To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41(S1), 66–93. Malm, A. (2015). The anthropocene myth. Jacobin Magazine. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life. London: Verso. Morton, J. F. (2007). The impact of climate change on smallholder and subsistence agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19680–19685. Munck, R. (2013). The precariat: A  view from the South. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 747–762. Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., & Parsons, L. (2019). Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural–urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a “climate precarity” approach. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. doi:10.1177/2514848619858155 Pettit, J. (2004). Climate justice: A new social movement for atmospheric rights. IDS Bulletin, 35(3), 102–106. Robinson, M., & Shine, T. (2018). Achieving a climate justice pathway to 1.5°C. Nature Climate Change, 8(7), 564–569. Taylor, M. (2015). The political ecology of climate change adaptation. Abingdon: Routledge.

12  Nithya Natarajan and Laurie Parsons UNDP. (2020). UNDP climate change adaptation. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Watts, J. (2020, March 24). Deal is deadly: What Covid-19 tells us about tackling the climate crisis. The Guardian. Weis, T. (2010). The accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(3), 315–341. World Bank. (2020). GDP (current US$). Washington, DC: World Bank. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

Part 1

Labour

2 Thermal inequality in a changing climate Heat, mobility, and precarity in the Cambodian brick sector Laurie Parsons Introduction Climate change and temperature have a closely intertwined but rocky history. First introduced by Wally Broecker (1975) with the question “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?”, the intervening years have seen the relationship increasingly politicised by climate change sceptics and opponents of low-carbon policy. A popular account amongst denialist groups, for example, holds the term “global warming” to have been retired in favour of “climate change” due to the equivocal evidence of warming around the world. As Donald Trump, a vocal advocate of this viewpoint, put it in 2014: “They only changed the term to CLIMATE CHANGE when the words GLOBAL WARMING didn’t work anymore. Come on people, get smart!” (Trump, tweet, 2014). Yet even beyond these hardcore sceptics, the apparent gentleness of the terminology has been accused of fuelling indifference to the impacts of climate change. The terms “climate breakdown” and “climate crisis” favoured by a growing number of media organisations, from Noticias Telemundo in the United States to The Guardian newspaper in the UK since 2019 (The Grist, 2019), in an effort to raise public awareness of the seriousness of the global threat. By contrast “Global warming” and even the stronger “global heating” have declined in their centrality to discourse. Alongside the complexities of measuring its impacts, such narrative contestations have often seen the issue of heat take an analytical backseat to its secondary effects. In particular, “most climate change impact research in tropical non-OECD countries has concentrated on the effects of extreme weather events such as floods and typhoons, particularly on rural communities, rather than increases in heat” (Zander, Cadag, Escarcha, & Garnett, 2018, p. 7). More broadly, studies exploring the impact of climate change on human vulnerability have tended to focus on rising sea levels, floods, and droughts, the effects of which can be more easily expressed in modelling. The impacts of heat, by contrast, have been seen as a largely “subjective” condition (Kunz-Plapp, Hackenbruch, & Schipper, 2016, p. 977) and thus prioritised predominantly

16  Laurie Parsons

in certain sectors of analysis, most notably studies of climate change in urban environments. Nevertheless, recent work undertaken in the three key areas of migration, health, and decent work reflects a revival of interest in the wider impacts of heat. Though discrete in their approaches, these studies bring a shared perspective, recognising undergirdingly that heat impacts are experienced through the lens of work and livelihoods, the structure of which determines the direct and indirect impacts of changing temperatures. From air conditioning at one extreme to the ability to take breaks from outdoor work on the other, the impact of global heating is not a direct function of the environment but one articulated by circumstances. Moreover, as is increasingly recognised, these circumstances are stratified rather than incidental. Global media have begun to refer to heat as “the next big inequality issue” (The Guardian, 2018), whilst local investigations of heat impacts in some of the world’s worst hit regions assert that “in the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change” (The Independent, 2019). Despite this nascent recognition, however, conceptualisation of heat inequality remains in its infancy, characterised by a discrete sectoral focus which often serves to obscure linkages between different dimensions of heat impacts. Presenting a “thermal inequality” framework in an effort to bring the insights of current work into a coherent rubric, this chapter aims to demonstrate the importance of these linkages, highlighting first the interconnectedness and mobility of heat stress across rural-urban divides and second the translocal embodiment of these impacts. Building on Tilly’s (1998) conception of “durable” inequalities, capable of surviving transition between spaces and contexts, this chapter will therefore demonstrate, overarchingly, how physically embodied thermal inequalities are transported between places by social and economic linkages which cross-cut local environmental conditions. Simply put, those who experience heat stress in one place are more likely to experience it in another. Exploring these issues, this chapter draws on work from a wider study of the Cambodian brick and construction industries, entitled Blood Bricks, undertaken between 2017 and 2019. Set within a country identified as the second worst impacted by heat stress in the Asia-Pacific region (ILO, 2019), a ­situation significantly exacerbated by climate change (ibid.), this study examined the impact of climate change on entry to – and experiences within – the ­Cambodian brick industry. In doing so, it brings together a quantitative socio-economic and environmental perception survey of 308 households located in three of the brick industry’s rural sender villages, and over 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with brick workers and their families. What follows will draw on these data to outline the concept of thermal inequality in four sections. First, it will set out the literature on heat in relation to health, migration, and decent work. Second, it will present data from the Blood Bricks study to highlight the role of heat in shaping as well as driving migration to the modern sector. Third, it will demonstrate the durable embodiment of

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  17

heat impacts. Finally, it will demonstrate the translocal nature of these impacts, highlighting how remittances (and their absence) transmit the impacts of thermal inequality back to rural areas from the modern sector.

Conceptualising thermal inequality In considering the human impact of climate change, the effect of temperatures in and of themselves has tended to be downplayed in the literature. Research has focused instead on the indirect effects of the planet’s warming climate, emphasising the floods, droughts, hurricanes, and pestilence that will accompany the new climatic norms (Zander et  al., 2018), leaving the impacts of heat specifically “challenging and underexplored” (Li, Ren, Kinney, Joyner, & Zhang, 2018, p. 171). Nevertheless, recent years have seen growing attention on the direct impact of heating on human well-being, manifesting, most notably, in three areas of research. First, recognition is growing of the impact of both chronically and acutely high temperatures on the human body. This body of work (Li et  al., 2018; Mora et al., 2017; Kjellstrom et al., 2016) has emphasised that “an increasing threat to human life from excess heat now seems almost inevitable, but will be greatly aggravated if greenhouse gases are not considerably reduced” (Mora et  al., 2017, p.  501). As this research emphasises, these impacts take a wide variety of forms: not only heat death but impaired health, well-being, and productivity. Nevertheless, “heat exhaustion and reduced human performance are often overlooked in climate change health impact analysis” (Kjellstrom et al., 2016, p. 97), as the subtle but widespread impact of heat stress makes it difficult to assess with confidence. Analysis thus far has been “piecemeal” (Kjellstrom et  al., 2016, p.  97), leaving considerable knowledge gaps as to the nexus of health and heat. The second growing strand of heat research relates to the impact of climate change on human migration. Moving away from a long-held focus on rainfall (Kniveton, Smith, & Black, 2012; Van der Geest, 2010; Barrios, Bertinelli, & Strobl, 2006; Henry, Boyle, & Lambin, 2003; Smith, 2001) and sea-level rises (McGranahan, Balk,  & Anderson, 2007; IPCC, 2007; Anthoff, Nicholls, Tol,  & Vafeidis, 2006) in calculating future migration figures, this focus on heat constitutes a relatively novel area of study, yet it has proved a successful addition to modelling. Several studies have found strong results in relation to rural-urban migration, primarily as a result of changes in agricultural output. Baez, Caruso, Mueller, and Niu (2017, p. 446), for example, find that “exposure to temperature extremes may render greater consequences on the mobility of individuals than natural disasters”, whilst Saeed, Salik, and Ishfaq (2015, p. 17), similarly, argue that “extreme high temperatures in the winter season are strongly correlated with migration, as compared to other variables”. Building on these perspectives, Zander, Richerzhagen, and Garnett (2019; Zander et al., 2018), similarly, demonstrate the impact of heat on mobility intentions holds also in relation to urban populations, rendering heat stress a potential

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“major driver” of urban-urban or urban-rural migration flows (Zander et al., 2019, p. 26). A third strand of heat literature – perhaps that which has gained most traction beyond academia thus far (e.g. The Independent, 2019; The Guardian, 2018) – pertains to the impact of heat on decent work and inequality (ILO, 2019). Related to scholarship exploring “thermal inequity” (Mitchell & Chakraborty, 2018, p. 330) via the spatial (in)justice of heat exposure (Mitchell & Chakraborty, 2018; Anguelovski, Roberts, Carmin, & Agyeman, 2011), this strand of work has adopted a more industrial approach than elsewhere, emphasising the impact on sectoral and overall economic growth in the global South. As outlined in a detailed global report by the ILO (2019), the phenomenon of heat stress presents a significant economic as well as physiological issue, with 2% of total working hours to be lost each year by 2030, either because it is too hot to work at all or because work must continue at a slower pace (ILO, 2019). Moreover, key to the impacts of heat is the uneven nature of their manifestation. As the report explains, “the countries that are most affected by heat stress have higher rates of working poverty, informal employment and subsistence agriculture” (ILO, 2019, p. 13), leading to far greater impacts of heat stress in the global South. From this standpoint, this chapter aims to contribute a thermal lens to the growing literature on worker health and safety in the global South (Prentice, De Neve, Mezzadri, & Ruwanpura, 2018), linking this agenda to the wider structural dimensions of thermal inequality. Indeed, crucial to conceptualising thermal inequality amongst the “routine labour practices that turn production sites into unhealthy, risky, and even lethal zones for workers” (Prentice et al., 2018, p. 157) is a recognition of its crosscutting, intersectional, and inter-sectoral manifestation. Those who are relatively socially disadvantaged are likely to find themselves “disproportionately affected by temperature extremes” (Hansen et  al., 2013, p.  2), with ethnic and political disadvantages key focal points of negative heat impacts. This rapidly changing climate is seeing us increasingly “divided into the hot haves and the cool have nots” (The Guardian, 2018, p.  1), as The Guardian newspaper reported in a global feature on the phenomenon. Spatial differences in the distribution of heat stress shape exposure along ethnic and socio-economic lines so that “in the US, for example, immigrant workers are three times more likely to die from heat exposure than American citizens” (The Guardian, 2018, p. 2). Moreover, as it becomes increasingly clear that “the world of work is intimately connected with the natural environment” (ILO, 2019, p. 16), interest has grown in the relevance of a precarity frame, through which to observe such intersections. Not only does climate change exacerbate precariousness, “disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk” (Newman & Humphrys, 2019, p. 1), but it does so in highly structured ways, reflective of working living and working conditions. Thus, “while climate heat increases the risk for all labour exposed to heat stress, this risk is differentiated among workers” (Newman & Humphrys, 2019, p. 1). Belying the large scale at which global temperature changes manifest, their human experience is therefore

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  19

complex, unequal, and structured by human systems. An employee’s working arrangements, in particular their relative security or precarity, shape both a worker’s direct experience of heat stress and their ability to manage or mitigate it. Those in more formal employment are far more likely to work in an environment designed to mitigate the impacts of heat and more likely to be able to take personal measures to achieve the same effect (Newman & Humphrys, 2019; ILO, 2019). In this respect, sectoral considerations are clearly of importance. ILO (2019) identifies agriculture and construction as hardest hit by heat stress due to both the outdoor nature of the work and the informal nature of the workforce. Nevertheless, a rigidly sectoral lens is insufficiently mobile to capture the extent of the inequality through which such conditions manifest. As outlined in the climate migration literature here (Saeed et al., 2015; Baez et al., 2017), excess heat is a key driver of sectoral mobility, most often away from agriculture and into low-paid and precarious work, which is itself more vulnerable to heat stress (ILO, 2019). Vulnerability to heat stress in such cases manifests as an embodied phenomenon, transported by socially disadvantaged individuals from one context to another. Drawing on the three areas of the literature on heat discussed earlier – mobility, health, and precarity – this chapter will outline and evidence the concept of thermal inequality in order to highlight the personcentred and socio-economically structured nature of climate change–induced heat stress in the world of work.

Cambodia, climate change, and mobility Regularly identified as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries (Eckstein, Künzel, Schäfer,  & Winges, 2020), Cambodia has in recent years experienced a wide range of environmental impacts. Rocked by some of the most severe floods in its history at the start of the millennium, the last five years have been characterised by repeated, severe droughts (EM-DAT, 2020). Due in part to upstream dam activity (Eyler & Weatherby, 2020) which has severely affected the flow of the lower Mekong River, an unusually frequent El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) since 2016 has engendered rising heat and low rainfall across Cambodia. This combination of water shortages and high land temperatures has been shown to drive down agricultural productivity (NGO Forum Cambodia, 2012), transposing global temperature rises into the everyday livelihoods of the nation. Reflecting its status as the second most economically vulnerable country to heat stress in the Asia-Pacific region (ILO, 2019), perception amongst survey respondents of rising temperatures is the most common climate change indicator, being reported by some 84.1% of respondents (Brickell, Parsons, Natarajan,  & Chann, 2018), compared with far lower percentages of those reporting drought or rainfall, for example (Table 2.1). Moreover, as outlined in an extension of this work (Parsons & Chann, 2019), perception of temperature change correlates significantly with the likelihood of migration. Specifically,

20  Laurie Parsons Table 2.1  Percentage perceiving climate change impacts (N = 308) Climate Change Indicator

Heat

Rainfall

Wind

Floods

Percentage perceiving indicator [%]

84.1

74

19.8

2.9

those who report having experienced changes in temperature were almost 50% more likely to have migrants in their household as compared to those who do not. As asserted elsewhere in the literature linking climate change and migration (Deressa, Hassan, & Ringler, 2011), this relationship appears to be largely expressed through the lens of livelihoods. Those who undertake farming experience changes in the climate differently to those who depend to a greater extent upon fisheries, for example (see also Parsons  & Nielsen, 2020), with crop failure being a key trigger for migration decisions. In many cases, therefore, “migratory decisions may be taken to escape from losses in rural incomes, which are variably intensified by climatic stress” (Saeed et  al., 2015, p.  10). Nevertheless, this is not a process that occurs en masse but through the lens of socio-economic inequalities. Who migrates and to where are issues determined in large part by agricultural assets and rural precarity. Those most exposed to environmental change are also those least able to adapt it, leading to a higher rate of migration into precarious migrant labour. Despite the dominance of the country’s garment sector, the landscape of migration in Cambodia is a varied one, associated with a wide range of conditions, levels of formality, and income. A falling but still considerable 27% of the population work in agriculture, whilst the proportions of those working in services (46%) and industry (27%) rise year on year (World Bank, 2016). The landscape of labour is both highly informal, with over 93% of the population informally employed (ILO, 2018), and mobile: almost one-third of the population is currently resident elsewhere from where they were born (UNESCO, 2018), a figure rising to two-thirds in the economically dominant garment industry (Care Australia, 2017). Nevertheless, of the various forms of precarious labour into which rural Cambodians might enter, amongst the least desirable is brick work. The vast majority of Cambodia’s roughly 10,000 brick workers are debt-bonded ­labourers (Brickell et al., 2018; LICADHO, 2017), indentured to the owners of the country’s almost 500 brick kilns (Parsons & Long, 2020). Unlike other industries, the brick industry attracts those who have built up unmanageable debts in farming or rural agribusiness by offering interest-free debt bonds, to be paid off through piece-rate brick work. Yet the low wages, difficult conditions, and seasonal stoppages in the brick industry make debts difficult to repay, often resulting in their rising rather than falling over time. Thus, though only rarely possessing formal working contracts, brick workers spend years or even decades

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  21

in the industry on average, often working alongside underage family members (Brickell et al., 2018). The conditions they experience whilst working there are characterised by low pay and heavy work, with exhaustion and undernutrition endemic in the industry (Brickell et al., 2018; Licadho, 2017). Yet punctuating the undergirding milieu of ill health are a range of chronic and acute forms of heat stress. From transporting bricks under the midday sun to hours spent stoking kilns which can reach up to 1,100 degrees Celsius (GKSPL, 2020), brick work is, even under ordinary circumstances, “already at the upper limits of what humans can tolerate before risking serious impairment” (LundgrenKownacki et al., 2018, p. 347). During heat waves, or periods of intensive production, when the normal cooling periods are shortened, many workers are exposed to dangerous levels of heat. Even for those who escape serious injury or ailments, severe dehydration and kidney problems are the norm, yet certain operations may bring still more instantly lethal forms of heat. As one worker explained, “every time we open the stopper [to bring the bricks out] it is very hot. It can make the people [working there] die” (Factory Foreman, 08/11/2017). Well aware of these conditions, the brick industry is usually a last resort for Cambodia’s rural villagers, yet it is one into which a growing population is being pushed by a combination of environmental and economic precarities. As rural Cambodians explain, “each year the temperature is getting hotter” (Lida, former brick worker, 28/02/2019), shaping an environment which is “hotter, [characterised by] irregular rain and unpredictable” (Acharya, a local monk in a brick worker sender village, 24/11/2017). The consequences for a country heavily dependent on rain-fed smallholder agriculture are severe, yet they are also uneven in manifestation. Whilst some are able to supersede these circumstances, others with fewer assets are often unable to do so in the same manner. As a further brick worker elaborated: People who left to work for the [brick] factories were very poor and couldn’t continue growing rice due to irregular rain. So that is why they had to go out and find work to earn a living and to pay back their debts. Vimean, 22/02/2018 This environmental and economic “climate precarity” (Natarajan, Brickell, & Parsons, 2019, p. 899) is specifically crucial to understanding migration to the brick kilns. Whereas migration to other sectors may be engendered by environmental pressures as a means to supplement shortfalls or facilitate investment in agriculture, migration to the brick sector is a response to agricultural collapse. As brick workers themselves explain therefore, entry to the brick sector is a choice forced upon them: “people prefer to work at garment factories because working at Brick Kilns is hot and very hard work . . . [whereas] . . . for people that have more income they do not come to work [here]” (brick worker, 30/10/2017).

22  Laurie Parsons

Brick workers, therefore, are those hit hardest by Cambodia’s rising temperatures: those unable to mitigate their exposure or adapt to their hotter environment due to a lack of assets, income, and networks. Yet this is no environmental accident. Rather, the production of their thermal affliction occurs within economic conditions at multiple scales. As brick kiln workers explained of their fellows in the kilns, “most of them failed in doing rice farming, because there hadn’t been enough water” (Chanrith, brick worker, 14/11/2017), but such ecological accounts are invariably presented also as structured by geographical and economic processes. Those with sufficient assets can adapt and endure, whilst “for those who are poor, it’s a dead end for them” (Vattanak, sender village chief, 17/11/2017). Within the broader violence of climate change, therefore, the thermal impacts of climate change are experienced through the lens of geopolitically engendered precarity: those exploited by thermal exposure in one context are more likely to be exploited by exposure once again.

The durable embodiment of heat impacts In a changing climate, migration decisions and outcomes are strongly structured by socio-economic conditions (McLeman, Schade,  & Faist, 2016). Migrants choose neither their destination nor their occupation freely but within circumstances dictated by their sender-side conditions and linkages within and outside the village (Parsons, 2016; Bylander, 2015). In Cambodia, as elsewhere, those villagers most vulnerable to heat stress in rural areas are therefore far more likely to experience heat stress in their migrant occupations, lacking as they do the capital and information to gain access to more comfortable and better paid employment (Lawreniuk & Parsons, 2020; Faist, 2016). As such, the impact of thermal disadvantage on the sender side is complex and “durable” (Tilly, 1998), linking migrant outcomes closely to sender-side conditions in a manner which transports the physical and structural impacts of heat stress from one site to another. Consequently, those best placed to avoid the rigours of heat stress in rural areas – the owners of machinery or those able to hire wage labour, for example – are also those likely to enjoy the coolest and most comfortable circumstances in migrant destinations. By contrast, arrival in the brick kilns brings merely an extension and further embodiment of a family’s struggles with heat. By seeking out workers with high levels of rural debt, brick kiln owners actively entice those who have lost assets and accrued debts to the climatic rigours of heat, knowing that their ability to refuse the worst forms of labour is minimal. Consequently, the abandonment of one heat-stressed livelihood leads indirectly to another, as brick workers are left with no choice but to endure the sweltering conditions of brick work, often exceeding 50˚C or more in the vicinity of the kiln itself. At busy times, the drive to minimise the cycle of production sees workers encouraged into the kilns before they are properly cool, forcing them to undertake

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  23

strenuous activity in temperatures so high that fainting is a common risk. As one worker recounted: The fire made the kiln red hot inside. When we were working there for one or two hours the heat from the kiln strongly affected our bodies. As I recall, I fainted once during my work at a boat kiln [lor touk]1. It was too hot as a result of burning bricks with more expensive firewood at the time. Sina, former brick worker, 09/11/2017 Even beyond the immediate impact of this work, the long-term effect on the body is significant. Many workers report a higher incidence of illness after beginning work in the kiln, as well as idiosyncratic health problems associated with brick dust and other contaminants related to burning material in the kilns. Brick workers are affected by illnesses “such as fever, [as] they are affected by the heat of the kiln, especially during removing hot burning charcoal and bricks from the kiln” (Sothi, brick worker, 01/11/2017). Moreover, as a former worker explained: It harmed my health almost to the point of death; I had blood pouring [from me] because the place was extremely hot. Later, I went to check on my health at the state hospital. . . [where] most workers had health problems like me. They had a problem with their lungs: most of them looked thinner and thinner, [but whilst] some workers were allowed to go home, other workers died and the owner had only helped the family by providing a coffin. Brick working family, Krang Chen, 19/02/2018 Moreover, this is a differentiation which persists not only between brick kilns and other industries but within brick kilns themselves. As workers explained, those with the highest levels of debt are often those allowed least leeway to control their own working conditions, leave the brick kilns, and even seek medical treatment, thereby generating knock-on effects on working capacity and health. The level of a worker’s debt – a function primarily of the extent of the crisis that forced them into the kiln in the first place – therefore plays a key role in shaping the conditions they face there. As one former worker elaborated: Those who owed more, the owner did not allow to visit home. In Khmer New Year or Phcum Ben [the annual festival of the dead], if we had no money, we could not visit our homeland, and the owner would not give us a loan either. When women gave birth, they lacked money, and the owner did not support them either. [By contrast], those that owed less, when they got sick, the owner gave them loans [for these purposes]. Brick worker family focus group, Krang Chen 20/02/2018

24  Laurie Parsons

As such, the cases here support the contention by Zander et  al. (2018, p. 19) that rural out-migrants “escaping the indirect effects of heat on crops and livestock by moving to the cities . . . may be putting themselves into conditions that are hotter and more stressful” (Zander et al., 2018). However, they help also to develop this argument, highlighting, in accordance with Newman and Humphrys (2019), the intersection of heat stress with workplace precarity. As a highly indebted, physically vulnerable, informal workforce, Cambodia’s brick workers’ “hyper-precarity” (Lewis, Dwyer, Hodkinson, & Waite, 2015), derived from sender areas but entrenched in destinations, both reflects and shapes their vulnerability to heat in subtly differentiated ways. Building on Tilly’s (1998, p.  7) exposition of the social mechanisms that “lock categorical inequality in place”, therefore, the case of Cambodia’s brick kilns extends the concept of heat inequality a degree further back than that of previous work. Not only do an employee’s working conditions – “their relative security or precarity and the level of labour organisation in their workplace” (Newman & Humphrys, 2019, p. 9) – structure their experience of heat but, in the case of migrant labour, that workplace precarity is itself structured by the potential for exploitation engendered by historical household heat stress. Simply put, migrant workers’ sender-side experiences of heat stress render them more vulnerable to ongoing precarity and exploitation in their destination workplace. Given the close relationship between low pay, precarity, and heat stress in the global South (ILO, 2019), the result is that those badly affected by heat once are, wherever they find themselves working, more likely to be affected again.

Translocal thermal inequality As the aforementioned testimonies demonstrate, the exposure of migrants to heat stress is structured by sender-side conditions. Moreover, as the case of the brick kilns demonstrates, the health impacts of enduring these conditions in some cases engenders a vicious cycle, leading to rising debts and diminishing control over working conditions. Those who experience the worst effects of excess heat in rural areas are also the most likely to suffer it in their destination, as the precarity of their occupation enforces acquiescence to conditions that might be intolerable to their better-off counterparts. As heat stress degrades the body, therefore, precarity increases, leading to reduced agency in the workplace and a diminished ability to take countermeasures against it. This is thus very much an embodied form of heat stress, whereby a physical inability to tolerate excess heat leads ultimately to higher levels in the future. However, though shaped by and reactive to the body, the impact of heat stress is not contained by it. Rather, as with the social structures that shape the experience of heat in rural areas, familial connections and interdependencies play a key role in transmitting the effects of heat stress beyond individuals and to those

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  25

who depend on them, leading brick working families to remain in the kilns for several generations in some cases: Let me tell you, my daughter went to work in a brick factory and got married with a child. Now my daughter is already old and she came back home to look after house and cow. Her daughter, also married and pregnant, took her place to work in the brick factory. Grandmother of brick worker, Toap Siem, 24/11/2017 Exposures to the rigours of temperature, viewed thus, are neither local nor static in their manifestation but emerge from a complex milieu of intersecting, multi-scalar factors across space and time. A  vicious cycle of ill health and indebtedness leaves workers perpetually “one illness away” (Krishna, 2011) from a worsening of conditions, as physical debilitation deepens workers’ debt, forcing them to endure higher and longer periods of harmful heat in the workplace. As debts rise to treat the symptoms of this exposure, control falls further still, leading workers into an accelerating cycle of ill health with implications for the next as well as the present generation. The durable embodiment of heat stress therefore does not end with the body itself. Rather, social and familial networks transport and duplicate the impacts of heat stress, rendering entry to the brick industry a difficult fate to escape both within and between generations. Furthermore, crucial to understanding the tendentious nature of heat inequality is its ability to extend outwards across space, drawing others into the experience of its impacts. Indeed, as shown in Figure 2.1, even beyond the kiln itself, the structures of assistance and obligation that play such a significant role in determining entry to the brick industry play a key role also in creating feedbacks to rural areas, via the mechanism of remittances from brick kiln workers to rural areas. As the data here demonstrate, brick workers remit the lowest average amount to their natal households of any migrant occupation, a figure with a crucial impact on rural inequality. Far more than an additional strand of income, remittances have become a key determinant of rural livelihoods, providing as they do the vital capital necessary to undertake agriculture in an increasingly monetised context. From investment in irrigation, to fertiliser, to machinery hire, remittances have become an increasingly important dimension of the rural economy in Cambodia in recent years, providing crucial funds for agriculture and becoming increasingly intertwined with credit access (Licadho, 2017; Parsons, 2016; Bylander, 2015). Without remittances, farming must be done against credit, worsening the consequences of a failed harvest and thus the precarity of rural livelihoods. As one brick worker explained: We do farming, for which we need capital to buy the fertilizer. If we do not have money, we have to borrow from them [microfinance lenders] and I sold my land to pay off my debts to them. . . . It was very difficult to grow rice in dry season because we didn’t have enough water. It was also

26  Laurie Parsons

successful, but for this we needed to use a lot of capital, so we borrowed the money to buy oils, fertilizer, and it was difficult to pay this back. Sangha, brick worker, 02/11/2017

Figure 2.1  Urban-rural remittances by occupation (N = 308) Source: Brickell et al. (2018).

The lack of this strand of remitted income for brick workers’ families is not merely incidental but fundamental to the practice of agriculture itself, leaving those who lack it exposed to an unsustainable cycle of environmental and economic risk. Remittances have therefore become a key mechanism by which an increasingly capricious natural environment is navigated by rural Cambodians, and their absence is a critical disadvantage for those who lack them. Thus, just as brick workers suffered “problems to their health because they worked in the hot sunlight” (Leakhina, brick worker, 18/01/2019), their consequent inability to remit money to their families effectively transmits heat stress onwards to their villages of origin. Unlike those whose migrant family members work in less physically demanding and better paid environments, rural villagers who lack the remitted funds to invest capital hired-in labour or labour-saving devices must attempt to undertake the long hours of traditional farming of their own accord, thereby linking

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  27

the physical impacts of heat stress in the two sectors most acutely vulnerable to it. For those who rely only on traditional methods, the impacts of heat stress are severe, with physiological studies of Cambodian agricultural labourers in brick worker sender areas finding headaches reported in over 60%, dizziness in over 40%, and vomiting in almost 20% of those working outside for long periods (Radir, Hashim, Phan, Sao, & Hashim, 2017). From this networked, geographically interconnected, standpoint, exposure to heat stress in one environment is not a discrete or spatially bounded occurrence but signifies an embodied vulnerability to heat which manifests across webs of mutual assistance and obligation. By transporting the impacts of excess heat between people and places, thermal inequality therefore shapes the impact and manifestation of heat stress in the workplace, and the capacity to evade or mitigate it in multiple, linked locales. Heat stress therefore manifests through and across translocal networks, cross-cutting the traditional rural-urban divides segregating the impacts of climate change. Thus, in highlighting the close and durable linkages between heat and wealth in the global South, the thermal inequality frame outlined herein demonstrates the need to interpret the impacts of climate change through the lens of the global workplace.

Conclusion Despite their deep intertwinement, climate change and heat are a complex pairing. Climate change can engender both too much heat and too little, whilst changes in temperature may often appear to be a less important dimension of environmental breakdown than the floods and droughts with which they are associated. In addition, a wide range of socio-economic factors – from working conditions, to public parks, to air conditioning – shape the experience of heat, rendering the link between global temperature changes and the local impacts of climate change complex, disaggregated, and occasionally obtuse. Nevertheless, long underplayed in both the communication and the measurement of climate change impacts, heat is back on the agenda on a number of fronts. Excess heat is increasingly viewed as a significant threat to health and decent work, as well as a determinant and driver of migration. Exposure to high temperatures can kill indiscriminately. Yet it is consistently “the lowest-income groups, in particular agricultural workers, smallscale and subsistence farmers, and casual workers in urban areas in tropical and subtropical developing countries are worst affected” (ILO, 2018, p. 20). Such exposures, it is increasingly recognised, are not merely incidental but the result of durable inequalities which articulate the experience of the environment. As demonstrated in the case of the Cambodian brick industry, those worst impacted by rising temperatures in one setting are also the least likely to escape them in another. Those smallholder farmers whose precarity leaves them with the least capacity to adapt to the rising temperatures around them are also those faced with the fewest, and worst, alternatives. For brick workers, the

28  Laurie Parsons

abandonment of farmlands brings only greater heat exposure to the furnaces of the brick kilns. Moreover, as this chapter has aimed to demonstrate, the impacts of heat are at once physically embodied, heritable, and transferrable: its physical impacts on the body leading to rising exposure both personally and for those with whom a person is associated. By centring its analysis within a key part of the construction industry, this chapter has also sought to underscore a final point: that thermal inequality as explored here is no recent aberration of the changing climate but a structural feature of an economy in which exposure to excess heat, as with the rigours of the elements more generally, is stratified by wealth. In a quite literal sense, therefore, “heat inequality has been found to feed the urban furnaces” (The Guardian, 2018, p. 6), not only by holding the depleted bodies that tend them in place but also by providing new fodder from amongst the most precarious of farmers.

Note 1 Boat kilns [lor touk] are the most common form of brick kiln in Cambodia. Each kiln is around 30 m long and semi-cylindrical, in a manner similar to an upturned longboat.

References Anguelovski, I., Roberts, D., Carmin, J., & Agyeman, J. (2011). Spatial justice and climate change: Multiscale impacts and local development in Durban, South Africa. In J. Carmin & J. Agyeman (Eds.), Environmental inequalities beyond borders: Local perspectives on global injustices (pp. 19–43). London: Routledge. Anthoff, D., Nicholls, R. J., Tol, R. S., & Vafeidis, A. T. (2006). Global and regional exposure to large rises in sea-level: A sensitivity analysis. Tyndall centre for climate change researchWorking Paper, 96. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from http://semanticscholar.org Baez, J., Caruso, G., Mueller, V., & Niu, C. (2017). Heat exposure and youth migration in Central America and the Caribbean. American Economic Review, 107(5), 446–450. Barrios, S., Bertinelli, L., & Strobl, E. (2006). Climatic change and rural-urban migration: The case of sub-Saharan Africa. CORE Discussion Paper No. 2006/46. Retrieved April  24, 2020, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=925652 Brickell, K., Parsons, L., Natarajan, N., & Chann, S. (2018). Blood bricks: Untold stories of modern slavery and climate change from Cambodia. London: Royal Holloway University of London. Broecker, W. S. (1975). Climatic change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming? Science, 189(4201), 460–463. Bylander, M. (2015). Depending on the sky: Environmental distress, migration, and coping in rural Cambodia. International Migration, 53(5), 135–147. Care Australia. (2017). “I know I cannot quit”: The prevalence and productivity cost of sexual harassment to the Cambodian garment industry. Canberra: Author. Castree, N. (2010). Crisis, continuity and change: Neoliberalism, the left and the future of capitalism. Antipode, 41, 185–213. Deressa, T. T., Hassan, R. M., & Ringler, C. (2011). Perception of and adaptation to climate change by farmers in the Nile basin of Ethiopia. The Journal of Agricultural Science, 149(1), 23–31. Eckstein, D., Künzel, V., Schäfer, L., & Winges, M. (2019). Global climate risk index 2020. Bonn: Germanwatch.

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  29 EM-DAT. (2020). The international disaster database. Retrieved April 24, 2020, from www. emdat.be/ Eyler, B., & Weatherby, C. (2020, April 13). New evidence: How China turned off the tap on the Mekong river. The Stimson Center. Retrieved April  27, 2020, from www.stimson. org/2020/new-evidence-how-china-turned-off-the-mekong-tap/ Faist, T. (2016). Cross-border migration and social inequalities. Annual Review of Sociology, 42, 323–346. GKSPL [Green Knowledge Sustainable Partnership Limited]. (2016). Introduction to brick kilns  & specific energy consumption protocol for brick kilns. Retrieved April  27, 2020, from http//www.gkspl.in The Grist. (2019, June 17). Is it time to retire “climate change” for “climate crisis”? The Grist. By Kate Yoder. The Guardian. (2018, August  13). Heat the next big inequality issue. The Guardian. By Amy Fleming, Ruth Michaelson, Adham Youssef, Oliver Holmes, Carmela Fonbuena, & Holly Robertson. Hansen, A., Bi, L., Saniotis, A., & Nitschke, M. (2013). Vulnerability to extreme heat and climate change: Is ethnicity a factor? Global Health Action, 6(1), 1–7. Henry, S., Boyle, P., & Lambin, E. F. (2003). Modelling interprovincial migration in Burkina Faso, West Africa: The role of socio-demographic and environmental factors. Applied Geography, 23(2–3), 115–136. ILO [International Labour Organisation]. (2018). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture (3rd ed.). Geneva: Author. ILO [International Labour Organisation]. (2019). Working on a warmer planet: The impact of heat stress on labour productivity and decent work. Geneva: Author. The Independent. (2019, August 10). In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change: In Iraq, it’s already happening. The Independent. By Richard Hall. IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. (2007). Climate change 2007: Climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Geneva: Author. Jessop, B. (2006). Spatial fixes, temporal fixes and spatio-temporal fixes. In N. Castree  & D. Gregory (Eds.), David Harvey: A critical reader (pp. 142–166). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Kjellstrom, T., Briggs, D., Freyberg, C., Lemke, B., Otto, M., & Hyatt, O. (2016). Heat, human performance, and occupational health: A key issue for the assessment of global climate change impacts. Annual Review of Public Health, 37, 97–112. Kniveton, D. R., Smith, C. D., & Black, R. (2012). Emerging migration flows in a changing climate in dryland Africa. Nature Climate Change, 2(6), 444–447. Krishna, A. (2011). One illness away: Why people become poor and how they escape poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kunz-Plapp, T., Hackenbruch, J., & Schipper, J. W. (2016). Factors of subjective heat stress of urban citizens in contexts of everyday life. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 16(4), 977–994. Lawreniuk, S., & Parsons, L. (2020). Going nowhere fast: Mobile inequality in the age of translocality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, H., Dwyer, P., Hodkinson, S., & Waite, L. (2015). Hyper-precarious lives: Migrants, work and forced labour in the global North. Progress in Human Geography, 39(5), 580–600. Li, Y., Ren, T., Kinney, P. L., Joyner, A., & Zhang, W. (2018). Projecting future climate change impacts on heat-related mortality in large urban areas in China. Environmental Research, 163, 171–185. Licadho [Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights]. (2017). Built on slavery: Debt bondage and child labour in Cambodia’s brick factories. Phnom Penh: Author.

30  Laurie Parsons Lundgren-Kownacki, K., Kjellberg, S. M., Gooch, P., Dabaieh, M., Anandh, L., & Venugopal, V. (2018). Climate change-induced heat risks for migrant populations working at brick kilns in India: A  transdisciplinary approach. International Journal of Biometeorology, 62(3), 347–358. McGranahan, G., Balk, D., & Anderson, B. (2007). The rising tide: Assessing the risks of climate change and human settlements in low elevation coastal zones. Environment and Urbanization, 19(1), 17–37. McLeman, R., Schade, J., & Faist, T. (Eds.). (2016). Environmental migration and social inequality. New York: Springer. Mitchell, B. C.,  & Chakraborty, J. (2018). Thermal inequity. In T. Jafry (Ed.), Routledge handbook of climate justice (pp. 330–346). London: Routledge. Mora, C., Dousset, B., Caldwell, I. R., Powell, F. E., Geronimo, R. C., Bielecki, C. R., . . . Trauernicht, C. (2017). Global risk of deadly heat. Nature Climate Change, 7(7), 501–506. Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., & Parsons, L. (2019). Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural  – urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a “climate precarity” approach. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 899–921. Newman, F., & Humphrys, E. (2019). Construction workers in a climate precarious world. Critical Sociology. doi:10.1177/0896920519880951 NGO Forum Cambodia. (2012). The impact of climate change on rice production in Cambodia. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264540118_The_Impact_of_ Climate_Change_on_Rice_Production_in_Cambodia Parsons, L. (2016). Mobile inequality: Remittances and social network centrality in Cambodian migrant livelihoods. Migration Studies, 4(2), 154–181. Parsons, L.,  & Chann, S. (2019). Mobilising hydrosocial power: Climate perception, migration and the small scale geography of water in Cambodia. Political Geography, 75, doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102055 Parsons, L., & Long, L. V. (2020). A survey of the Cambodian brick industry: Population, geography, practice. Phnom Penh: Brick Workers Trade Union of Cambodia. Parsons, L.,  & Nielsen, J. (2020). The subjective climate migrant: Climate perceptions, their determinants and relationship to migration in Cambodia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1807899 Prentice, R., De Neve, G., Mezzadri, A., & Ruwanpura, K. N. (2018). Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: Setting a new research agenda. Geoforum, 88, 157–160. Radir, A. F., Hashim, Z., Phan, K., Sao, V., & Hashim, J. H. (2017). The impact of heat on health and productivity among sugarcane workers in Kampong Cham, Cambodia. Asia Pacific Environmental and Occupational Health Journal, 3(1), 9–19. Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (2011). Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma. Global Environmental Change, 21(4), 1215–1223. Saeed, F., Salik, K. M.,  & Ishfaq, S. (2015). Climate change and heat-waves: Rural-to-urban migration in Pakistan, a silent looming crisis. Policy Brief #47. Pakistan: Sustainable Development Policy Institute. Smith, K. (2001). Environmental hazards, assessing the risk and reducing disaster. London: Routledge. Strauss, K. (2018). Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity? Progress in Human Geography, 42(4), 622–630. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trump, D. (2014). @realDonaldTrump: “They only changed the term to climate change when the words global warming didn’t work anymore. Come on people, get smart!” Retrieved April 24, 2020, from https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/488825209189711873?lang=en

Thermal inequality in a changing climate  31 UNESCO. (2018). Overview of internal migration in Cambodia. Bangkok: UNESCO. Van der Geest, K., Vrieling, A., & Dietz, T. (2010). Migration and environment in Ghana: A  cross-district analysis of human mobility and vegetation dynamics. Environment and Urbanization, 22(1), 107–123. World Bank. (2016). World bank databank. Cambodia: Country Dashboard. Retrieved June 5, 2020, from http://datatopics.worldbank.org Zander, K. K., Cadag, J. R., Escarcha, J.,  & Garnett, S. T. (2018). Perceived heat stress increases with population density in urban Philippines. Environmental Research Letters, 13(8), 1–9. Zander, K. K., Richerzhagen, C., & Garnett, S. T. (2019). Human mobility intentions in response to heat in urban South East Asia. Global Environmental Change, 56, 18–28.

3 Climate change adaptation through agroecology in Senegal Enhanced farmworkers’ autonomy or new forms of vertical labour control? Patrick Bottazzi, Sébastien Boillat, Franziska Marfurt, and Sokhna Mbossé Seck Introduction: reviewing working conditions in agroecology Agroecology first emerged in the 1970s as a scientific approach and a set of ecologically sound agricultural practices (Altieri, 1987). Since then, agroecology has also been highlighted as a strategy to adapt to climate change (Altieri, Nicholls, Henao, & Lana, 2015) and more recently also as a means to mitigate climate change complementary with climate-smart agriculture (Gliessman, 2013; Saj, Torquebiau, Hainzelin, Pages, & Maraux, 2017). Agroecology has also been taken up and further developed by rural social movements, particularly in Latin America (Rosset & Martínez-Torres, 2012). In this context, agroecology progressively became a hybrid concept combining technical and ecological aspects with multiple social and political principles, aiming to support the autonomy of farmers and to improve their labour conditions. Under what has been described as an “agroecological revolution” (Altieri & Toledo, 2011), the movement also promotes ethical principles such as environmental stewardship, food sovereignty, and the virtue of frugality and other spiritual values (Rabhi, 2010; Sponsel, 2012). In a conceptual article, Timmermann and Félix (2015) claim that work in agroecology is more meaningful than conventional farming. According to the authors, agroecology also leads to more ­“contributive justice” as it compensates farmers’ heavy workload by providing other resources and well-being such as freedom (autonomy of the farm); personal initiative; increased dexterity; social and peer recognition; inter-influence among farmers; and development of farmers’ skills, knowledge, and capabilities. Despite these claims, little empirical research has been dedicated to the consequences, in terms of labour conditions, of farmers’ conversion to agroecology. This gap resonates with a more general insufficient attention brought to questions of power and social inequality in sustainable agriculture research,

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in particular climate-smart agriculture, which tends to focus exclusively on technical and farm-level issues (Taylor, 2018). As a matter of fact, research on work-related aspects of sustainable agriculture has been primarily dedicated to quantitative measurements aimed at optimising labour productivity by reducing labour inputs and increasing yields (Dahlin & Rusinamhodzi, 2019). Nevertheless, while sustainable agriculture is generally understood as more quantitatively labour-intensive than industrial farming, some argue that it offers better working conditions in a qualitative sense. For example, 20 years ago, a large literature review in Europe showed that organic agriculture requires about 12% more work, has lower yields (by about 30% compared to conventional agriculture), but can allow for greater work satisfaction, depending on workers’ perception of what satisfactory work is (Jansen, 2000). More recently, other studies in Europe report a positive relationship between farmers’ adoption of organic farming and subjective well-being (Hall & Mogyorody, 2007; Mzoughi, 2014). These studies show that satisfaction at work in organic farming also depends on personal and family life and, more generally, on social structures, including gender relations, organisational aspects of work, type of activity, the mobilisation of knowledge, and the cultural background of the farmers. Other recent studies in Europe and the United States provide a less optimistic picture. In their comparative study on Belgian horticulture, Dumont and Baret (2017) argue that working conditions in organic farming are not a priori better than conventional farming. Small agroecological producers feel particularly constrained by their socio-economic context because of unaffordable high land prices, low food prices, the difficulty of conditions to access subsidies, and increasing competition in the supply of vegetable boxes (2017, p. 61). In the United States, reciprocal relations with consumers in community-supported agriculture (CSA) resulted in psychological pressure to farmers and situations of “self-exploitation”, where farmers accept wages lower than the regional average, long working days, and painful activities (Galt, 2013). A similar psychological pressure due to the difficulty of accommodating crop seasonality and demand has also been observed in France (Dupré, Lamine, & Navarrete, 2017). In the global South, the question of labour conditions in agroecological farming is even more crucial, due to the prevalence of precarious and vulnerable livelihoods in rural areas, wide gender gaps, and social inequalities. Studies from Malawi and Kenya have shown that additional workloads generated by agroecological practices often fall on more vulnerable groups, such as women, landless workers, and youth (Bezner Kerr et al., 2018; Lee, Martin, Kristjanson, & Wollenberg, 2015). Even technologies aiming at closing gender gaps may not necessarily benefit women farmers in practice (Hansda, 2017). Furthermore, in the global South many agroecological farming projects strongly rely on international NGO networks, raising questions of dependencies and limited autonomy for farmers (Isgren & Ness, 2017). Finally, many organisations supporting “peasant farming” tend to idealise rural communities as homogeneous, overlooking internal inequality and uneven power relationships (Bernstein, 2014).

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On the basis of these considerations, we argue that integrating sustainability concerns in agriculture has crucial implications for labour conditions and workload distribution. Agroecology, sustainable, and climate-smart agriculture alike require technological and societal changes. Yet the bulk of scholarly research has focused on technical aspects, tending to overlook how changes affect the amount and distribution of workload and, more generally, power relationships in agrarian social structures. In particular, the aforementioned studies related to labour issues in agroecology converge on two main ideas: first, in similar socio-economic contexts, the level of workers’ autonomy to take decisions in their work is a core determinant of their working conditions and satisfaction. Second, working conditions depend to a significant extent on social, economic, and political contexts at broader scales and cannot be limited to technical aspects. Both conditions have been scrutinised in the literature under the banner of “labour control” (Baglioni, 2017; Pattenden, 2016), a framing which focuses on the mechanisms that perpetuate social classes and inequalities in agricultural development. Studies in this vein highlight that farmers’ autonomy and working conditions in agriculture require them to move away from the farm level and to include contextual socio-economic aspects such as the articulation between global and local governance mechanisms and the impact of economic capital on marginal areas of development. In this chapter, we build on this idea but argue that in sustainable agriculture, financial capital and classical normative analysis are not sufficient dimensions to understand mechanisms of labour control. Rather, six major channels of labour control help characterise the level of workers’ autonomy in local modes of agricultural production: (1) access to markets, financial incentives, and access to productive infrastructures; (2) local conventions, rules, and norms such as fairtrade or organic certifications (Raynolds, 2014); (3) access to land, natural resources, and productive assets (Scoones, 2009); (4) technocognitive aspects legitimating workers’ positions (Coolsaet, 2016); (5) ontological values contributing to influence farmers’ engagement (Mzoughi, 2011); and (6) interpersonal relations (Coquil et al., 2018; Coquil, Dedieu, & Béguin, 2017). In the next section, we first present the socio-political context of emerging agroecological transition initiatives in Senegal and describe four short case studies located in the north-west of the country. By characterising these initiatives from the point of view of the modes of production and, more precisely, by considering the six channels described previously, we seek to understand to what extent agroecological initiatives allow for enhanced farmworkers’ agency, autonomy, and labour conditions.

Agroecological transition in Senegal: socio-political context and emerging initiatives Agricultural policies and peasant organisations in Senegal

In Senegal, the agriculture sector is in a critical situation due to severe droughts, declining soil fertility, and food insecurity, all of which are exacerbated by

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climate change and neo-liberal policies. Until 1984, farmers were supported by the government through inputs provision (improved seeds, fertiliser, pesticides) and commercialisation support. Since the mid-1980s, the New Agricultural Policy, initiated under the policy purview of the Washington consensus, led to the complete disengagement of the state and the privatisation of the Senegalese food system (Duruflé, 1995). Since 2000, the government of President Abdoulaye Wade started focusing on the paradigm of food security through “special programmes”1 seeking industrialisation and attempting to attract big investors from foreign countries (Oya & Ba, 2013). This policy did not reach their proposed objectives and led to severe cases of land grabbing and conflicts with peasants, especially in the Senegal River Valley (Koopman, 2012). After 2012, President Macky Sall has reaffirmed the productivist scope of the national agricultural policy with the Programme d’Accélération de la Cadence de l’Agriculture Sénégalaise (PRACAS)2 plan, enacted in 2014. The PRACAS represents the main agricultural development strategy with the objective to reach self-sufficiency in rice and onions as well as increase the production of a few commercial crops such as groundnuts and counter-season fruit and vegetables (MAER, 2014). Although Sall’s government is recently proposing a “green orientation” to his National Plan called PSE-vert by proposing a reforestation programme, most of the current agrarian policies remained unchanged. The government’s lines of actions include large-scale irrigation development, subsidising chemical inputs, hybrid seeds and mechanisation, conventional research, and securing large agribusiness access to land and water. Recent reports estimate 700,000 ha of farmers’ land were subject to dispossession, leading to new conflicts and farmers’ mobilisations in recent years (Brun, 2018). In the last decades of agrarian transformations, peasant movements of Senegal have attempted to gain ground in order to defend the interests of family farmers. Initially, the Fédération des organisations non-gouvernmentales du Sénégal (FONGS) created in 1978 and the Cadre national de concertation des ruraux du Sénégal (CNCR) established in 1993 have been set up by peasant organisations to play the role of negotiator with the state and defend peasant interests. The CNCR is a member of La Via Campesina and the main focal point of this network in Senegal. Although these organisations succeeded in gaining political space at national and international levels, the peasant movement remains strongly dependent on external aid (mainly NGOs), state coercion, and political co-optation (Hrabanski, 2010). Emerging initiatives of organic and agroecological farming

The first experiences of systematic organic farming trials in Senegal began at the end of the 1980s, demonstrating promising technical results with significant increases in yields (Diop, 2007). More recently, several agroecological educational programmes such as the FAO Farmer Field School, as well as initiatives by NGOs and local farmers, are implementing innovative agroecological practices sporadically all over the country (FAO, 2016; IPC, 2015; Settle & Garba, 2011). These initiatives principally promote crop diversification using old

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varieties of cereals adapted to local climatic conditions (millet, sorghum, fonio, rice, niebe), fertilising, and highly nutritive trees (i.e. Moringa oleifera, Acacia Albida, Detarium Senegalensis) (Takimoto, Nair, & Nair, 2008; Tidiane Guiro, Idouhou-Dossou,  & Wade, 2012). Such initiatives also promote the use of bio-compost (mainly livestock manure) and bio-pesticides, such as neem leaves (Azadirachta indica), irrigation techniques for saving water and soil conservation (mulching), and restoring overexploited land (i.e. using Andropogon and Euphorbias plants). Such technical experiences are accompanied by a mobilisation of farmers’ organisations creating solidarity networks, providing technical assistance and information, creating banks of local seed varieties, and developing value chain and advocacy support (IPC, 2015; Settle & Garba, 2011). More recently, these initiatives have also increasingly gained national, regional, and international support as strategies of climate change adaptation and mitigation. For example, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a strong supporter of agroecology in Senegal, states that “agroecology is the best solution for climate change adaptation in Africa” (AFSA, 2020), whilst the FAO in Senegal has also launched a study on the potential of upscaling agroecology to fight the impacts of climate change (FAO, 2019). Similarly, NGOs are also taking official adaptation policies as a starting point to advocate for the adoption of agroecology in agricultural policies: for example, ENDA-PRONAT states that “awareness of the challenge of climate change is leading public policies to promote ecological agriculture” (ENDA-PRONAT, 2015, p. 8). Nevertheless, despite the growing interest in agroecology in the country, no social science research has been carried out in order to assess the potential of up-scaling these pilot experiences at a broader level and to see if similar experiences potentially generate farmers’ initiatives, autonomy, and emancipating working conditions. In this section, we present four distinct examples of agroecological transition initiatives in Senegal. They are based on explorative fieldwork from February to the end of April  2019, mostly in the coastal strip of the Niayes between Dakar and St. Louis and in-country in the surroundings of Thies and Diourbel. During this period, we carried out semi-structured interviews with NGO leaders, technicians, farmers, and peasant associations, in order to characterise social, organisational, and power-related aspects of those agroecological initiatives. The overarching aim was to assess the potential of up-scaling these pilot experiences at a broader level, and to see if those experiences are potentially generating farmer’s agency, autonomy and emancipating working conditions. Our cases cover different farm and labour organisation types, including community associations supervised by NGOs, family farmers organised in unions, religious communities, and managerial farms. These initiatives are as follows: 1 The NGO-supported initiative is a productive configuration almost entirely supported by an international NGO that develops agroecological programmes in several countries as a means to fight poverty and more recently

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also mitigate and adapt to climate change. The NGO supports the constitution or consolidation of a community association comprising 185 workers, 95% of whom are women. The association is officially recognised as a “group of economic interest” (GIE)3 and has a granted land access by the village authority. The NGO provides irrigation infrastructure, some of the most important productive assets (tools, inputs, and training), supports the commercialisation of products on local and national markets, and provides permanent technical supervision. Labour is supervised by NGO technicians and organic farmers have to respect a contrat de contre partie (counterpart contract) with precise hours of work, turnovers, irrigation time, and other “good practices”. The approach is very much top-down and strongly steered by the NGO headquarters in France. Use of pesticides is allowed in case of high necessity (e.g. pest infestation), for which reason the group does not have organic certification but refers to agroecology in the more permissive sense afforded by the regional coordinator. Farmers’ work is supervised and controlled very strictly and the NGO’s technical criteria are mandatory to farmers. As stated by the regional coordinator, “we provide technical skills, in return farmers are asked to apply them” (NGO supervisor, 1.3.2019). The NGO also supports the farmers with the securing of their land rights and access to water through negotiation with local and national authorities. Farmworkers are the subjects of regular “demonstration” for actors from civil society, research, and politics coming to the experimental fields. Overarchingly, the NGO wants to demonstrate the potential of agroecology to produce ecologically and economically sound practices to a large public in Senegal. As they state, “we want to prove that agroecological production is economically viable. This will be enough to attract farmers and investors” (NGO supervisor, 1.3.2019) 2 The farmer union initiative. The farmer union group examined here has supported smallholder family farmers engaged in agroecology since 1982. Since the 1990s, the union has been strongly supported by a national NGO backed up by international donors and then directly by these donors and governmental development agencies. The union currently includes 3,000 members, but only about 40 members are engaged in an ongoing organic certification process (interview with NGO technical advisor, 10.10.2019). The main objective of the union is to “establish a healthy and sustainable agriculture [in the region] for better food security” and “to support the population in the fight against environmental degradation” (farmers’ union main statute, 2019). The union supports farmers to get a national recognition of their practices through certification mechanisms. They make few references to climate change adaptation, except for reforestation and ecological restoration projects supported by international donors. Although they frame themselves as an apolitical organisation, the union members participate in demonstrations from time to time for urgent matters, as in 2018 when group members supported a popular street protest against the government’s decision to construct a dozen of water drills in their area to

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supply Dakar city with potable water. The union’s vision of agroecology is inspired by the organic standards defined by the National Federation of Organic Agriculture (FENAB), of which it is a founding member. These standards take the form of a written cahier des charges (terms of reference), which is a set of rules consisting of good agricultural practices that need to be respected in order to get an organic certification. These rules include the exclusion of sharecropping (baye seddo), arguing that in this case the landowner is not in a position to guarantee the compliance of the standards. Since the union members are smallholders who often lend their land to migrant workers, they perceive it as a restriction. Control of work is therefore mainly established through normative channels such as the cahier des charges. Chemical inputs are totally forbidden for organic producers on the totality of their crops under any circumstances. With the support of NGOs, the union has contributed to raise awareness and responsibility on the risks related to chemical inputs as illustrated by this citation: The difference is to believe in what you do. God is asking us not to threaten each other’s [lives and livelihoods]. If I use pesticide and you eat it and at 30 years, 15 years or 10 years you start having health problems, this would be my fault. God doesn’t want it. (Male farmer, 30 years, organic union, April 4, 2019)

Most of the interviewed farmers emphasized the contradictions between their ontological convictions, painfulness in executing the tasks, and high frustration they experienced when their products did not find the preferential market niche’. Their difficult situation is exacerbated by increasing pressure on land access and the rapid degradation of natural resources. In this context, though farmers have clear ideas on how to make agriculture more resilient, they have relatively little power to resist social-ecological pressures that undermine their prospects (Boillat & Bottazzi, 2020) 3 The CSA. Our case study started with a private initiative in the touristic coastal and gentrified area close to the capital city of Dakar. A group of French businesswomen purchased land and expensive infrastructure and hired an experienced supervisor who manages the farm. Established in a relatively high-income area, the supervisor and four permanent employees work with volunteers (mostly agronomy students), expats, and direct consumers. The production is entirely organic as no fertilisers and no pesticides are allowed. A strong emphasis is put on the direct link between the workers and consumers, amongst whom a lot of expats personally harvest their products on the farm and develop personal relations with the staff members. In addition, a monthly market for organic vegetables and delivery to hotels in Dakar help sell most of their products. The initiative also regularly organises field schools to support the diffusion of agroecological practices to a broad audience of students, practitioners, or other interested persons. At the moment, the permanent workers only receive a minimum

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wage for their work as the structure is still not economically viable. In exchange, workers receive board and lodging during their working days. 4 Our case study of spiritual brotherhood is a Bayefall community located in the country in the surroundings of Diourbel. The Bayefall are a branch of the Mourid Islamic Sufi order and attach utmost importance to work (Pezeril, 2008). The spiritual chief of the respective Bayefall community (marabout) is developing an ambitious project of agroecological farming and education programme together with his disciples. The Bayefall workers are not paid financially for their contribution but receive food and board as well as spiritual recognition and guidance from the marabout. Some people from abroad also live in the community, share spiritual and moral values, and contribute by participating in the collective working activities. Most members of the community declare allegiance to the charismatic and open-minded marabout and follow all his ndigel (Wolof word for “spiritual orders”). According to common Bayefalls’ beliefs, work without expecting financial compensation for the marabout is sanctifying and can be considered as a prayer. Disciples receive the “orders” of the marabout without contesting them and therewith develop humility and trust. If the spiritual chief tells me go to France to take agricultural training, I will go without thinking as it is the allegiance pact . . . you will do whatever you are asked to do and you will leave what you are asked to leave. You have no reason to have your own project. Bayefall disciple working in agroecology, 30 years, 15.10.2019 Bayefall work engagement has been recently associated to the principles of agroecology and their effects on ecosystems’ protection, as stated in this citation. For me agroecology is nobility, being in the service of humanity. If you plant a single tree imagine the number of ants that will live there. [And] the people who will use it to heal themselves. They say “nourish the earth that nourishes the tree that will nourish you”. I see nothing more noble than cultivating the land. It’s the best way to find autonomy. I  appeal to young immigrants who take canoes and who think there are silver trees there. No, I appeal: “Go back to the earth! It’s the only way to be independent.” Bayefall disciple working in agroecology, 29 years, 7.11.2019 The community is supported by a broad network of friends and associations based in Europe and the United States who have collaborated for several decades to implement development programmes in their community and the surrounding villages. The agroecological project started in 2016 with the aim of generating income sources for the community members, transmitting knowledge, and supporting food sovereignty. According to the

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marabout, the choice of producing according to agroecological principles is justified by the fact that Bayefall “have to protect life in all its forms . . . and resist the domination of industrial agriculture”. Notwithstanding the firm intention to keep local villages independent from industrial farming and chemicals, the vocation of the community is not to make political advocacy in order to receive support from the state. According to the marabout, the objective of the project is to “prove to the Mourid community that it is possible to produce ecologically and to progressively expand the practices within the entire brotherhood” (13.10.2019). Though still at an early stage, the project is progressing very quickly due to the spiritual fervour of his disciples. Taken together, these four initiatives indicate that agroecological farming in Senegal remains experimental and has not led to a higher autonomy of farmers and farmworkers. Most of the initiatives remain led or influenced considerably by international networks and NGOs, with top-down labour control mechanisms remaining prevalent despite the explicit aim of many of these initiatives to empower farmers. Due to their very weak access to preferential organic markets and premium prices, farmers’ financial autonomy is not guaranteed and they constantly need to be supported by external funding, meaning they must accept the donor’s terms. Labour control is exerted through the supervision and transmission of technical knowledge from NGOs and trained technicians to farmers with a top-down definition of restrictions and quality constraints. Despite this, though, most of the interviewed farmers supported the values under those restrictions and seemed to have incorporated them without questioning. The small size of all the initiatives and the level of personal engagement of the participants also show that this form of agroecology remains confined to a niche, where interpersonal relations count as much as the outcomes of the agricultural production. This leads to more informal forms of labour control in which personal relations and social pressure play a key role. These aspects support the idea of a limited agency of farmers and farmworkers and the need to scale up agroecology by combining experimental farming with broader political action. Scaling up agroecology: mobilisations and multi-stakeholder platforms

Since 2015, several multi-stakeholder platforms have emerged with the explicit objective of scaling up agroecology and organic agriculture to the national level and supporting small-scale farmers with adequate policies. We observed three types of platforms: umbrella organisations, semi-formalised networks, and ad hoc advocacy platforms. Umbrella organisations are structured organisations created with the explicit aim of promoting agroecology at the national level. The most recognised one is the National Federation for Organic Agriculture (FENAB) created in 2008 with the objective of promoting agroecology and organic agriculture and their

Adaptation through agroecology in Senegal  41

inclusion in national policies. The FENAB is constituted by 44 farmer organisations and six supporting NGOs (mainly with Swiss and German funding) and has five staff members who are paid through NGO support and membership fees (interview with FENAB coordinator, 23.02.2019). Until now, FENAB has worked in the areas of capacity building, commercialisation, and land rights advocacy, but its main focus is the establishment of national certification schemes. The organisation is advocating for the implementation of a national organic label in order to make the organic sector economically more viable and has established regulations based on the international organic certification criteria of IFOAM. However, most farmers’ grassroots organisations find IFOAM certification criteria too restrictive. Dissentions have appeared between members who advocate for participatory guarantee systems (PGS), a local participatory certification scheme, and those who privilege international recognition. Tensions also exist with other similar organisations in the country that are competing to get formal recognition in the field of national certification procedures. Furthermore, according to some of its affiliate member organisations, the focus on certification has led the organisation to become less active in political advocacy in support of small-scale farmers. Semi-formalised networks are networks consisting of organisations dedicated to the promotion of agroecology. This includes the Multi-Stakeholder Task Force for the Promotion of Agroecology in Senegal (TAFAE), created in 2015. The TAFAE was launched at a meeting organised by the French Research Institute for Development (IRD) and the Platform of European NGOs in Senegal (PFONGUE), which gathered researchers, local farmers’ organisations, and NGOs to promote a science-society interface for the advancement of agroecology (Presentation by TAFAE coordinator, 20.11.2019). TAFAE’s objective is to support exchange of experiences and technical know-how through mutual site visits and to advocate for agroecology in the national political sphere. However, up to now, the network has a limited capacity for advocacy as its central management office is somewhat informal, mostly managed by foreigners and in a lower hierarchical position than its member NGOs (Interview with 3AO coordinator, 15.03.2019). Another emerging semi-formalised network is the Alliance for Agroecology in West Africa (3AO) created in 2018 at a meeting co-organised by the Network of Peasant Organizations and Agricultural Producers in West Africa (ROPPA) and IPES-Food. More active at a regional scale, the network is hosted by ROPPA and steered by a committee including farmer organisations, IPES-Food, ENDA PRONAT, and European NGOs and research organisations. Ad hoc advocacy platforms created by civil society organisations around a specific advocacy goal include the Group for Reflection on Land in Senegal (CRAFS), created in 2010 by farmer organisations, researchers, and lawyers and steered by ENDA-PRONAT, a leading NGO supporting the largest part of the agroecological initiatives in Senegal. Since its creation, the CRAFS has been instrumental in stopping a large biofuel production and protecting the rural community land in northern Senegal. The CRAFS has recently elaborated a

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proposal of land policy reform, handed over to the president in 2017. Its proposal is to increase the decision-making power of local communities, restrict large land transactions, and protect commons (i.e. pastoral land, protected forest, and water areas) while securing access for smallholders. Nevertheless, whilst the CRAFS managed to slow down large-scale land acquisitions during the WadeSall presidency transition, its proposals were not formally adopted (Interview with NGO technical advisor, 15.11.2019). Another advocacy platform is the Dynamic on Agroecological Transition in Senegal (DyTAES). The platform’s objective is to formulate strong policy recommendations for the up-scaling of agroecology in the country, and it was created in 2019 after the national government announced the launch of the PSE-vert, which includes a large reforestation programme aiming at mitigating and adapting to climate change. Led by ENDA-PRONAT, the platform members, including 80 participants from farmer organisations, NGOs, local governments, and research institutions, launched a national consultation in all regions of the country to establish a policy proposal. The proposal was discussed during a national symposium including representatives of the government in November  2019. There, the questions of equity in land and water access were debated, with several government representatives advocating for excluding these issues and sticking to technical recommendations (Participant observation at DyTAES workshop, 18 and 19.11.2019).

Discussion In Senegal, most initiatives to support agroecological transition are not led by farmers or by farmworkers themselves and therefore tend to limit the potential for grassroots emancipation and autonomy. These initiatives are top-down, still at a pilot stage, with high financial and technical dependence on external organisations such as NGOs and private associations. Channels of labour control are based on NGO-to-farmer knowledge, external and limited funding, and exogenous ontological values introduced by international partners. Farmers’ adoption of organic practices is motivated by exchanges of financial, cognitive, and ontological values that contribute to increase the dependence on external partners. Farmworkers are to some extent “demonstrators” of a new way to produce food and for this reason remain highly conditioned by their promotors. Financial and technical support, as well as some attempts to set up short value chains for organic products, is currently being developed. However, these initiatives remain too weak to offer market alternatives in a context of liberalisation of the agrarian sector (Koopman, 2012) in complete contradiction with the development of sustainable alternatives. A first barrier to agroecological farmers’ emancipation is the limited coherence of national as well as international agrarian policies. Subsidisation of chemical fertilisers with the help of international lobbies (IPAR, 2015), privatisation and dispossession of underground water, privilege accorded to agribusiness detrimental to small-scale farmers, priority given to extractive industries

Adaptation through agroecology in Senegal  43

development in highly productive agricultural areas without real impact assessment and mitigation measures, extensive and disorganised urbanisation, and the lack of clear land security are undermining farm working conditions. Facing those challenges, small-scale pilot projects such as NGO- or community supported agriculture are the first steps to support the technical development of agroecology at the farm level but remain insufficient to find solutions to the structural problems mentioned earlier. The limited negotiation and advocacy capacity of most organisations supporting agroecology is rooted in the strong implication of foreign donors and NGOs that lack political legitimacy at the national level. They contribute to build small niches of (technical) change, but their capacity to foster the self-determination of farmers’ organisation is limited. According to organic farmers, the prerequisites for an agroecological transition would be clear government support when it comes to securing equitable access to land and water, protection of preferential market space for organic products, nation-wide technical and logistical support for organic input provision, and the development of certification systems. Among these issues, certification procedures are heavily debated. First, there is very little consensus on the way to set up a nationally recognised certification system. At the time of our research, there were three different organic labels in competition, and none of them was officially recognised. Second, the focus on certification enables the interests of private agencies to control the “organic sector” and therefore control farmers’ work through complex certification schemes. The risk is to increase the vertical control of small-scale farmers’ due to the increasing implication of transnational interests. Participatory system of guarantee (PSG) currently emerging in the country might represent a more viable and equitable method of certification. Currently, PSG allows the commercialisation of organic products through a shorter value chain by a limited number of certified local stakeholders. Nevertheless, organisations promoting PSG face trade-offs between allowing more autonomy to farmers and getting more visibility through international recognition. In order to progress with all these crucial issues, the agroecological movement further needs to become institutionalised, while also allowing a stronger involvement of existing farmers’ organisations. The examination of civil society mobilisations highlights some important obstacles. Although these mobilisations are gradually creating synergies among the involved actors, they remain dependent on NGOs or research organisations funded by European donors, even when they are nominally carried out by peasant organisations. To be able to challenge national policies, these mobilisations must meet the interests of foreign donors who in turn need to justify their actions on technical terms to avoid being potentially accused of political interference. This can lead to partial success such as the CRAFS’ actions. Furthermore, the gradual inclusion of government organisations at local and national levels in the existing platforms that advocate for agroecology can potentially lead to technocratisation and depolitisation of agroecology, including the suppression of more polemical and politically engaging objectives.

44  Patrick Bottazzi et al.

Even if farmer organisations would gain more power, it is not certain that the interests of female, landless, or migrant farmworkers would be adequately represented and that these groups would be empowered through the development of agroecology. In all examined cases, these disadvantaged social groups in the Senegalese context have limited decision power: in the NGO-supported initiative, farmworkers, who are mainly women, remain dependent on NGO support to access land, inputs, and technical knowledge. Farmer unions are dominated by smallholder family farmers who also rely on external workers seldom represented in the unions. Similarly, farmworkers in the CSA and in the spiritual brotherhood have no or few options to participate in decisionmaking. This highlights the challenges that agroecology faces in practice, even though they clearly display a strong commitment to social inclusion and empowerment. The urgent need to mitigate and to adapt to climate change is a strong case to develop further agroecological practices (Saj et al., 2017) and to bring the attention to the most vulnerable rural social groups affected by climate change and other consequences of globalisation (Leichenko & O’Brien, 2008). Despite this evidence, references to climate change adaptation remain loose in the discourses of the organisations promoting agroecology in Senegal. Their focus is mainly on poverty reduction and the building of healthy and sustainable food systems. Framing agroecology as a strategy to adapt to climate change appears, more recently, as a way of attracting donors and establishing ties with international organisations such as the FAO, which views agroecology explicitly in this sense. NGOs also see climate change adaptation as an entry point to advocate for national policies enhancing agroecology, as the constitution of the DyTAES in relation with the “PSE Vert” shows. Nevertheless, current national policies aiming at tackling climate change mainly focus on reforestation, making the inclusion of agroecology in these programmes rather uncertain.

Conclusions Facing rising temperatures and drought due to climate change, and sustained demographic growth until 2050, Sahel countries are highly exposed to the threat of hunger and displacement. A change of paradigm in agriculture development is therefore urgently needed, and in Senegal as well as in other sub-Saharan countries, agroecological transition niches are important incubators of transformation, offering a meaningful framing to implement truly transformative adaptation (Pelling, 2010). Nevertheless, their impact to transform the broader food system has been limited until now and is facing several barriers. In this contribution, we conceptualise these barriers as channels of labour control that limit farmers’ and farmworkers’ emancipation from multi-channelled labour control and difficult working conditions. These channels transcend the locality of labour control (Jonas, 1996; Pattenden, 2016) through the role of foreign actors in controlling agroecological niches. In small pilot projects as well as for independent unionised organic farmers, the incorporation of agroecological

Adaptation through agroecology in Senegal  45

practices is associated with additional farmer and consumer “responsibilisation”, yet this remains broadly limited to a demonstration of technical potentialities. The added value of farmers’ labour is mainly symbolic, as it is mainly thought to increase the legitimacy of funding agencies without generating enough farmers’ economic and organisational autonomy. Furthermore, the empowerment of more vulnerable people such as farmworkers, migrants, and women remains even more challenging within the present structure of farmer organisations. Further support is therefore urgently needed in building capabilities and inclusiveness in local farmers’ organisations, with the aim of gaining more political autonomy and better incorporating the food system governance at local, national, and international levels. The recent development of multistakeholders’ advocacy platforms would constitute an important step forward if they combine with historical social movement organisations (CNCR and FONGS) and their grassroots organisations at an operational scale. The pressing issue of climate change could catalyse governmental awareness of the need to urgently support more resilient food systems in view of the current economic and climatic crisis and, hopefully, bring more attention to the most vulnerable groups among farming populations.

Notes 1 Mainly the Retour vers l’agriculture plan (REVA) and the General offensive pour la nourriture et l’abondance (GOANA) 2 Programme d’Acceleration de la Cadence de l’Agriculture Sénéglaise (PRACAS) means “programme to accelerate the cadence of Senegalese agriculture” 3 Groups of Economic Interests (Groupe d’Intérêt Economique GIE) are associations recognised by the State aiming at foresting the access to credit for small producers.

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Adaptation through agroecology in Senegal  47 Hrabanski, M. (2010). Internal dynamics, the state, and recourse to external aid: Towards a historical sociology of the peasant movement in Senegal since the 1960s. Review of African Political Economy, 37(125), 281–297. doi:10.1080/03056244.2010.510627 IPAR. (2015). Contribution de l’IPAR au processus d’amélioration des pratiques de subventions agricoles au Sénégal. Retrieved from http://ipar.sn/IMG/pdf/contribution_de_ipar_a_l_ amelioration_des_pratiques_de_subventions_agricoles_au_senegal.pdf IPC. (2015). Successful stories from the peasant family farming. Rome, Italy: Author. Isgren, E., & Ness, B. (2017). Agroecology to promote just sustainability transitions: Analysis of a civil society network in the Rwenzori region, Western Uganda. Sustainability, 9(8), 1357. doi:10.3390/su9081357 Jansen, K. (2000). Labour, livelihoods and the quality of life in organic agriculture in Europe. Biological Agriculture & Horticulture, 17(3), 247–278. doi:10.1080/01448765.2000.9754845 Jonas, A. E. G. (1996). Local labour control regimes: Uneven development and the social regulation of production. Regional Studies, 30(4), 323–338. Koopman, J. (2012). Land grabs, government, peasant and civil society activism in the Senegal River Valley. Review of African Political Economy, 39(134), 655–664. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/42003215 Lee, J., Martin, A., Kristjanson, P.,  & Wollenberg, E. (2015). Implications on equity in agricultural carbon market projects: A  gendered analysis of access, decision making, and outcomes. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 47(10), 2080–2096. doi:10.1177/0308518X15595897 Leichenko, R. M., & O’Brien, K. L. (2008). Environmental change and globalization: Double exposures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MAER. (2014). Programme d’accélération de la cadence de l’agriculture Sénégalaise (PRACAS). Dakar, Sénégal: Author. Mzoughi, N. (2011). Farmers adoption of integrated crop protection and organic farming: Do moral and social concerns matter? Ecological Economics, 70(8), 1536–1545. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.03.016 Mzoughi, N. (2014). Do organic farmers feel happier than conventional ones? An exploratory analysis. Ecological Economics, 103, 38–43. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.04.015 Oya, C., & Ba, C. O. (2013). Les politiques agricoles 2000–2012: Entre volontarisme et incohérence. In M. C. Diop (Ed.), Sénégal 2000–2012: Les institutions et politiques publiques à l’épreuve d’une gouvernance libérale (pp.  149–178). Retrieved from https://core.ac.uk/ reader/17184941 Pattenden, J. (2016). Working at the margins of global production networks: Local labour control regimes and rural-based labourers in South India. Third World Quarterly, 37(10), 1809–1833. doi:10.1080/01436597.2016.1191939 Pelling, M. (2010). Adaptation to climate change: From resilience to transformation. London: Routledge. Pezeril, C. (2008). Islam, mysticisme et marginalité: Les Baay Faal du Sénégal. Paris: L’Harmattan. Rabhi, P. (2010). Vers la sobriété heureuse. Arles: Actes Sud. Raynolds, L. T. (2014). Fairtrade, certification, and labor: Global and local tensions in improving conditions for agricultural workers. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(3), 499– 511. doi:10.1007/s10460-014-9506-6 Rosset, P. M., & Martínez-Torres, M. E. (2012). Rural social movements and agroecology. Ecology and Society, 17(3). Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/26269097 Saj, S., Torquebiau, E., Hainzelin, E., Pages, J., & Maraux, F. (2017). The way forward: An agroecological perspective for climate-smart agriculture. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 250, 20–24. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2017.09.003

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4 Routes to food security Strategies of survival of marginalised communities in North-western Bangladesh Taneesha Mohan In Khansana (North-Western Bangladesh) we are plagued by both droughts and floods. Both these disasters severely affect availability of agricultural work for us. Since floods are not too common there aren’t many shelters where we can find refuge. I feel that there is no point in going to these shelters, it is best to stay at our homes. If the landlords need us for any work, they can get in touch with us easily. Moreover, we do not have pattas (land ownership records), and there is always this fear that we will be ousted from our land because there are people who don’t want us here because we are Musahars. Parbati, 32 years old, Musahar Para

Introduction Parbati is an agricultural daily wage labourer, who belongs to the Musahar community, a minority community in Bangladesh. The Musahars in Bangladesh, as in India, are victims of social discrimination and oppression. Parbati’s story highlights the heightened vulnerabilities of marginalised communities to climate stresses and its associated risks. Microfinance institutions are seen as a tool to enhance food security among the rural poor, but these operate under certain limitations, increasing the responsibility and drudgery associated with the growing debt of the rural female population. The Global Climate Risk Index (2020) ranks Bangladesh seventh in terms of the effects of climate disaster, making it all the more important to understand and mitigate these growing vulnerabilities among marginalised Bangladeshi women (Eckstein, Künzel, Schäfer, & Winges, 2019). The country’s low-lying topography, its climatic features, the high population density (1,252 people per square kilometre1), and the socio-economic and political environments make it extremely prone to disasters and highly vulnerable to climate change. The World Bank (2018) estimates that 80% of the population are exposed to disasters such as droughts, floods, and earthquakes, with cyclones having the most debilitating effects on the population. The case of Khansama described earlier is a common occurrence along the north-western regions of Bangladesh, where the frequency of disasters is increasing every year, followed by their long-lasting effects. Situations like these bring into question the efforts of

50  Taneesha Mohan

macroeconomic policies and interventions of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in development and disaster risk management. Despite the numerous aid and relief packages provided, vulnerabilities are on the rise for a large section of the Bangladeshi population (World Bank, 2018), generating marginalisation and exclusion. This chapter will argue that in order to understand the reasons behind these increasing vulnerabilities, one has to broaden the scope of development and disaster risk management to include a political economy/ecology framework. Resilience, within the space of international development, has become a new buzzword (Harrison & Chiroro, 2017). At the individual level, resilience engages with the concept of agency, referring to the individual’s/household’s ability to recover from a shock successfully (Harrison & Chiroro, 2017). Recovery in this regard may refer to the original conditions or transformation of components and their relationship with one another within a system (Vasseur, 2015). One of the major critiques of resilience thinking is that despite engaging with the human dimensions of environmental change, that is, the social-ecological system, there is very little engagement with social and political processes, of power and equity, that underline coping and adaptive mechanisms to climate change (Cote & Nightingale, 2012). The concept of resilience requires an overhaul, and it needs to move beyond a narrow understanding of the capacity of people to “bounce back” (i.e. a focus on their agency alone) from a disaster. Instead, resilience thinking needs to engage with key issues of equity and power, asking “who owns what, who does what, who gets what and what they do with it?” (Bernstein, 2016, p. 8).2 As Taylor (2015) argues, the vulnerability of households to natural disasters is conditioned by their control over assets such as land, water, labour, and even credit. What becomes evident in Taylor’s analysis is that class, caste, and gender are important factors, as they radically reshape relationships to food, subsistence, and resources. It is therefore necessary to engage with and understand the underlying precarity of livelihoods along these lines of power, as well as understand how the commodification of resources alters adaptive capacities and resilience to disaster risks. This chapter focuses on agricultural livelihoods of two marginalised ­communities  – Musahars (a minority Dalit community) and a caste Hindu community in Khansama  – investigating the various subsistence strategies employed by the rural poor in order to secure their livelihood under disasterprone conditions. Despite pro-growth/development interventions made by the Bangladesh government as well as NGOs, the underlying vulnerabilities of rural society continue to persist. The growing insecurity of work, coupled with exclusionary government policies, has left the marginalised worse off in Bangladesh (Misra, 2017). The vulnerable rural population relies on unequal patronclient relations for access to land, credit, and work, which places further limits on the agency and choice available to the rural poor (Nelson & Finan, 2009). This chapter departs from the notion of resilience, being the ability to absorb/bounce back from disturbances, to incorporate a political economy

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framework. Macro-political factors, shaped by agrarian neoliberalism, have altered labour-employer relationships creating a “crisis of labour”, which is marked by exploitative working conditions (Bernstein, 2001), and loss of access and control over productive resources such as land, as well as rising indebtedness. This chapter shows how the interlocked markets of land, labour, credit and multi-scalar power relations determine the vulnerabilities experienced, generating exclusionary practices at the ground level which affect communities’ ability to mitigate and cope with climate change and disaster risk. This study identifies that for marginalised communities in particular, adaptation measures will meet with little to no success if it merely focuses on improving disaster resilience without paying any attention to the drivers of livelihood resilience (see Ayeb-Karlsson, van der Geest, Ahmed, Huq, & Warner, 2016). The chapter is divided into three sections, where the first section takes a look at the methods and the rationale behind using these in order to understand the resilience capacities of the vulnerable populations. The second section provides a detailed background of the study areas, highlighting the different vulnerabilities experienced. Finally, the third provides a detailed account of the different routes to food security.

Methods The data draw from fieldwork carried out for a Global Challenges Research Fund project (2016–2018) titled “Equitable Resilience in Local Institutions” conducted across six districts in Bangladesh. Fieldwork was conducted over a period of nine months from July 2017 to April 2018. I draw on information from one of the districts for this chapter – Dinajpur in north-west Bangladesh (Figure 4.1). This is an agroecologically distinct region, where the local economy is heavily dependent on agriculture and allied activities, such as paddy, jute, and potato cultivation and livestock rearing. In this region in Dinajpur, the poor, especially the agricultural wage labourers, are trapped in a cyclical period of poverty and hunger referred to as Monga (Mazumder & Wencong, 2012). In collaboration with local NGO partners the field sites were chosen by identifying communities that were most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,3 which consisted of the minority Hindu and Christian populations. Fieldwork was carried out in three phases. The first phase was a householdlevel survey, where along with socio-economic data of the household, the respondents were presented with six different hypothetical disaster risk scenarios (which they are familiar with) and were asked to rank the different scenarios based on how resilient they are (see Ensor, Mohan, Forrester, Kanti-Khisa, & Karim, forthcoming). The resilience ranking survey identified households within the village along a continuum of resilience, and they were characterised as high-resilience groups (HRGs) and low-resilience groups (LRGs). From the HRGs and LRGs smaller

52  Taneesha Mohan

subsets of male and female groups were created for the focus group discussions (FGDs). Each group had an average of 10–12 members, as shown in Table 4.1.

Figure 4.1  Location map of study site, Khansama, Bangladesh Source: Author’s own (2020).

Through the FGDs, we drew out conversations on development and disaster risk processes, the formal/informal institutions and organisations, and ecological and social networks that impacted the causes of the different resilience outcomes. This helped frame the questions of the in-depth interviews, which was

Routes to food security  53 Table 4.1  Focus group discussions in Khansama, Dinajpur Location

Male FGDs No. of Groups

Female FGDs Participants (total)

No. of Groups

Participants (total)

Musahar Para (Khansama)

2

9

2

11

Okhrabari (Khansama)

2

10 10

2

12 9

11

10

Source: Fieldwork conducted in July 2017, Dinajpur.

the third phase. In-depth interviews were unstructured and conducted among male and female members who belonged to the different resilience groups. A total of 17 respondents were selected from across male and female groups, HRGs, and LRGs. The in-depth interviews probed further to understand the different power relations, the drivers of vulnerability, and challenges to equity. The following section provides a background of the village site, highlighting the different vulnerabilities faced by the two communities.

Background of the region: identifying the vulnerabilities In this chapter, I conceptualise the degree of vulnerability faced by households through their access to and control over resources. In addition to this, I contend that social identities, such as gender and caste, define the individual’s and household’s capacity to withstand and recover from shocks, both climatic and non-climatic. Neither the nature of nor resilience to a shock can be studied in isolation, as these are governed by relations of power which are multilayered and altered with changing macroeconomic policies and micro-level processes. This section looks at how vulnerabilities are generated among the two communities in Khansama when faced by multiple shocks and how the degree of vulnerability determines the resilience threshold of the community. Fieldwork for Khansama was carried out between July 2017 and August 2017, focusing on stories of those who are the most vulnerable and marginalised. Khansama lies in the north-western region of Bangladesh in the district of Dinajpur. Two localities were chosen from this site: Musahar Para and Okhrabari. The region is characterised by long periods of droughts usually lasting up to seven months. However, it also suffers from floods, especially during the monsoons, river erosion, and severe cold spells during the winters. Climatically, the village site falls within the dry and arid zone, where the summer temperatures go up to 45oC and winter temperatures drop as low as 5oC. With very little industrial development taking place in the region, a majority of the people are engaged in agriculture as cultivators or agricultural labourers.4 Table  4.2 provides details of the socio-demographic spread across this field site.

54  Taneesha Mohan Table 4.2  Socio-demographic distribution in Khansama, Dinajpur Religious group

Population in numbers

Population in percentage.

Muslim Hindu Christian Total

15 114 23 152

9.87 75.00 15.13 100

Source: Fieldwork conducted in July 2017, Dinajpur

The Musahars (Hindus and Christians) and Rishi and Vaishya Hindu castes in Okhrabari are the vulnerable and marginalised communities in the region. They are asset-less and rely on their labour for their survival. The village also has a landowning Kshatriya caste, and the Muslims who identify themselves as Bengalis. The Musahars identify themselves as tribal/Indigenous, but they are yet to officially be granted that status. They were brought to this region during the British Raj (1850s) to clear forests and lay down railway lines in the region. The Musahars of the field area were brought from the district of Chappra in Bihar, India. As in India, the Musahars (translates as “those who eat rats”) are one of the most deprived and marginalised communities in Bangladesh as well. The community has limited access to schools and jobs, and does not own any land. They continue to face social stigmatisation based on their identity and their eating habits (Asaduzzaman, 2013). To break away from this social stigma, many within the community converted to Christianity, but this has not brought about any transformation in their social status. The Musahars usually find themselves confined to low-paying unskilled jobs, where families are heavily dependent on female agricultural labour for their survival. Men and women migrate as family labour for agricultural work, while there are men who carry out non-agricultural work in larger city centres working as construction workers, loaders, and rickshaw drivers. The Musahar community lives together in the Musahar Para, where they do not share boundaries with people of other communities. With no access to agricultural land, and while they still wait for title deeds5 to be transferred in their name, they face the constant threat of being displaced, usually due to government road expansion works and the Bengali Muslims6 (Barkat, Suhrawardy, & Ghosh, 2011). For the Musahars, during periods of food shortages, they revert to traditional practices where they forage for food in the jungles. These include roots, water lilies, and jungle corn called marua. Their diet also consists of pork, eels, and rats, which are a delicacy for them. However, over the years, these eating habits have resulted in the practice of untouchability.7 The Musahars are thought of as an unclean caste. Even those in Okhrabari who belonged to lower caste groups were very clear that they would not go to a Musahar’s house to eat. In order to gain greater social acceptability the Musahars are gradually sacrificing their traditional food practices. This is a double-edged sword; despite sacrificing their eating habits, there is no change in their social status. Instead, the Musahars suffer from even greater food shortages.

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Another mechanism used by the Musahars to counter the food shortages is a collection of rice called eedurer dhaan (rat rice). Musahar households travel to different agricultural fields within a radius of approximately 30–40  km, ­post-harvest. They dig the soil in search of burrows where rats have stored grain. These tend to be found at a depth 3–6 feet below the surface. Savita, a 26-year-old Musahar agricultural labourer had recently returned from collecting close to 15 kilos of rice from the fields. She says: This is a practice that has been passed down from generation to generation in our community. We know exactly where and how to dig up the soil to get the grains. Last year (2016), my entire family went along with me and we were able to collect 45 kilos from 8 acres of land. We store some of this rice and if need be sell it in the market in order to get some money. Within the village, we also barter this rice in order to get other commodities. Another traditional practice is ensuring self-sufficiency. The owners of the land don’t have a problem with the Musahars coming in as their soil gets tilled and cleared. Though, problems have started emerging. First, agricultural labour households from other communities have also started looking around for eedurer dhaan. This has resulted in reduced availability and access for the Musahar community. And in order to be able to procure this rice, they now have to travel longer distances, which increases the burden and cost on the family. The Hindu community that lives in Okhrabari belong to the Kshatriya, Vaishya (upper caste), and Rishi (lower caste) communities. The Kshatriyas and a small number of the Vaishyas own both homestead and farm land; however, the majority live on khaas (government) land. They pay a yearly land tax in order to hold on to this land.8 Despite having proof of paying land taxes, the Hindu community, in particular, faces constant threats of displacement from local Muslims and industrialists. Land grabbing takes places through forgeries of land deeds and by influential people working along with political representatives to threaten and displace these minority communities (Barkat et al., 2011). Farming and its allied activities are the mainstay of the region. The primary crops grown are rice and potatoes. The Musahars and other landless communities work for the farmers from this community as well as larger (usually Muslim) landowners in the area. As is the case of Musahar women, a majority of agricultural work is carried out by female labour. In the case of Okhrabari, female labour does not receive any recognition as employed/hired labour; instead, it gets subsumed under family labour/unpaid labour. The familial gendered relations leave very little room for improvement in the household status of wage and work conditions (Garikipati, 2009). With women in both the Paras taking up agricultural work to ensure the survival of their families, conditions of poverty further place restrictions on their bargaining capacity in the labour market (Garikipati, 2009). Among the landless (bhoomiheen) Muslim, Kshatriya, and Vaishya communities, many have received basic education, which has helped them find

56  Taneesha Mohan

employment in the export processing zones (EPZs) near their village. The shift to wage/salaried work in the EPZs has allowed some women to move away from the dependence on agricultural work, providing a certain degree of economic and social mobility. Jobs in the EPZs have created a distinct class barrier within the region. However, in Okhrabari only eight out of 77 households worked at the EPZs, a small percentage of the workforce. Among the Musahar community, even though there is a large and willing (predominantly male) population, their lack of education prevents access to these jobs. This has generated animosity among the different communities where the Musahars feel that they are being discriminated against, despite having the practical knowhow to carry out the work offered in the EPZs. Vulnerabilities among the two minority communities revolve around two key components, access to better paying jobs and control over productive assets such as land. Adding to the vulnerabilities of these marginalised populations is the cyclical period of poverty known as Monga, which sets in during September–November (Bengali months of Bhadra–Kartik), as once the kharif crops are sown, there is a dearth of work and a decline in people’s purchasing power (Paul, Hossain, & Ray, 2013). Moreover, the growing market dependence on basic food items over the years further adds to their deprivation and food insecurity. In order to cope with the distress of Monga, families migrate in search of work. The migrants are almost always men who migrate to cities to work in construction or as rickshaw pullers. Families that are left behind adapt to the distress by reducing their food intake and at times scavenge round for wild plants and vegetables (Elahi & Ara, 2008), which creates an additional problem of malnutrition. The primary causes for Monga are a large number of people being dependent on agricultural work, the inequitable distribution of land, limited opportunities for non-farm activities, and natural disasters (Bari, 2007). While the region is reeling under the effects of droughts and floods, socioeconomic vulnerability is key in assessing their resilience (Adger, 2006). This aspect comes across clearly when trying to identify the resilience of the respondents in Khansama, where vulnerability is affected by both environmental and socio-economic changes. The poor are least able to withstand only the smallest shocks and disturbances that come their way. Figure 4.2 shows the impact of small and significant disturbances on both HRGs and LRGs. Figure 4.2 highlights that the distribution of resilience is varied and conditioned by historical, socio-cultural, environmental, institutional, and politicaleconomic factors (Matin, Forrester, & Ensor, 2018). Whether the disturbance is small or significant, the LRGs are sensitive to all scenarios (Table 4.3). The LRGs in Khansama do not own land, have temporary housing structures, and rely predominantly on daily wage labour. The most significant scenario which can alter the resilience capacities of people is Scenario 5  – market fluctuations. Intensive agricultural practices allowed Bangladesh to become a food-secure region but at the same time

Routes to food security  57

Figure 4.2  Mean Likert scale response scores for the HRG and LRG, Khansama region Source: Author’s own, 20189 (see also Ensor et al., forthcoming).

brought along increased market dependence for food (Misra, 2017). The promotion of rice monoculture, commercial aquaculture farming, and the control of food grain production and market through agribusinesses has created distancing from food, especially for those lower down in the occupational hierarchy (Gurung, Bhandari, & Paris, 2016). At the time of survey, the price of rice increased from 30 BDT to 65 BDT in a span of six months. Rice being the staple food for the people in the region, this means that a greater proportion of household income is being spent on ensuring food security. Increasing market dependence and indebtedness witnessed the simultaneous decline in income for the landless and the small farmers from rice farming (Hossain, Lewis, Bose, & Chowdhury, 2003). HRGs in the region seem relatively insensitive to the impacts on Scenario 4 – reduction of development aid. The primary reason for this is the availability of alternate forms of employment, where households that are engaged in alternate occupations do not suffer similar losses compared to those dependent on agricultural wage work. In the case of Okhrabari, work at the EPZs provides higher household incomes. For the HRGs, these higher incomes mean less dependence on microfinance loans. Therefore, reduction in development aid will not disrupt the livelihoods of the HRGs. The following section takes a look at gendered dimensions of these vulnerabilities and the survival strategies utilised by rural female labour.

58  Taneesha Mohan Survival strategies of the marginalised

Resilience and adaptive capacities vary not only between but within communities. The lack of alternative livelihoods and growing indebtedness have resulted in marginalised sections of society becoming more susceptible to climatic and economic shocks. This differentiation is reflected in the mean resilience ranking scores for Musaharpara at 69.3 and Okhrabari at 54.6, where the higher score indicates lower resilience (see Ensor et al., forthcoming). The rural female labour force participation rate in Bangladesh has increased from 23.1% in 1999–2000 to 38.6% in 2016–17 (Raihan & Bidisha, 2018). For Musahar women their primary source of income is agricultural wage work for the Muslim and Hindu landholders in the neighbouring areas. There is a high demand placed on their labour during transplanting and harvesting. Muqbil, a large landholder (20 acres of land) from Okhrabari, mentioned that he prefers hiring Musahars for their work. The Musahar community are good workers. People from every community have some skill, and agricultural work is theirs. These labourers are almost always women. Men rarely take up agricultural work these days. In addition it is economical to hire them, because what work can be done by 4 Musahar women, requires 6–7 people from any other community. On the one hand, there is a valorisation of the work carried out by Musahar women, but on the other it is these very same labour relations that continue to keep Musahar women confined to the bottom of social and economic hierarchies (Lerche & Shah, 2018). Gender and caste both play a key role in the continued oppression and exploitation of the labouring class. During periods of peak labour demand women receive 200–250 taka per day, whereas men receive 300–400 taka per day. The wage disparities result in the segmentation of the labour market, and in addition the “stickiness downwards” of wage rates, that is wage rates being supressed, adds to the vulnerabilities experienced by female labour (Kapadia, 1993). Apart from gender being one of the reasons for the wage gap, a majority of the male agricultural wage labourers belong to other communities, which have better negotiating capacities due to their higher social status. Men from the Musahar community stated this as one of the reasons as to why they don’t want to work as agricultural labourers. Women in many households have become the sole breadwinners of the family, coupled with the increasing burden of the social reproduction of the household, limitations are placed on their bargaining capacity, rendering them vulnerable docile and cheap (Kapadia, 1993). While the demand for female labour might be high, employment is available for an average of 190 days in a year. Due to the seasonal drought in the region, it is only the larger landholders who can cultivate two seasons of crops (amman and boro). In addition, when there are floods and hailstorms,

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the destruction of crops leaves the agricultural labourers with no job and no wage. For female agricultural labourers in Okhrabari, the number of days of gainful employment is half of that for the Musahars. Women in Okhrabari rely on micro-credit loans to help them during periods of shortages. With men moving out in search of work, women in Okhrabari have access to the government-run Cash for Work scheme and Rural Maintenance Program, along with the Public Food Distribution System (PFDS). These government schemes are, however, not without their problems. In the employment-­ generation schemes women barely receive more than 30 days of employment. In Okhrabari, those belonging to the LRG category believed that those who had connections to the district officer and contractor would receive more days of work.10 For PFDS, with the deregulation of the economy, the amount of grain controlled by the government dropped and in turn the number of government-run retail shops also declined (Chowdhury  & Haggblade, 2000). Farmers found it difficult to reach the government-run markets and began selling their produce to private traders (Misra, 2017). The amount of grains for PFDS witnessed a subsequent decline, and unless categorised by the government as ultra-poor, access to these food grains is limited. These schemes and programmes with their limited access do provide marginal respite, but it is insufficient to draw them out of the cycle of precarity and debt. Liberalisation of the markets in Bangladesh has resulted in a diminished role of the developmental state, which otherwise provided a “non-market” access to food and livelihoods such as the PFDS and state controlled grain markets (Araghi, 2009). The national agricultural policy went through significant amendments, where self-sufficiency in food was promoted through modern/post-production technologies and the promotion of agribusinesses (GoB, 2013). Agribusinesses and the mechanisation of the modern agricultural system add to the insecurity of work for female agricultural labourers.11 With fewer days of work and increasing rural wage dependency for survival, female agricultural labourers have to forage around for both work and food. The following sections take land and labour as survival strategies and a means to build resilience for the marginalised communities. Land as a means for survival

One of the key resources that determine vulnerability to climatic and nonclimatic shocks is the access to and control over land. Musahars and the Hindu community have limited control over land due to land grabs, land erosion, floods, exclusionary practices in land policies and grants, and the sale of land to overcome rising indebtedness. As an adaptive practice, these marginalised communities gain access to land through tenancy arrangements, the terms and conditions of which are determined through their socio-economic power relations at the village level.

60  Taneesha Mohan

For marginalised communities, the adoption of a Structural Adjustment Programme loan by the Bangladesh government in 1986/87 brought along with it food surplus generation and commercialisation of agriculture, but the erasure of transitional practices led to a distancing from land and its produce (Paprocki & Cons, 2014). This was observed with the growing wage dependency for food and small and marginal landholders losing land to large landholders and agribusinesses (Misra, 2017). The small and marginal farmers in this context look for supplementary income opportunities in the farm and non-farm sector, and the leasing of land for cultivation. While sharecropping continues to exist in the region, many are turning to an exchange system called bandhoki, which has similarities to the traditional land mortgage system of khaikhalashi and daisudi (Jabbar, 1978).12 With limited access to credit sources and employment opportunities, Musahars stay away from leasing land for cultivation, as they have limited income and access to different credit sources such as banks and Microfinance Institution (MFI) loans. The Hindu and Muslim families from Okhrabari who rely heavily on micro-credit tend to take land on bandhok. Bandhok operates as a land mortgage system, where a loan amount is taken and the land is kept with the moneylender until the principal amount is repaid. In the bandhoki system there is no interest rate charged on the principal amount. The loans are usually given by medium farmers and at times marginal landholders and landless households. The spread of MFIs in the region provides the marginalised communities access to these large sums of money to take on mortgage lending. The money is usually taken from the NGOs under the pretext of entrepreneurial activities and is then made available to those who require it. Bandhoki loans have gained popularity as they are marketed as being readily available, and unlike banks there is no fear of losing the land upon failure to repay. The land can be obtained the moment the principal loan amount is repaid. The moneylender holds on to the land and is free to cultivate the land until such time. Whilst large landowners and medium farmers are able to repay the loans within a short span of time, for small and marginal farmers it is difficult. The inability to repay the loans further adds to their growing indebtedness, which further increases their vulnerability to risks. Moreover, the inability to repay the loan as quickly as possible means that they end up distancing themselves from the land for periods of over 5–8  years, entering into exploitative and poorly paid work contracts. Furthermore, for the marginal and landless households who provide the bandhoki loans, whilst they might have freedom to cultivate the land, they are not free from the pressures that are placed upon them by the market. None of these bandhoki farmers are registered and do not have a Krishi card.13 They are dependent on large agricultural corporations like Syngenta for their seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides, which increases their cost of production. During periods of excessive floods or drought, these bandhoki farmers (and tenant farmers) are excluded from any relief/aid provided by the government, as they do not own

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the lands they cultivate. This places limits on the benefits that they can reap from agriculture, and instead the families are faced with growing debts, which allows for very little horizontal, vertical, and occupational mobility. In order to repay the loans the agricultural labour enters into exploitative work contracts whether in rural or urban areas. Moreover, the unequal distribution of land and skewed ownership leaves women who toil on the land with very little decision-making power. This places restrictions on the mobility and the ability of women to work and secure the survival of their families. The precarity of work for rural female labour

The continued exposure to droughts and the intermittent flooding affect the standard of living in Khansama; however, the Musahar and the Hindu community bear a disproportionate share of the adverse impacts, especially those belonging to the LRG households turn to ex-ante risk management strategies such as migration, farm work, and non-farm work. While men migrate to urban centres in search of work, or look for non-farm work, women carry the burden of household survival and meeting basic needs. Women have access to two key resources, MFI loans and their labour power. Both credit and labour, as discussed later, draw women into insecure work and credit contracts, which heightens the household’s vulnerability to climatic and non-climatic shocks. During climate shocks, reduced access to food results in families taking loans, the burden of which falls on the women of the household. While microfinance loans provide an alternative to private money lenders, they still suffer from high interest rates (Roodman, 2010), varying from 18% to 25% per annum, which increases when borrowers default on a payment (Mcloughlin, 2013). Under such conditions, women take more loans to repay the interests accumulating on existing loans. Thus, while MFIs have allowed for greater access to money, it has also constrained the ability of borrowers to become debt-free. In Okhrabari, women from all households had loans from three to four microfinance institutions on average. Most of these loans are taken for marriage costs and to repay older loans, with a handful being spent on entrepreneurial activities (see Figure 4.4). The high rates of interest and multiple loans leave the borrowers in debt traps (Mia & Lee, 2017). Yet there is difference in access to MFI loans for the Musahars, as only those who have the ability to repay these loans (those who belong to the HRGs) borrow. For those who cannot afford such loans (usually the LRGs), they borrow from private money lenders, relatives, and, most commonly, from employers/landholders (see Figure 4.3).14 In such instances, usurious interest rates draw many Musahars from the LRGs into exploitative labour contracts. In particular, bonded or tied labour is one of the safety net practices for the Musahars, because they are socially stigmatised, economically deprived, and, when faced with droughts and floods, can access food and water security this way. Labour tying ranges from mild to harsh forms of bondage (Guérin, 2013). A common, short-term labour-tying practice is one that is driven through advance payment, a survival strategy used

62  Taneesha Mohan

by the Musahar female agricultural labourers in particular to enter into tied arrangements with advance payments multiple times in a year (Mohan, 2015), due to the continuous requirement for money to procure food and meet other basic costs. Yet the continual generation of debt places limitations and restrictions on labour, often leaving them at the beck and call of the employers. Janaki, a 40-year-old Musahar woman, says: Unlike people from other communities we cannot depend on microfinance loans as we have seen many in our village default on loans which forces them to more loans to repay the existing loans. I prefer to borrow from the landlord, and this is an advance payment for my labour. When the landlord needs me I go and work for him. It is important that we finish work quickly, because it becomes difficult to leave the village for any other work that might come our way. After all, we should not jeopardise the relationship we have developed with our employer, who provides us work even during the lean season. For Janaki and many like her, they do not see this exclusionary labour arrangement as bondage but as access to money during periods of distress. However, this labour arrangement places restrictions on the movement of labour, generating unfreedom, with the degree of unfreedom varying with the loan amount (or advance payment). Labour tying takes a different form in Okhrabari, where higher caste positions in the Hindu community place limitations on the mobility of female labour. More often than not, women accompany their husbands to the field as family labour. During Monga, the dearth of agricultural work means that both male and female agricultural labourers end up working for lower wages. Therefore, in order to secure agricultural jobs all year round, many male agricultural labourers are becoming krishanis or tied labourers. Amol, a 34-year-old landless labourer, recounts: My father passed away and we lost whatever little land we had. There isn’t enough work available here. We are drowning in NGO loans. We currently have seven loans that need to be repaid. How is that going to be possible with me barely getting 10 days of work in a month. My wife rears sheep and goats but this is not enough for us to sustain our family of six. I  have now been working as a krishani for 5  years, in another village. The pay might not be good but at least I am ensured work. I can borrow rice and other food items from my employer. . . . I can feed my family. In the two different labour tying arrangements, unfreedom is experienced along a continuum driven by the economic and social compulsion to sell their labour

Routes to food security  63

(Rogaly, 1996). Under such conditions, households tend to rely more on coping strategies which are short term and erosive in nature (Basu, Hoshino, & Hashimoto, 2015). Labour-tying arrangements are one such household action taken with the aim to survive a shock rather than build resilience of the household and community at large.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted how resilience to climatic and economic shocks is an outcome of an interplay between biophysical, socio-economic, political, and multi-scalar power relations. Khansama falls under an arid to semi-arid region, where prolonged periods of drought and Monga both create scarcity of employment, income, and food. Often mistaken for adaptive strategies, the marginalised communities deploy numerous coping mechanisms to ensure the survival of their families. This is, in a wider context, where the deregulation of the agricultural sector left farmers more vulnerable and state patronage started declining, taking away key areas of support against market fluctuations. Furthermore, the rise of NGOs and micro-credit institutions has provided access to an alternate source of money, whilst, on the other hand, borrowing from multiple sources has only given rise to further indebtedness. The dependency on agriculture exacerbates the vulnerabilities of the different marginalised communities. Rural labour remains indebted to the landowner/employer for access to land and for work, to retailers to procure food, and to NGOs to compensate the growing expenses and declining wages. In addition, discrimination based on socio-cultural and economic status, as witnessed in the case of the Musahars, pushed the rural poor to take up socially debasing work. Resistance to this results in unemployment, as observed with the male labourers. The challenge before us is that of equity. Governments and NGOs need to work towards a more equitable distribution of resources such as land. With the survival of households often hinging on female labour (both paid and unpaid), ownership of land needs to be ensured in order to improve their bargaining power, both within and outside their homes (see Agarwal, 1994). Moreover, NGOs need to step away from merely carrying out service delivery to work with issues of land rights and labour rights. To combat Monga and other disasters, the efficacy of social safety net programmes needs to be improved. The Musahars, who are the least resilient, and a socially discriminated minority community are still fighting to obtain the adivasi status that can provide them with some benefits. Resilience at the household level is fragile and ever-changing. Socio-­ economic and political upliftment is key, as seen in the sensitivity to different disaster scenarios, across both HRGs and LRGs. Government and civil society need to work to put in place strategies that can address the inequitable power structures at the local and national level to create an equitable agrarian future.

Annex 1

Table 4.3  Disturbance scenarios Disturbance storyline Scenario a: Small disturbance

Scenario b: Moderate disturbance

Scenario c: Significant disturbance

1) Flooding

The village has temporarily lost 10% of its lowestlying agricultural land to a flood.

2) Erosion/ landslide

The village has permanently lost 5% of its arable land either to erosion or to a landslide (as appropriate).

3) Drought

The village is suffering a month-long drought which reduces its total water supply by 10%. The availability of The availability of credit has reduced credit has reduced by 25%. by 50%.

The availability of credit has reduced by 75%.

The price has dropped by 10%.

The price has dropped by 30%.

4) Reduction of development aid (via NGOs/CBOs) 5) Fluctuation in the market (with respect to cash crops)

The village has lost 25% of its lowestlying agricultural land and some buildings are flooded. The village has permanently lost 10% of its arable land either to erosion or to a landslide and some buildings have also been lost.

The village has lost 50% of its lowestlying agricultural land and some buildings and houses are flooded. The village has permanently lost 25% of its agricultural land, buildings have been lost, and houses have been affected by the landslide/ erosion. The village is suffering The village is a month-long suffering a monthdrought which long drought reduces its water which reduces its supply by 25%. water supply by 50%.

The price has dropped by 20%.

Source: Ensor et al. Revealing patterns of resilience: a subjective approach to ranking and explaining household resilience applied to the case of rural Bangladesh

Cattle

Loan

Sanitation

Diseases

Food

House

Education

Human Death

Fear

6. Lightning

LEGEND Moderately Damaged Highly Damaged Indirectly Damanged Positive Impact Mohajon Bank Neighbour Government Body NGO Land Owner

Communication

Unemployment

5. Earthquake

Transportation

Electricity

Fish

Crops

4. Hailstorm

Figure 4.3  Disaster resilience map: LRGs, women, Musahar Para

Government

NGOs

Neighbour

Mohajon

Soil Fertility

Trees

Land Owner

Water Scarcity

Feeling Cold

3. Catch Fire

2. Drought

1. Cyclone

Market Price Increase

Low Resilience Women - Mushaher Para, Khansama

Annex 2

7. Flood

Cattle Death

Routes to food security  65

Trees

Water Scarcity

Cattle Soil Fertility

Loan

Sanitation

Diseases

Cooking

Figure 4.4  Disaster resilience map: LRGs, women, Okhrabari

NGOs

Neighbour

Mohajon

Can’t Go Outside

3. Earthquake

2. Rain + Wind

1. Lightening

Market Price Increase

Low Resilience Women - Okrabari, Khansama

Annex 3

Food

Crops

Education

Cultivation

House

Fish

4. Hailstorm

Electricity

Communication

7. Flood

LEGEND Moderately Damaged Highly Damaged Indirectly Damanged Positive Impact Mohajon Bank Neighbour Government Body NGO Land Owner

Human Death

Fear

6. Catch Fire

Transportation

Cattle Death

Unemployment

5. Drought

66  Taneesha Mohan

Routes to food security  67

Notes 1 www.statista.com/statistics/778381/bangladesh-population-density/ 2 Bernstein identifies these as the core questions essential to understanding the social relations of production and reproduction and rural differentiation. 3 For Dinajpur the NGO partner was Nijera Kori, an organisation working to secure land rights for landless communities across Bangladesh. 4 At the national level, agricultural labour households comprise of 31.0% of the total household dwellings and in rural areas this is 34.4% (Yearbook of Agricultural Statistics, 2011). The primary source of income for 26% of rural households is agricultural daily wage labour, with 31% self-employed in agriculture and only 14% in non-agricultural tasks (Labour Force Survey, 2010). 5 As of June 2019, I was informed that 73 out of 75 households have received title deeds in their name. Three households are yet to receive the title deed as they lie in contested property. 6 “Land grabbing by the Bengali Muslims is rampant among the minority and especially adivasi communities in Bangladesh” (Barkat et al., 2011) 7 During field work, when Musahars and those belonging to other communities were asked whether the practice of untouchability continues; the response was usually a resounding no, and they would tell me that this is a practice that is typical of India and not Bangladesh. However, one often heard stories of how Musahars are asked to eat in designated corners, with separate plates when they go to restaurants. The previous district collector, in order to break this practice, had taken some Musahars along with him to a restaurant. But this act resulted in protests from the locals, who found it unacceptable to share their plates and cups with Musahars. 8 The people in this village were able to access the land office and get receipts (known as DCRs) with the help of Nijera Kori, a national NGO that works with landless labourers and peasants. 9 Refer to Annex 1 for details on five disaster scenarios. Refer to Ensor et al. (forthcoming) for a detailed description on understanding resilience thresholds. 10 While this was a common assumption among all the respondents, there was no way to verify this information at the time of the survey. 11 Mechanisation of agriculture emerged from liberalisation and has helped with rice productivity making Bangladesh a food secure country. 12 Khaikhalashi is a system where in exchange for money the mortgagee gets to cultivate the land, while the principle loan amount is repaid. Daisudi is a system where the landowner/ mortgager regains control over the land once the entire amount is paid in full (Jabbar, 1978). The difference between these two mortgage systems is the method of repayment, however under both these systems the inability to repay the loans results in the loss of control over the land. 13 Krishi card is a government issued farmers card, which allows farmers to take loans and get products at subsidised rates. 14 Systems map highlighting the disasters, disruptions and the coping strategies used by women in the low resilience group in Musahar Para and Okhrabari show how loans are the first recourse to dealing with a disaster whether environmental or economic.

References Adger, W. N. (2006). Vulnerability. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), 268–281. Agarwal, B. (1994). Gender and command over property: A critical gap in economic analysis and policy in South Asia. World Development, 22(10), 1455–1478.

68  Taneesha Mohan Araghi, F. (2009). The invisible hand and the visible foot: Peasants, dispossession and globalization. In H. Akram-Lodhi & C. Kay (Eds.), Peasants and globalization: Political economy, rural transformation and the Agrarian question (pp. 111–147). London: Routledge. Asaduzzaman, E. (2013). Ethnic group at stake. The Daily Star. Retrieved October 19, 2019, from www.thedailystar.net/news/ethnic-group-at-stake Ayeb-Karlsson, S., van der Geest, K., Ahmed, I., Huq, S., & Warner, K. (2016). A peoplecentred perspective on climate change, environmental stress, and livelihood resilience in Bangladesh. Sustainability Science, 11(4), 679–694. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.  (2010). Report on Labour Force Survey 2010.  Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Statistics and Informatics Division, Ministry of Planning, Government of People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. (2011). Yearbook of agricultural statistics of Bangladesh. Statistics and Informatics Division, Ministry of Planning, Government  of People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Bari, S. (2007, April 18). Consigning Monga to the museum. The Daily Star, Dhaka. Barkat, A., Suhrawardy, G. M., & Ghosh, P. S. (2011). Commercialization of agricultural land and waterbodies and disempowerment of the poor in Bangladesh: An exploratory study (p. 16). Dhaka: Association for Land Reform and Development (ALRD). Basu, M., Hoshino, S.,  & Hashimoto, S. (2015). Many issues, limited responses: Coping with water insecurity in rural India. Water Resources and Rural Development, 5, 47–63. Bernstein, H. (2001). “The peasantry” in global capitalism: Who, where and why? Socialist Register, 37. Bernstein, H. (2016). Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: The contributions of food regime analysis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 611–647. Chowdhury, T.,  & Haggblade, S. (2000). Dynamics and politics of policy change. In R. Ahmed, S. Haggblade, & T. Chowdhury (Eds.), Out of the shadows of famine: Evolving food markets and food policy in Bangladesh (pp. 165–185). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cote, M.,  & Nightingale, A. (2012). Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research. Progress in Human Geography, 36(4), 475–489. Eckstein, D., Künzel, V., Schäfer, L., & Winges, M. (2019). Global climate risk index 2020: Who suffers most from extreme weather events? Weather-related loss in 2018 and 1999 to 2018. Germanwatch.org. Retrieved August  9, 2020, from https://germanwatch.org/ sites/germanwatch.org/files/20-2-01e%20Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%20 2020_10.pdf Elahi, K., & Ara, I. (2008). Understanding the Monga in Northern Bangladesh. Dhaka: Academic Press and Publishers Library. Ensor, J., Mohan, T., Forrester, J., Kanti-Khisa, M.,  & Karim, U. T. (forthcoming). Revealing patterns of resilience: A  subjective approach to ranking and explaining household resilience applied to the case of rural Bangladesh. Global Environmental Change. Garikipati, S. (2009). Landless but not assetless: Female agricultural labour on the road to better status, evidence from India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(3), 517–545. GoB [Government of Bangladesh].  (2013).  National agriculture policy. Dhaka: Ministry of Agriculture. Guérin, I. (2013). Bonded labour, agrarian changes and capitalism: Emerging patterns in South India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(3), 405–423.

Routes to food security  69 Gurung, K., Bhandari, H.,  & Paris, T. (2016). Transformation from rice farming to ­commercial aquaculture in Bangladesh: Implications for gender, food security, and livelihood. Gender, Technology and Development, 20(1), 49–80. Harrison, E.,  & Chiroro, C. (2017). Differentiated legitimacy, differentiated resilience: Beyond the natural in “natural disasters”. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(5), 1022–1042. Hossain, M., Lewis, D., Bose, M. L., & Chowdhury, A. (2003). Rice research, technological progress, and impacts on the poor: The Bangladesh case (summary report). EPTD Discussion Paper No. 110. Washington, DC: International Food Policy. Jabbar, M. A. (1978). Conceptual issues related to classification of land tenure systems in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Journal of Agricultural Economics, 1(1), 17–29. Kapadia, K. (1993). Mutuality and competition: Female landless labour and wage rates in Tamil Nadu. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 20(2), 296–316. Lerche, J., & Shah, A. (2018). Conjugated oppression within contemporary capitalism: Class, caste, tribe and agrarian change in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(5–6), 927–949. Matin, N., Forrester, J.,  & Ensor, J. (2018). What is equitable resilience?  World Development, 109, 197–205. Mazumder, M. S. U., & Wencong, L. (2012). Monga vulnerability in the Northern part of Bangladesh. African Journal of Agricultural Research, 7(3), 358–366. Mcloughlin, C. (2013). Helpdesk research report: Impact of microcredit interest rates on the poor (pp. 1–12). Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Governance and Social Development Resource Centre. Mia, M. A., & Lee, H. A. (2017). Mission drift and ethical crisis in microfinance institutions: What matters? Journal of Cleaner Production, 164, 102–114. Misra, M. (2017). Is peasantry dead? Neoliberal reforms, the state and agrarian change in Bangladesh. Journal of Agrarian Change, 17(3), 594–611. Mohan, T. D. (2015). Labour tying arrangements: An enduring aspect of agrarian capitalism in India (Doctoral dissertation). The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London. Nelson, D. R., & Finan, T. J. (2009). Praying for drought: Persistent vulnerability and the politics of patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil. American Anthropologist, 302–316. Paprocki, K., & Cons, J. (2014). Life in a shrimp zone: Aqua-and other cultures of Bangladesh’s coastal landscape. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1109–1130. Paul, S. K., Hossain, M. N., & Ray, S. K. (2013). Monga in northern region of Bangladesh: A study on people s survival strategies and coping capacities. Rajshahi University Journal of Life & Earth and Agricultural Sciences, 41, 41–56. Raihan, S., & Bidisha, S. H. (2018). Female employment stagnation in Bangladesh. Dhaka: The Asia Foundation and UK Aid. Rogaly, B. (1996). Explaining diverse labour arrangements in rural South Asia. In G. Rogers, K. Foti,  & L. Lauridsen (Eds.), The institutional approach to labour and development (pp. 102–139). London: Frank Cass. Roodman, D. (2010).  Quick: What’s the Grameen bank’s interest rate? Center for Global Development. Retrieved September  8, 2020, from www.cgdev.org/blog/ quick-whats-grameen-banks-interest-rate Taylor, M. (2015). The political ecology of climate change adaptation: Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. London and New York: Routledge. Vasseur, L. (2015). Adaptation and resilience in the face of climate change: Protecting the conditions of emergence through good governance. Brief for GSDR. Retrieved August 15, 2020, from

70  Taneesha Mohan https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/6579124-Vasseur-Adapta tion%20and%20resilience%20in%20the%20face%20of%20climate%20change.pdf World Bank. (2018). Bangladesh disaster risk and resilience program. Retrieved October  10, 2019, from www.worldbank.org/en/country/bangladesh/brief/bangladesh-disaster-riskclimate-change-program

Part 2

Adaptation

5 Old ways and new routes Climate threats and adaptive possibilities in the Indian Himalayas Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni Introduction: climate threats and adaptive possibilities This chapter takes us to the Indian Himalayas where people belonging to the Gaddi Scheduled Tribe customarily practised a dual-livelihood strategy that combines small-scale subsistence agriculture with nomadic herding of sheep and goats. In the state of Himachal Pradesh, Gaddi agro-pastoralism is a longstanding system that is adapted to an environmental niche subject to significant seasonal variation and climatic volatility. In recent decades, the exposure of Gaddi households to environmental risk – storms, flash floods, landslips, and drought  – has intensified as a result of climate change. As elsewhere, in the Indian Himalayas heightened environmental vulnerability is set against a wider context of market-integration and state-making processes. This chapter situates households’ responses to the climate shocks in the twenty-first century against a historical context of colonial land settlement and resource extraction, the top-down technocratic interventions favoured by a developmental state, and the imbalanced economic relationships promoted as India has aligned itself to a neoliberal economic order. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Himachal Pradesh’s Chamba District, we show alterations in Gaddi households’ orientation to market, state, and environment have heightened exposure to the impacts of climate change, while, simultaneously, allowing for possibilities to manage vulnerability either by adjusting customary practices or through diversifying into new working arrangements. Though able to demonstrate adaptive capacity, there are clear limits in the forms of agency which Gaddis can draw upon. Drawing details from two village case studies, we examine how riskspreading strategies deployed by many families drive them towards greater reliance on precarious forms of labour and unequal exchange.1 With official reports and technical assessments often implicating climate change directly as a cause of agrarian distress and vulnerability,2 this chapter responds to calls for climate change impacts and adaptation to be conceptualised relationally with full regard to the particular unequal power structures within which subordinate groups are incorporated (Natarajan, Brickell, & Parsons, 2019, p.  902; Taylor, 2015, p.  86). In response, we argue that Gaddis’ livelihood strategies require the navigation of political and economic landscapes

74  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni

as much as physical ones; highlighting the need for climate adaptation to be understood in such terms. The chapter proceeds in two sections. The first section charts the historical contexts of agro-pastoral livelihood strategies in the western Himalayas. Going beyond immediate environmental hazards, we follow Orlove (2009, pp. 160– 161) in understanding climate impacts as both deriving from and contributing to existing vulnerabilities, and Ribot (2011, p. 1160) in recognising these vulnerabilities as fundamentally produced through adverse incorporation into systems of market production and exchange that are national and global in reach. At the same time, we acknowledge the uneven and contingent penetration of market and state relations into the vertical landscapes of the western Himalayas; and explore how resulting entanglements permit space for the agro-pastoralist Gaddi to exercise a degree of room for manoeuvre. The second section of the chapter provides two detailed case studies that highlight the Gaddis’ capacity to adjust when confronted by the adverse impacts of climate change. Adopting a grounded and localised perspective,3 the first case study shows how, given the limited impact of affirmative action schemes, nomadic shepherds have adjusted practices and patterns of movement in response to, and in some instances, to take advantage of, climate change impacts. The second case study highlights different types of adaptive possibilities: with commercial agricultural production vulnerable to environmental threats, villagers have diversified into new forms of work that take them back to the high Himalayas. Together these case studies illustrate the means by which Gaddi families have been able to modify customary practices while, simultaneously, working to navigate their incorporation into labour and exchange regimes oriented around the needs of neoliberal capitalism. In demonstrating how environmental, economic and political forces combine to shape the transformation of livelihood strategies, we see how Gaddi people have been restrained by policies of settlement whilst also being compelled to follow new, precarious routes through landscapes subjected to the impacts of climate breakdown. As such, we argue, “adaptation” is shown to be a relational and politically contingent process, compelling this nomadic community to engage with expanding markets in new and uncertain ways.

Navigating physical and political landscapes in the Western Himalayas There is a story4 about a procession of gods seeking to cross the ice-bound Himalayas. Finding their way blocked by snowdrifts, Shiva, the most powerful god, produced a flock of sheep and goats which walked ahead to clear a path. Shiva then took a pinch of dirt from his skin and out of it fashioned the first Gaddi man and the first Gaddi woman and tasked them with ensuring the flock were properly cared for. Thus, the Gaddis found a home for themselves in the Himalayas, where they survived by combining small-scale agriculture with the keeping of sheep and goats. With altitude placing severe  limits on

Old ways and new routes  75

the possibilities for farming, combination of subsistence agriculture and transhumant pastoralism allowed Gaddis to take advantage of seasonal variability by migrating with flocks of sheep and goats and by shifting between winter villages and summer homes higher up. However, there are limits to flexibility of movement – economic and political transformations over the last century, combined with recent alterations in weather patterns and climatic unpredictability, pose particular challenges for Gaddi households. In this section we outline how Gaddi livelihood strategies must navigate landscapes spanning the physical, social and political, and detail how official attempts to restrict movement and settle people onto land have curtailed the space available for agency in the face of environmental and climatic change. Gaddi pastoral movement is the largest scale transhumance of sheep and goats in the entire Himalayan region (Tucker, 1986). Shepherds travel with their flocks from low-lying winter pastures (ban) in Punjab, up through home villages in the Kangra and Chamba Valleys to spend the summer sheltering from the monsoon rains at high-pastures (dhar) in the upper parts of the Chamba or in Lahaul to the north. Snow and frost in the high ranges, and heavy rain and heat in the low, make it impossible to carry on sheep-farming on a tolerably large scale with success in any one part of the country. The only way is to change ground with the seasons, spending the winter in the forests in the low hills, retreating in the spring before the heat up the sides of the snowy range, and crossing and getting behind it to avoid the heavy rains in the summer. (Lyall, 1874, p. 46) Alternating through this series of seasonally limited niches, transhuman nomadism allowed Gaddi shepherds to exploit grazing resources across a series of altitude zones subject to significant climatic variation (Bhasin, 1988). The migratory cycle of Gaddi flocks is oriented around villages in the Chamba and Kangra Valley (see Figure 5.1). From each flock-owning family, one or two men migrate with the flock while other household members stay year-round at “home” where, customarily, they tend to the fields. Land holdings were and are generally small, as altitude limits the possibilities for farming and winter crops are imperilled by the possibility of late snow. Farming is still based on rainfed-irrigation and thus is dependent on the timing and quality of summer and winter monsoons. In this marginal and climatically variable region, few households are able to meet subsistence requirements from their farming or shepherding alone. To view Gaddis either as being primarily shepherds or primarily farmers obscures the interdependence of these activities. With summer and winter crops sufficient to cover basic food requirements, the keeping of animals provides wool, meat and, when sold, a source of cash. Maintaining a flock traditionally provided a vital safety net in an uncertain and marginal environment where crops could fail with a poor monsoon and animals might be lost to storms, landslips,

76  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni

Figure 5.1 Routes of Gaddi shepherds in Chamba, Kangra, and Kullu Bharmour; image taken by Axelby (1/4/2016) from Forest and Tribal Culture Awareness Centre, Bharmour, Chamba District, H.P.

bear or leopard attacks, or disease. The combination of shepherding and agriculture diversified livelihood options as a means of spreading risk. Looking beyond the determining influences of the mountain environment of the western Himalayas, Gaddis’ nomadic movement exists within a shifting

Old ways and new routes  77

web of relationships  – with settled farmers and landowners, with buyers of meat and wool, and with the state in the form of forest guards and revenue collectors. Based on the exploitation of a series of narrow climatic, geographic, economic, political and social niches, Gaddi agro-pastoralist livelihood strategies are sensitive to change in any one of these areas. A historical review of changes introduced under colonial rule, in the post-independence period, and the neoliberal India of the twenty-first century, demonstrates a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between land, people, market and state. Colonial attempts to impose order on the “unruly” landscapes of the western Himalayas saw the systematic mapping, measurement and demarcation of forest and cultivable land across the region (Bhattacharya, 2019; Chhatre, 2000, p. 4). Settled tenurial regimes of private and state property were at odds with customary collective arrangements that permitted temporal and spatial flexibility: “the shepherds” scope to react to climatic and environmental change, to adjust temporally and spatially, was severely constrained’ (Kaul, 1996, p. 107). With tenure established in ways that enabled the state to levy taxes on landowners, official policy encouraged the expansion of commercial agriculture, including, following Independence, efforts to promote horticulture and cash crops in Chamba District. Finding their nomadic movement restricted, and poorly placed to benefit from intensified agricultural production, Gaddi households were severely disadvantaged in the new agrarian order of post-independence Himachal Pradesh. In an attempt to compensate for the loss of access to natural resources, state-promoted developmental efforts were established to provide educational and occupational opportunities, deliver subsidised food programmes, and extend road connections to remote and “backwards” tribal areas (Axelby, 2017). If land could be developed, then so too would be people. In 1950, on account of their unique culture, their geographical isolation and the “backwardness” of their traditional nomadic occupation, the Gaddis of Chamba district were granted Scheduled Tribe status (Lokur & Pande, 1965) Recognising that “the weaker sections of the people” were deserving of assistance, the official category of Scheduled Tribe (ST) is part of a nation-wide ­system of affirmative action which sought to improve the social, educational and economic position of tribal communities and integrate them into a notional ­mainstream. The upper part of the Chamba Valley  – the Gaddi homeland known as Gaddern – was designated a tribal subdistrict with enhanced budgets for education and infrastructure provision. Even so, members of Scheduled Tribes in Chamba District were over-represented among those living below the poverty line and among the poorest of the poor. Here, the agro-pastoral Gaddi have long suffered from disproportionately low incomes per capita and perform poorly on multidimensional human development indicators, including child mortality and literacy (Axelby, 2017). Here we have described the extension into the Western Himalayas of a developmental state that sought to promote land settlement, scientific forestry, enclosure of wastes, agricultural commercialisation, intensification of resource use, land redistribution, mechanisation of farming, education, the building

78  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni

of roads and bridges, and the extension of chemical fertilisers and new High Yield Variety [HYV] seeds. Across a century of colonial rule, both the centralplanning era of the post-independence decades and, more recently, the largescale withdrawal of state interventions in favour of neoliberal market-driven approaches, polices have been driven by shared calculations about the control of territory, the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of labour (Taylor, 2015, p. 5; Moore, 2010). Collectively, the changes outlined in this section – the settlement of land and scheduling of people – brought about a radical reconfiguration of the relationships that Gaddis living in the Chamba Valley have with the environment. Against this historical background, the impacts of climatic change in this ecologically sensitive and climatically variable region have further complicated the matrices of risk and vulnerability to which Gaddi households are subject. The Himalayas are recognised as a region where the ongoing climate emergency is having disproportionate impacts (INCCA, 2010). In comparison to average global air temperature increases of 0.5°C–1.1°C over the last century, the North Western Himalayan region has warmed by as much as 1.6°C (Bhutiyani, Kale,  & Pawar, 2008). In an analysis of long-term changes in surface temperature in Indian states from 1951 to 2010, Rathore, Attri, and Jaswal (2013) report that the highest increase in annual mean maximum temperatures was observed over Himachal Pradesh (+0.06°C/year). The effects of climate change are visibly apparent in the melting of icefields and glaciers.5 Snow falls have decreased, both in quantity and duration (Bhan  & Singh, 2011). Concerning rains in the Indian Himalaya region, studies report that the total quantity has been reduced over the last century (Prasad & Sharma, 2016) but that monthly rainfall shows a mixture of rising and falling trends. More studies agree that, in recent decades, Himachal Pradesh has experienced increasing trends in pre-monsoon and winter rains, together with a decreasing of annual monsoon and post monsoon seasons (Jaswal, Bhan, Karandikar, & Gujar, 2015; Bhutiyani, Kale, & Pawar, 2010; Rathore et al., 2013). Surveys conducted in our two study villages reflected how the meteorological data is being experienced on the ground. In Upala village at the heart of Gaddern, villagers observe that snowfall has decreased in quantity especially but also in timing. While only 30  years ago, the village was under four or five feet of snow for up to half the year, now the snowbound months have shortened to one or two each year and falls rarely exceed two or three feet. The dense fog of the monsoon has become a rarity – these months are now characterised by heavy rainstorms interspersed by days of drizzle. Outside of the monsoon, it is reported that rainfall is heavier during the winter, and preand post-monsoon months. The sense of an increase in climatic irregularities, during and among seasons, is repeated in reports from lower Chamba’s Nichla village; our second study village. Here villagers have experienced an increase in snowfall in winter months and unseasonal storms throughout the year. At the same time, the monsoon rains are observed to have become markedly less reliable in timing and extent. As temperature and precipitation rise, so too

Old ways and new routes  79

do the intensity and irregularity of climate events. Flash floods wipe out terraced fields; unseasonal droughts reduce the water upon which flocks and crops depend. While acknowledging that it is difficult to attribute particular weather events to anthropogenic climate change, it is undeniable that human and natural systems in Himachal Pradesh are undergoing unprecedented alterations. Communities who depend most heavily on natural resources for subsistence livelihoods are likely to be the first and most affected by climate change. With their customary reliance on rainfed agriculture and transhumant pastoralism, Gaddis in Himachal Pradesh have been left uniquely exposed (Aryal, Cockfield, & Maraseni, 2014). “Climate change is an expression of deeper and often harder to grasp socioecological relationships” (Pelling, 2011, p.  176). This section has reviewed the deeper historical processes and structural inequalities against which contemporary climate change vulnerabilities in the western Himalayas have been produced. Following Orlove (2009, pp.  160–161) in understanding climate impacts as deriving from and contributing to existing vulnerabilities, we recognise how impacts and the possibilities for adaptation are reproduced within overlapping structures of power that operate at different spatial scales (Taylor, 2015; Ribot, 2011, p. 1160). Operating from a position of economic and political marginality, Gaddi households have simultaneously been subjected to official pressure to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, while at the same time being pulled by economic compulsion towards deeper integration into global markets. In the next section we offer case studies of two different villages – one in the upper part of the Chamba Valley near Bharmour and one at a lower altitude close to the district headquarters at Chamba Town. In doing so we adopt a broadly ethnographic methodology that highlights the practices, experiences and perspectives of people as they are subjected to change and as they respond to reduce their vulnerability (Fiske et al., 2014, p. 10). This approach allows us to recognise the uneven and contingent nature of market and state penetration into the western Himalayas and the emergence of new spaces in which Gaddi people may deploy literal and metaphorical room for manoeuvre.

Impacts, resilience, and adaptive possibilities Rather than present a simplistic binary divide between local people dependent on access to natural resources and powerful, monolithic forces of state and market, this chapter takes seriously climatic and environmental factors as independent variables playing an active role in shaping livelihood possibilities in the western Himalayas. Having outlined the radical reconfiguration of both the physical setting and the socio-political structures that frame the conditions in which people live, we now consider the capacity of Gaddi households to respond. In these case studies we see how adaptation extends beyond responses to alterations in natural environment such as air temperature or water supply, to consider the operation and constraints of rural labour markets, educational provision, agricultural economics, and government policies including land

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reform, agricultural extension efforts, infrastructure promotion, welfare provision including subsidised food programmes, and reservation of jobs. Adaptation is therefore shown to be rooted in relational dynamics which both prevent and enable forms of adaptive agency, and politically contingent, as Gaddi community members navigate their integration into regional markets, and the (re) shaping of their livelihoods through state policies.

Case study 1:  Upala village in Upper Chamba (altitude 2300 metres) In a narrow tributary valley of the Budhil river, Upala is a nucleus of about 60 houses lying at 2300 metres above sea level among patches of pine trees. Villagers narrate that Upala was settled by families who arrived in Gaddern in the seventeenth century. Under the rule of the Chamba Rajas, land could be turned for farming with the permission of the state. Seeking good land at different altitudes, over the centuries, repeated generations of Gaddis expanded cultivation across the hill sides around Upala by digging, sometimes in places quite far from their family home, small terraced fields sustained by stone walls. The upper part of the Chamba Valley – the Gaddi homeland known as Gaddern  – is designated a tribal subdistrict entitled to enhanced budgets for education and infrastructure provision. In 2005 a new road connected Upala village to Bharmour town. Increased connectivity has brought a host of social, political, economic changes and, as villagers opine, climatic ones. And since the road’s construction has been concomitant with improved investment in youth education, it has arguably also exacerbated the disillusionment of younger Gaddi generations in a context where occupational opportunities outside the village are scarce. Between heightened expectations, persistent unemployment, and the expansion of transport infrastructure, families living in Upala are suspended in a politics of waiting for a promised future, and the possibility of adapting pastoralism and subsistence agriculture to current pressures. Without exception, families in Upala practice agriculture  – typical ­landholdings range from 50 m² to 200 m². Given the severity of winters, all but a few of Upala’s villagers would, until as recently as a decade back, leave the village for lower altitude homes elsewhere in the Chamba Valley or to the south in Kangra or Punjab. By contrast, today villagers express the view that the warming climate, coupled with the road

Old ways and new routes  81 construction, has actually reduced the village’s isolation  – many families now remain in Upala throughout the year. Barley is grown in winter; maize and beans during summer. Over the last decade, land has been turned over to the production of apples and beans which are exported to cities in Himachal Pradesh and further afield. And yet, overall, the shift towards commercial agriculture remains partial. Now, as in the past, production is mostly destined for domestic consumption; despite the availability of subsided hybrid seeds and food grains, families continue to sow desi (local) crops which they say taste better than imported varieties. Agriculture retains its role, but it is generally agreed that farming is undertaken with less enthusiasm than in the past. While two decades ago all land in the vicinity of Upala was cultivated, today on average a quarter of families’ fields are left empty. The dispersal of fields over a wide area, their small size, the increase in formal education and the provision of subsided grain rations are cited as factors behind this decline. In this context, farmers report rising instances of crop failure that are directly attributable to climate events. This is especially true for the summer crop which is impacted by prolonged dry spells favouring pest invasion, and by the increased frequency and intensity of violent storms. On the other hand, warmer temperatures favour the growth of foreign vegetable varieties, and villagers have maintained flexibility through dynamic diversification into secondary crops. Demographic change, rising costs and low returns from agriculture have left families in Upala keen to diversify into other areas. A dozen have established small businesses, mainly in transport or commerce; other individuals have found employment in shops and hotels in Bharmour. But while connectivity has improved, this has not necessarily translated into their being able to take advantage of new occupational opportunities made available from education and the expanding economy. The Tribal Sub-District is well provisioned with schools, and as members of the Gaddi Scheduled Tribe, young people in Upala are able to take advantage of educational assistance and reservation quotas in schools and colleges. However, this has not necessarily translated into access to the “high jobs” with public or private employers that many young people dream of. As elsewhere in India, the number of government jobs that were once available to Gaddi ST candidates under the reservations policy is inadequate when compared to the scale of the unemployment problem amongst the SC and ST populations (Corbridge & Harriss, 2013). Only a few individuals – often using political connections – successfully obtain

82  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni prestige employment and they typically move out of Chamba along with their families. For those that remain, manual labour in the village is sporadically available: building houses or undertaking public works through the MGNREGA scheme.6 The promise of education and high jobs has persuaded many households in Upala to abandon their customary nomadic pastoralism – today only 14 out of 60 households are actively engaged in nomadic pastoralism, a pattern that is repeated in neighbouring villages. Yet, in the absence of alternatives, the keeping of sheep and goats remains surprisingly persistent. In August  2017, Bulgheroni joined a herder from Upala village who had spent two months at summer grazing pastures in Lahaul. The young man was travelling back to Upala with two other herders from Bharmour and their flock of six hundred sheep and goats. With temperatures in Lahaul dropping, and monsoon rains in retreat, the herders were returning to their village homes as part of the great downward migration to winter pastures in Punjab. The route from the summer grazing meadows in Lahaul to the village commons in Bharmour initially follows the river course, continues up the valley to reach the glacier, then climbs steeply to the Upala pass – a narrow passage between huge rocks. The rocky moraine surrounding the glacier is a visible sign of its retreat and is particularly apparent on the northern Lahauli side of the pass. The journey is punctuated by possible stopping points (goth) where herders can stay for the night. The decision of where and when to stop depends on the position of the sun, the meteorological conditions, and on the other groups of herders walking in front or behind. When drizzle set in on the second day of the journey, the group had to stop at the lowest goth – a big rock under which it is possible to start a fire. The plan had been to reach the final goth below the glacier, and to be in a position to cross the pass the following morning. But with the rain making the path slippery and dangerous, it was preferable to wait. A second group of herders reached the camping place and announced that they had received a phone call from a relative in Bharmour forecasting rain. Shepherds know that when it rains in Bharmour, it snows on the pass. A delay was necessary. The following day, the shepherds left late when the sun was already high, walked only for a few hours, and crossed the river on an ice bridge before finally reaching the upper part of the moraine where the flock halted for the night. The next morning, before the first rays of light had touched the tips of the peaks, the flock were already walking on the glacier. Herders carried

Old ways and new routes  83 several litres of water and a dozen chapati for the Goddess, whose territory they were entering and who had the final word on the outcome of their crossings. Other herds followed; delayed by the previous day’s rain well over a thousand animals were now jammed under the steepest part of the glacier. Here a path on the snow needed to be carved with axes to allow animals through. But the number of animals crossing simultaneously muddied the ice which melted as the sun rose. Two goats fell from the path, but managed to climb up again, scared by the fall and by the loud encouragements of the shepherds. If the flocks had reached the pass when it was snowing, they risked becoming trapped. Going down on Bharmour side, several dead animals were conserved in the ice  – reminders of less lucky crossings. Altered environmental and economic contexts have heightened conflicts over access to grazing and water across the western Himalayas. In the low-lying areas close to the Punjab border, urban extension, the intensification of agriculture, alterations in cropping patterns and environmental degradation have reduced grazing space and vegetation quality. Additionally, shepherds have to content with animal theft, aggressions from drivers on the road and mushrooming construction around towns. Shepherds report that rising temperatures have affected the quality of grassland and, consequently, animals’ health. Dry monsoons and unseasonal storms have left soils drier or covered in mud; a warmer climate favours the expansion of noxious plants and pushes their growth towards higher altitudes. As the account of the journey over the Upala Pass shows, risks are heighted during migration between summer and winter pastures, owing to the melting of glaciers and storms leading to landslides and rockfalls, off-season rains and strong winds in Lahaul. These events and processes test herders’ capacity for improvisation. In response to these changes, shepherds have increased the percentage of goats in their herd since, compared to sheep, they can better avoid noxious plants. In addition, evidence shows a doubling of variations in small movements among winter grazing lands compared to two decades ago – an effective strategy to compensate for scant availability of vegetation. Without exception herders report that, whereas 20 years ago they could graze in the same land for about two weeks, today they must shift to the next land after five or six days. Recognising climate change as manifesting in complex and contradictory ways that vary within and across locations, shepherds report impacts at higher altitudes as being less severe and, to some extent, as advantageous. Overall reduction

84  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni in snowfall has increased the duration during which alpine meadows are available for grazing. Taking advantage of the shortening of snowy months, herders now anticipate an earlier arrival and up to an extra month spent at the luxuriant high pastures of Gaddern and Lahaul. Both at winter and summer grazing lands, and when moving between them, Gaddi shepherds have proven able to adjust spatially and temporally to changes in grazing resource availability. This might explain how migratory pastoralism continues but we need to look at its integration into the market economy to understand why. Despite compound difficulties, mobile pastoralism in Upala village and in Gaddern as a whole has proven to be surprisingly tenacious. Why would this be? Whereas until the end of the 1970s, animals and wool were mainly exchanged with other products or services, transport connections to urban consumers mean that today animals are sold in large quantities to butchers in Bharmour as well as to traders from Delhi, Punjab and Jammu  & Kashmir. Urbanisation and changing consumption habits have therefore assured the continuity of this customary activity. Though the environmental niches in which pastoralism operates are undergoing dramatic alterations, including a heightening of risks and difficulty, changes in economic calculus have persuaded many families to maintain small flocks of sheep and goats which are sent away to migrate seasonally between summer and winter pastures. Embracing capitalist logics, the keeping of sheep and goats has transformed into an investment opportunity. The opening of opportunities to sell meat to an expanding urban market has brought changes in the way in which grazing resources are accessed and the employment of labour to travel with the flock (Axelby, 2007, 2016). Though a smaller proportion of families in Gaddern have members that travel with the flock, the profitability of shepherding has encouraged households to place their animals under the care of professional shepherds who are paid in cash or kind to maintain the migratory cycle – in effect ownership and workforce have separated. Though shepherding is not considered an attractive occupation, for some – young men waiting for better opportunities to arrive, or as a lifelong occupation for those lacking educational qualifications – it remains profitable and hence is preferable to other kinds of uncertain, temporary and precarious work available elsewhere. Leaving Upala we turn now to a second village, lower in altitude and closer to the District Capital but more exposed to the uncertainties of agricultural and labour markets.

Old ways and new routes  85

Case study 2:  Nichla village in Lower Chamba (altitude 1100 metres) In the lower part of the Chamba valley, the village of Nichla is a tight cluster of 11 households set amidst terraced fields under a hill-side thick with oak and deodar. Below the fields there is an abrupt drop to the river and to the road. At 1200 metres above sea level, the land produces two crops each year – the staples are maize, which is harvested in late September, and wheat, which grows through the winter months and is harvested in April. On first sight Nichla village gives the appearance of timeless simplicity: family farms and terraced fields supported by rain-fed irrigation. However, on closer examination a more complete picture emerges: this village is newer than it initially appears, and the Gaddi families living there are subjected to forces  – economic, political and climatic  – that reach beyond the local and national to become global in extent. Having used the example of Upala to examine impacts of climate change on shepherding and demonstrate the capacity to respond, Nichla village illustrates the adaptive possibilities for agriculture in the face of risk, and a shift into seasonal labour in an attempt to compensate for the loss of migratory flocks. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a wave of out-migration from the Gaddi heartland around Bharmour. Some – including the ancestors of the families living in Nichla  – moved to the low hills above the Raja’s capital (Noble, 1987). Continuing to combine nomadic shepherding and agriculture, these pioneers were able to establish themselves in the area by agreeing to hand over half their crops as rent to members of the Raja’s court and wealthy business families. Though this change of residence opened up a new niche for pastoralism – shepherds in the lower villages could shift their flocks up to their upper village homes each summer – the ability to produce two crops from the land near the river allowed the Gaddi families living in and around Nichla to begin the transition away from nomadic pastoralism. Sedentarisation was the stated aim of over a century of government policy: marginal tribal people living in remote locations and following nomadic occupations should be integrated into the mainstream of economic and political life. The sedentarisation process was further accelerated when the HP Tenancy and Land Reform Act of 1972 forced owners to hand over their land to the families who farmed it (Bhatnagar, 1981). By the late 1990s all of the families in Nichla had made the decision to abandon mobile pastoralism, though, it

86  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni should be noted, most continued to keep a number of animals that could be grazed locally. In the post-independence decades villagers benefitted from the provision of food rations through the public distribution system in the 1970s, the delivery of piped water in the ’80s, and the arrival of electricity in the 1990s. But the most significant change was the widening of new income sources. Whilst in previous times agriculture had been carried out primarily for subsistence, the metalling of roads and improved communication links now allowed for the transportation of produce for sale at market. The shift towards commercial agriculture was further promoted by the distribution of government subsidised rice which replaced maize as the dietary staple. A variety of vegetables – including tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower – are now grown in Nichla. However, the move towards commercial production exposed households to market volatility at the same time as climatic variation brought new unpredictability and threats to crop yields.7 A sensitivity to environmental change is clearly evident in Nichla, especially with regard to the heightening of risk caused by climate change and discussions about how best to minimise impacts. Observed parameters of environmental change in lower Chamba include the loss of various tree species, the drying of long-established water sources, increases in pest populations, and changes in bird types and populations. More concerning to the farmers of Nichla is the increased vulnerability of crops due to drought, landslides and the increased incidence and intensity of rainstorms which are directly attributed to climate change. “When we need rain there is not enough, and when we don’t need it there is too much” is a common refrain which summarises the difficulties faced by farming-families dependent on rain-fed irrigation. Wise hands tell you that the first day in any crop’s life is the most important day, but uncertainty makes it difficult to judge the optimal time to sow. If sufficient rain doesn’t arrive in June the maize crop doesn’t grow, later in the season it is particularly vulnerable to damage from wind and rain. In September 2018 a particularly violent storm tore through this part of the Chamba valley and wiped out almost the entire harvest in a matter of minutes. Winter rain and snowfall are observed to have become more frequent – the ground becomes saturated leading to landslides that take fields and houses with them. Damage to crops and settlements result in severe economic loss for farming households. In Nichla, as in Upala, diversification into new varieties is a response to the heightening of risk. Additionally, farmers adjust sowing times in

Old ways and new routes  87 response to meteorological events and make decisions on how much to sow according to their perception of meteorological conditions. Farmers increasingly rely on the purchase of pesticides and herbicides to ensure a successful harvest. But little can be done in the case of storms and landslides, and flexibility in crop diversification also has limits. Land-poor Gaddi households are constrained in their ability to move away from maize production – maize is not just a cash crop but also provides stalks to feed draft animals and husks that are burnt for heat in the cold winter months. Having abandoned mobile pastoralism in favour of settled farming, the families of Nichla find themselves exposed to increasingly uncertain weather conditions. Compared to the wealthier non-tribal households8 in the area around Nichla, Gaddi families’ dependence on rain-fed agriculture and the production of maize and wheat means they bear a disproportion degree of vulnerability to climatic and market uncertainty. In response to the heightened risks posed by climate change and agricultural market variability, the families of Nichla are continually having to diversify their activities and spread risk by pursuing a range of options that include agricultural and non-agricultural labour. In lower Chamba, Gaddis are a minority and – even more than those living in the tribal subdistrict – they lack the social, political and economic assets need to gain employment in good government jobs. As a result, they are pushed towards combinations of income-earning activities which, being temporary and precarious, they label “petty work”. These forms of work extend from rural to urban settings with migration outside of Chamba and Himachal Pradesh for varying periods of time. Many Gaddis now must leave their village homes and travel seasonally in search of work building roads or labouring on hydro projects. Moving beyond nomadism, these new forms of migration have become an increasingly important – though temporary, precarious and irregular  – component of household livelihood strategies that combine agriculture and livestock rearing with local and non-local wage labour. “Project work” is generally obtained through labour contractors who recruit for work on hydropower projects and road building programmes elsewhere in Himachal Pradesh. The daily wage rates may be high – up to three times the state minimum wage/MGNREGA rate – but the work can be difficult and dangerous and the living conditions rough. Those labourers who leave Chamba to work on projects often live in very basic accommodation – parachute tents or stone huts – especially when making roads in remote mountainous areas. These new forms of seasonal

88  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni migration clash with the agricultural calendar – workers are drawn away in April-May and September-October when the demand for labour in the village is most acute. There is, in fact, a long history of labour migration into the Himalayas for road construction. The border roads were constructed by a seasonal migrant labour force drawn from Jharkhand, Bihar and other states. But for the Gaddi families of lower Chamba the need to migrate in search of work is a relatively recent phenomenon. In September 2014 Axelby visited a temporary camp below the remote Sach pass where several men from Nichla village were employed to repair the mountain road. It took six hours and three buses to arrive at Bhairagarh – the final village on the Sach pass road over the Pir Pangal range. Walking a further ten kilometres brought us to Kalaban where a tractor at the side of the road marked the site of the road-builders’ camp. Behind the tractor a blue tarpaulin covered a store of picks, crowbars and heavy hammers. Just below the road we found a stone-walled hut, with space to sleep ten people. The roof was made of timber planks and a yellow tarpaulin held down by large stones. To one side a kitchen space had been established from another tarpaulin roof and a couple of aluminium sheets as a windbreak. Aside from a single Nepali labourer all were from Nichla or surrounding villages in the lower Chamba valley. After the sun dropped behind the ridge it became very cold very quickly. The workers huddled around the campfire to eat dal and rice, then slept under blankets in the door-less hut. The next morning, as the sun flooded the valley, they ate parathas and drank more black tea. After some time, they walked back to the buttress they were tasked with constructing. One worker took a lump hammer to a large boulder while another used a metal pole to pry it open. They explained that they were building a buttress to stabilise a section where the hillside is particularly steep. Though the work was hard, all agreed that that pay was more than adequate compensation for being away from home. The Gaddi men at Kalaban joked that this new line of work duplicated the nomadic traditions of their grandfathers: leaving home to live for months at a time at remote mountain passes where the work was hard and physical but not without reward. As described by Urry (2016, p.  21), from the final years of the last century, neoliberalism ratcheted up global processes of movement – the transport of goods and people – enabled by oil. The example of Nichla – the promotion of cash crop production for markets, intensification of land

Old ways and new routes  89 use, and the search for wage labour  – shows how global processes affect local contexts. Thrown into this context, climate change impacts have heightened the calculus of risk and reward for households already precariously reliant on combinations of small-scale agriculture and local wage labour. There is no road to Nichla village, and none of the inhabitants owns a car, but working to make roads, these grandsons of shepherds are now tightly bound up in a high-carbon socio-economy that drives climate change. Their strategies to adapt to the changing climate are entangled within the new economic and political realities that have reshaped their lives, rendering their integration into markets a politically contingent choice and constraint. Climate change alone cannot explain the balancing of risk that led the Upala shepherds to drive their flocks over the high passes. And the workers from Nichla were drawn to Kalaban in part by demographic change, their position at the bottom of the social hierarchy and their economic marginality. But as the cases of Nichla and Upala demonstrate, understanding of adaptive responses in the face of the ruptures caused by a changing climate are best advanced with proper consideration of the ways in which control over land and labour, and engagements with state and market, are historically shaped and hierarchically ordered.

Conclusion: running the gauntlet A British settlement officer who surveyed the Western Himalayas in the 1860s described the obstacles facing Gaddi shepherds when moving between their winter bans and summer dhars: I have heard old shepherds say . . . it was like running the gauntlet to convey a flock across the low country to its ban. Every petty official or influential landowner tried to extort something as the flock passed him. A mild man was easily daunted and had no chance so the Gaddis picked out their ugliest customers for the work. (Lyall, 1874, p. 48) Like the story of the divinely created flock that opened a path through the snow, this account speaks to the Gaddis’ long-standing ability to find a way through political obstacles and challenges, their capacity for adaptation, and their ability to scratch out a precarious living in a remote and hazardous landscape. In this chapter we have brought these stories up to date – looking at how Gaddi households in different locations have, in different ways, reacted to changes in

90  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni

economic and political context in combination with recent changes in climatic conditions. Attempts to bind Gaddis to a wider political e­ conomy – through education and reservation of Government jobs – have, at best, ­benefited only a privileged few. Despite the provision of roads, welfare measures, and subsidised food programmes; remoteness and marginality continue to define Gaddi lives. And contrary to development doctrines that emphasise settlement and market and political integration, it is in such spaces that the possibilities for alternative adaptation are located. Climate change produces ruptures and increases risk for livelihoods that are already precarious and peripheral. Our review of adaptive possibilities illustrates how Gaddis households have sought room for manoeuvre, first, by adjusting existing agricultural and pastoral production in response to uncertainty and, second, in seeking to spread risk by diversifying into new forms of work. In both instances, by conceptualising power as relational, we see how the experience of climate change is mediated through broader structures that promote extraction of produce and the exploitation of labour. Adjustment is possible in the sense of reducing vulnerability to climate change, but it comes at the cost of integration into commercial and labour relations on terms that are highly unequal. Recognition of the wider political and economic context demonstrates the limits of adaptation and the ways in which power relations shapes agency and economic mobility to its interests. Now, as in the past, Gaddi households seek to maintain an existence that combines the mobile with the settled and which incorporates shifting formulations of individual and collective endeavour across different landscape both close to home and far away. Now, as in the past, they are only able to do so by taking paths that reinforce their marginality and precarity and that leave them exposed to further changes in the physical and political environment.

Notes 1 The research on which this chapter draws was conducted by Bulgheroni and Axelby independently of one another. For Axelby’s fieldwork in lower Chamba, he lived in the village here called Nichla in 2015–16 with further visits in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Bulgheroni conducted fieldwork in upper Chamba including the village here called Upala in 2015, 2017, 2018. Both Bulgheroni and Axelby drew on a broadly ethnographic toolkit including participant observation, interviews, household surveys and archival research. 2 Examples, drawn from India and with reference to Himachal Pradesh, include: INCCA (2010) and Department of Environment, Science  & Technology, Government of Himachal Pradesh (2012). For an assessment of methodological shortcoming of vulnerability assessment methodologies contributing to India’s State Action Plan on Climate Change see Dhanapal and Panda (2014), and Dubash and Jogesh (2014). 3 Brace and Geoghegan (2011, p. 284); Fiske et al. (2014, p. 10). 4 As recorded by Noble (1987); and Kaushal (2001) 5 A study of the Manimahesh Glacier calculates that between 1971 and 2013 it retreated by 157 ± 34 m (4 ± 1 m year – 1) and estimated that the total area lost is at 0.21 ± 0.01 km2 (0.005 km2  year  – 1) www.researchgate.net/publication/282897662_Frontal_changes_ in_the_Manimahesh_and_Tal_Glaciers_in_the_Ravi_basin_Himachal_Pradesh_northwestern_Himalaya_India_between_1971_and_2013 (accessed 8th June 2020).

Old ways and new routes  91 6 A state programme established in 2005 which guarantees every rural household the right to 100 days of employment each year. 7 See Axelby 2018 for a fuller account of the development of Gaddi villages in lower Chamba in the post-independence period. 8 “Caste” Hindu families occupy better quality land and have greater coping capacity due to their ability to maintain irrigation through piped water, the provision of government backed insurance schemes, their lower degree of economic dependence on agricultural production and their ability to access other income earning opportunities.

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92  Richard Axelby and Maura Bulgheroni Fiske, S. J., Crate, S. A., Crumley, C. L., Galvin, K., Lazrus, H., Lucero, L., . . . Wilk, R. (2014). Changing the atmosphere: Anthropology and climate change. Final Report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force, 137. INCCA [Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment]. (2010). Climate change and India: A  4x4 assessment  – a sectoral and regional analysis for 2030s. New Delhi: Ministry of ­Environment and Forests, Government of India. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from www. indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/fin-rpt-incca.pdf Jaswal, A. K., Bhan, S. C., Karandikar, A. S., & Gujar, M. K. (2015). Seasonal and annual rainfall trends in Himachal Pradesh during 1951–2005. Mausam, 66(2), 247–264. Kaul, M. C. (1996). Common lands and customary law: Institutional change in North India over the past two centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaushal, M. (2001). Divining the landscape  – the Gaddi and his land.  India International Centre Quarterly, 27, 31–40. Lokur, B. N., & Pande, C. A. (1965). The report of the advisory committee on the revision of the lists of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. New Delhi: Department of Social Security. Lyall, J. B. (1874). Report of the land revenue settlement of the Kangra district, Punjab. Lahore: Central Jail Press. Moore, J. (2010). The end of the road? Agricultural revolutions in the capitalist world ecology, 1450–2010. Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(3), 389–413. Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., & Parsons, L. (2019). Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural  – urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a “climate precarity” approach. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 899–921. Noble, C. (1987). Over the high passes: A year in the Himalayas with the migratory Gaddi shepherds (No. 6). London: HarperCollins. Orlove, B. (2009). The past, the present and some possible futures of adaptation. In W. N. Adger, I. Lorenzoni, & K. O’Brien (Eds.), Adaptation to climate change: Thresholds, values, governance (pp. 131–163). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pelling, M. (2011). Adaptation to climate change: From resilience to transformation. London and New York: Routledge. Prasad, R., & Sharma, A. (2016). Spatial distribution of annual rainfall in Himachal Pradesh and its implication in farming. Himachal Journal of Agricultural Research, 42(2), 115–125. Rathore, L. S., Attri, S. D., & Jaswal, A. K. (2013). State level climate change trends in India. Environment Meteorology, 1(11). Ribot, J. (2011). Vulnerability before adaptation: Toward transformative climate action. Global Environmental Change, 21(4), 1160–1162. Taylor, M. (2015). The political ecology of climate change adaptation: Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. Abingdon: Routledge. Tucker, R. P. (1986). The evolution of transhumant grazing in the Punjab Himalaya. Mountain Research and Development, 6(1), 17–28. Urry, J. (2016). Complex systems and multiple: Crises of energy. In S. Crate & M. Nuttall (Eds.), Anthropology and climate change: From action to transformations. New York: Routledge.

6 From climate adaptation to social reproductive resistance Examining the gendered climate-labour migration nexus in Southeast Asian mobilisations for environmental justice Symon James-Wilson Introduction The deepening intricacies of global climate change have inspired new geographies and typologies of human migration. Historically narrow categorisations of migration (e.g. dichotomies such as voluntary/involuntary migration, circular/permanent migration, and economic/non-economic migration) have progressively fallen out of favour within academic literature and mainstream rhetoric. Instead, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners alike have gradually developed more multi-thematic and intersectional ways of conceptualising human movement. This shift has generated more complex understandings of mobility and immobility in particular. At the nexus of climate and labour, labour migration has increasingly been touted as a form of climate adaptation. Yet what has received less attention are the gendered implications of such mobile forms of adaptation. In particular, the need to gender this emerging climate-labour migration nexus has been particularly striking in Southeast Asia, where the feminisation of subsistence agriculture and the transnational migration of female migrant domestic workers have combined with several “natural” disasters (e.g. sea-level rise, aggressive resource extraction, and soil-degrading monocropping) to reveal a complicated politics of social and economic precarity (Chantavanich, Ito, Middleton, Chutikul, & Thatun, 2013; Huguet, 2013). In this moment, stereotypical migrant character tropes like the so-called Third World maid and the ill-adapted flood victim have come under greater scrutiny. Female climate-labour migrants’ dynamic claim-making and place-making practices have expanded to create a striking constellation at the intersection of participatory justice and social movements. This chapter examines the gendered climate-labour migration nexus through a trans-disciplinary lens. Supported by theory from labour studies, feminist geography, and environmental studies, and qualitative data that were collected from grassroots migrant organisers in Indonesia and the Philippines in 2015, I  argue that female climate-labour migrants’ social reproductive resistance challenges the historically limited view of mobile women as being either

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“vulnerable” (in the case of female labour migrants) or “apocalyptic” (in the case of female climate migrants). Rather, the evidence presented here suggests that social reproductive resistance has increasingly become a driving force in the socio-ecological transformations that are taking place in Southeast Asia and around the world. This analysis is centrally aimed at troubling the emphasis on distributional deficits (domination) in the forced migration literature and inviting more critical attention to the socially reproduced benefits of migration (resistance). It will proceed in four sections. First, it will outline the overarching framework of the gendered climate-labour migration nexus that this chapter seeks to achieve and the questions such a framework must be capable of answering. Second, it will undertake a four-part theoretical construction of this framework, drawing on ideas of gendering, environmental justice, the transnational and embodied politics of scale, and resilience in the pursuit of a framework capable of tackling these questions. In the third section, this framework will be brought to bear in the analysis of grassroots migrant organisation in Indonesia and the Philippines, after which the ideas developed in the course of the chapter will be drawn together in the course of the fourth, concluding, section. Framing the gendered climate-labour migration nexus

Human insecurity and planetary insecurity coincide at the intersection of economic and environmental forms of injustice. The disconcerting fixation on efficiency, continuous growth, and capital accumulation that drives late-stage capitalism’s privileging of profit over people has been used to legitimise new forms of (human) resource extraction and im/mobility (Massey, 1994). Most often, this has operated to liberalise the global circulation of mobile goods (e.g. food stuffs, technology, clothing) and to, simultaneously, place greater restrictions on the movement of mobile people such as refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented or irregular migrants (Elias, 2010; Sassen, 1991). The expansion of temporary work visa programmes, the obstruction of pathways to permanent residency and citizenship for so-called low-skilled migrants, and the defunding of social welfare programmes in the global North have worked to re-organise migration from global South “sending” countries within everstricter hierarchies of race, gender, and geography (Sassen, 1991). In addition, the endurance of colonial and capitalist socio-spatial organising principles has resulted in global inequity (Sassen, 2010). This unevenness has had detrimental consequences for many migrants, including economic exploitation via wage theft, human rights abuses, and, in some cases, even accidental or premature death (Cheng, 1996). The feminisation of care work

While racialised men from post-colonial contexts are often recruited for agricultural and construction jobs (e.g. seasonal farmworkers who migrate from

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Central America and the Caribbean to Canada through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program temporary work visa), racialised women from postcolonial contexts are often recruited for various kinds of social reproductive “care work”, including domestic work and sex work (e.g. childcare workers who migrate from Indonesia to Singapore on two-year, employer-bound work visas) (Wells, McLaughlin, Lyn, & Mendiburo, 2014; Friedman & Mahdavi, 2015). Globally, the vast majority of social reproductive work falls on the shoulders of women, with the most vulnerable of women bearing the greatest load. Social reproductive work (or “care work”) includes birthing work, sex work, the care and socialisation of children, elder care, cooking, cleaning, providing emotional support, maintain kinship relations, and other tasks that “reproduce” individuals, families, and communities (Glenn, 1992; Hardy, 2016). Whether organised through logics that are capitalist (paid wage work) or non-capitalist (work not compensated through monetary transactions) in nature, women who are less formally educated, have more limited language skills, and are darker-skinned, economically poor, rural, undocumented, and sexually and/or gender non-conforming tend to do the most challenging and “dirty” social reproductive work (Glenn, 1992). Women who are the most economically disadvantaged, socially marginalised, and racialised as non-White complete a disproportionate amount of the under-paid or un-paid social reproductive work that is foundational to each and every society (Parreñas, 2015). The feminisation of subsistence agriculture

The contemporary feminisation of both subsistence agriculture and labour (care work) migration is linked to histories of chattel slavery, plantation economics, environmental degradation and mass extinction created by resource extraction industries, genocides of Indigenous communities, land theft, and other violent forms of disenfranchisement (McKittrick, 2013). Increasingly, women are also making up a larger and larger share of subsistence farmers globally (LahiriDutt, 2014; Pattnaik, Lahiri-Dutt, Lockie, & Pritchard, 2018). This is partly explained by research which has shown that men are more often empowered to take up a household’s secondary and tertiary livelihood strategies (e.g. running small businesses) than women are (Tiwari & Joshi, 2016). In addition, this trend is further clarified by evidence that has shown that subsistence agriculture has become progressively more challenging and unreliable with global climate change (Khatri-Chhetri, Prasad Regmi, Chanana, & Aggarwal, 2020). Variable climate conditions have propelled demand for “more hands in the fields”, so to speak. In communities that rely heavily on subsistence agriculture, the feminisation of labour plays out on the ground in three key ways. First, many young women and girls who may have traditionally been granted the opportunity to attend school or participate in a secondary or tertiary livelihood strategy like running a small business must now remain at home to farm and complete social reproductive tasks for their families (Bikketi, Speranza, Bieri, Haller, &

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Wiesmann, 2016). Second, difficult farming conditions have often meant lower crop yields (Fuller et al., 2018). This increases not only food insecurity at the household level but also economic insecurity at the regional scale (Flatø, Muttarak, & Pelser, 2017). Across a range of rural and peri-urban geographies, low crop yields and food insecurity have stymied local markets and marketplaces. This has made it much more difficult for subsistence farmers to participate in cash economies, and consequently all market-based exchanges that require monetary transactions  – such as paying for school fees and uniforms (Fuller et al., 2018). Lastly, global climate change and the unreliability of subsistence agriculture have become major migration “push factors” for women, and men, who seek alternative livelihood strategies (Mueller, Doss,  & Quisumbing, 2018; Tiwari  & Joshi, 2016). In Southeast Asia, but also notably in Central America, East Africa, and South Asia, labour migration pathways through both formal and informal foreign domestic worker programmes have become wellestablished, multi-generational trajectories for women, and construction work and seasonal agricultural work have become common formal and informal labour channels for men (Friedman & Mahdavi, 2015; Michel & Peng, 2017). The unruly realities that shape these migrants’ lives help explain why fitting their stories into singular, neat categories of migration is a similarly difficult, if not impossible, task. Carefully nested within broader questions of political economy and neoliberal globalisation, the desire to qualify and classify human movement is no value-neutral or apolitical act. To illustrate this, consider the following questions: 1 Should a woman who leaves her community to become a foreign domestic worker only be classified as a “labour migrant” if her departure was largely motivated by a series of chronic droughts in her home country? 2 A woman leaves her village due to catastrophic floods, and after being denied environmental refugee status attempts to successfully migrate to another country under a temporary foreign worker programme. Should she now be considered a labour migrant and not a climate migrant? Evidently, there are several limitations to narrow categorisation systems when it comes to complex human migration processes. This begs the question: how might we create analytical spaces for re-conceptualising the process of categorising migrants and take more seriously the fact that labour migrants may also be climate change–induced migrants “in disguise”? (Urkidi & Walter, 2011). What follows will attempt to construct such a framework, drawing on four conceptual bases in order to establish a cohesive platform from which to address the complexities of the gendered climate-labour migration nexus.

From gender to gendering: identity intersectionality, vulnerability, and agency “Gendering” – or the unending process through which social constructions of gender play out in the social world – plays a significant role in the formation

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of this climate-labour migration nexus. Gendering, in the active verb tense, frames gender as a continual process that actively creates spaces of belonging, spaces of difference, and spaces of im/mobility amongst im/mobile people, goods, and services, and is not merely an identity positionality (Silvey, 2012; Van Houtum & Van Naerssen, 2002). Thus, gendering, as a grammatical verb, can be “done” and “un-done” by human actors. The ways in which gendering is inflected can either choreograph or disarrange individual and collective movements towards self-recognition, solidarity, and radical consciousness (Ng, 2011). Gender is therefore not merely a categorisation of bodies but an active process of gendering through which status-quo beliefs and values “become condensed in our emotional and physical beings . . . patterns of behaviour” in highly subjective yet collective ways (Ng, 2011, p. 351). Rather than a static category that one “occupies”, conjugating gendering, racialising, and sexualising in the active, verb tense emphasises the processual nature of identity and human experiences. Gendering’s orientation towards the active equips the framework to more meticulously deduce the prevailing unevenness that exists between gendered subjects when it comes to their lived experiences of in/justice (Smith & Stenning, 2006). Gendering the climate-labour migration nexus empowers this framework to better compare the ways in which gender-based marginalisations vary between different groups of women, instead of primarily focusing on comparing women’s experiences to those of men (Jaggar, 2009). This gendered climate-labour migration nexus views an individual’s position as situated in a web of local identity politics, regional geographies, and global hierarchies (McLeman  & Smit, 2006; Smith & Stenning, 2006). This framing casts women’s labour mobility under climate change in a new and necessary light, recognising in particular that the global “North to South” transfer of climate change’s negative repercussions, and the global “South to North” movement of female climate and labour migrants, has not impacted all women evenly. Instead, the negative impacts of land desertification, extreme weather events, and forced migration economic development paradigms have impacted gendered, racialised, classed, and often non-citizen “Third World” women more specifically and profoundly than they have “all women”. Climate change and labour migration’s disruptions impact women differently depending on how they are gendered, racialised, and classed (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2003). For example, Indonesian women left behind in rural “sending” villages to subsistence farm or to work in polluting export processing zone (EPZ) factories are impacted by the nexus in a way that is quite distinct from the Filipina transnational domestic workers who are forced to leave their own families behind as they migrate to the global North for care-work jobs that can only be performed in situ. The White, middle-class women who hire differently raced, classed, and gendered women as domestic workers are positioned within the global “care deficit” paradigm in different ways than their employees (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2000).

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This is due to two linked processes. First, the mass entrance of women into the formal labour market in global North contexts, and the subsequent demand for a supply of “other” women to perform gendered, care labour, works to intensify polarisation within migrant-sending communities themselves (Ehrenreich  & Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2000). Second, the departure of local women to meet the demands of the global care deficit in migrant-receiving countries creates a parallel care deficit in migrant-sending communities themselves (Parreñas, 2015). Within this chain, the social reproductive work that women who migrate are no longer able to perform for their own families (e.g. cooking, cleaning, socialising children) is off loaded onto the women left behind – the grandparents or eldest siblings of households who are often even more economically and socially marginalised than the women who left to work overseas.

Gendering and environmental justice In placing questions of environmental justice centrally in the gendered climate-labour migration nexus, this chapter rests on conceptual founda­ tions laid within feminist and critical geography. Situating environmental justice movements within what Smith and Stenning (2006, p.  192) identify as the “practice turn”, and what Brickell (2012) conceives as the shift from “mapping” to “doing” within critical geographies, process-focused conceptual frameworks like the gendered climate-labour migration nexus draw closer attention to global climate change’s distributional deficits (domination) and socially reproduced and shared benefits (resistance). Here, gendering challenges the tokenistic theoretical models that have traditionally imagined vulnerability to be the central organising model for struggles surrounding climate change and transnational labour migration. Shifting the focus away from vulnerability illuminates how the margins can also be understood as sites of radical collective action and inspired leadership (hooks, 1990). By moving the gendered climate-labour migration nexus beyond structuralist and individualist dichotomies in this way, feminist geography’s interventions in development studies have highlighted the ways in which subverted identity subjectivities and more nuanced histories of empowerment have been developed through processes of environmental formation, and consequently that historic and contemporary processes of ethno-racial, gender, and class ­differentiation have become rooted and entangled in similarly varied socioecological ­ imaginaries and allocations (Gandhi, 2003; Schroeder, Martin, Wilson,  & Sen, 2008; Smith  & Stenning, 2006). Taken together, feminist geography, labour studies, and environmental justice discourse therefore call for more actor-­oriented approaches to uncovering spaces of human and environmental transformation by more scrupulously attending to the politics of scale, identity intersectionality, unequal power relations, and ethnographic methods (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003).

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Transnational and embodied politics of scale Scholarship in critical and feminist geography has challenged inherited notions of scale to politicise scale as a concept that is socially constructed rather than ontologically pre-given (Buckingham & Kulcar, 2009; Kurtz, 2003), troubling the imagined binaries and geographic oversimplifications of global North/global South, First World/Third World, developed/developing, centre/periphery that traditionally relied on methods of mapping and “locating” spatial ­phenomenon as strictly local, regional, or global in scope. In their place, critical and feminist geographers have approached the study of space through an approach to scale that is sensitive to the politics of identity, culture, power, and institutions (Rana, 2011), raising new questions surrounding both socio-spatial injustice and socio-spatial sovereignty that emerge when chosen theoretical frameworks make new analytical demands of scale (see Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003). Specifically, feminist geographers who study gendered labour migration, like Silvey (2009), have highlighted the need for the study of scale to engage with the politics of the embodied. While “jumping scales” – whether it be from the household to the regional to the national to the global and back again – illuminate considerable insight, zooming even further to the micro-scale of the individual is crucial to resisting the urge to over-generalise and over-simplifying identities and the individuality of human experience. For example, if one is to deeply understand how environmental precarity, domestic care work, and multiple forms of violence (including colonialism and racial capitalism) differentially impact gendered subjects, then one must trace these convergences all the back to the scale of lived experience – to the scale of the body. Taking the view that gendered environmental injustices and socio-economic inequalities are deeply inscribed, and yet disrupted, across multiple scales, for feminist geographers the body is a site of assemblage and rupture (Silvey, 2004; Silvey & Bissonnette, 2014). Interrupting classically dualist, masculine understandings of place, feminist and post-colonial geographies’ critical attention to the politics of “the body” as an empowered scale of socio-spatial analysis has reinforced the subjectivity, agency, and biopolitics of the labouring (Silvey & Bissonnette, 2014): a framing of special value to the politics of migrant bodies, historically and contemporarily subject to xenophobic pathology and populist logics that seek to justify dehumanisation, exclusion, and systemic violence (e.g. the likening of climate refugees to “human tidal waves”) (Bettini, 2013; Buckingham & Kulcar, 2009; Rajan, 2001). Yet from the perspective of this gendered climate-labour migration nexus, an individual’s embodied experience is privileged as a valid source of knowledge and not seen as secondary to the traditionally favoured metrics of costbenefit analysis, dual labour market theory, and world systems theory (Nixon, 2010; Okereke, 2011). Not simply disposable, enumerated, and commoditised objects of climate and labour geographies, “gendering” migrants’ bodies

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pinpoints humanising, action-oriented, and socially just environmental and economic practices (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Rana, 2011) and ushers in an exploration of “reproductive resistance” – an asset-based paradigm for understanding socio-ecological justice claim-making and place-making practices (Parreñas, 2015; Hochschild, 2003).

From adaptation to resilience: objects of distributive justice Aggravated by the dismantled Western welfare state’s “need” for caretakers, particularly as the so-called ‘baby boomer’ elderly population far exceeds the current youth demographic, the transformative potentials of labour and climate change migration have been largely veiled by the gloomy spectres of exploitation (Bettini, 2013; Ehrenreich  & Hochschild, 2003; Hugo, 2011). While research on global climate change has endeavoured to identify sites where human socio-political and economic practices conjunct with biophysical processes, there has been an overwhelming focus on vulnerability, insecurity, adaptation, and resilience, and considerably less on transformation (McLeman & Smit, 2006; Naser, 2012; Thuy et al., 2014). Loaded with the neo-liberal and colonial rhetoric of “capacity-building”, “self-reliance”, and “empowerment” that are highly reminiscent of the textual and continental mythscapes of the Development Decades, identifying the migrant body as the site of and scale at which responsibility for the causes and consequences of “natural disaster” should be located has produced drastic implications. Community-based disaster preparedness (CBDP) in the Philippines or Indonesia’s National Action Plan for Addressing Climate Change and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation has, similar to academics and policy-makers, paid very little attention to the role gendering processes play in shaping individual and collective mobilisation for voice and bargaining power (Allen, 2006; Thuy et al., 2014). In the mainstream framing of socio-ecological participation, claims for environmental justice have been rooted in a highly legalistic language of technical “fixes” that is characteristically dismissive of local knowledge systems, and thus upsurges considerable tension between distributional versus procedural approaches to justice (Allen, 2006; Methmann & Oels, 2015). Yet critical frameworks such as that outlined here reveal something of the relationships obscured by these paradigms. In particular, as female migrants now make up over 80% of the gross total in Indonesia, and as care work has continued to be the “primary export” of the Philippines (with over 50% of the population who remain in the country relying on foreign workers’ remittances and low wages from foreign-owned industries for sustenance), it is interesting to consider how human and natural resource extraction are in fact interrelated (Parreñas, 2003; Silvey, 2009). For example, in economically disadvantaged countries where women are often understood as “surplus” people who are largely inessential to formal labour markets, the rhetoric that women are “unskilled” and “lack capacity” (whether it be social, economic, and political)

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problematically reinforces a gendered imaginary that women are biologically inferior and instinctively adapted to domestic spheres – that women are somehow naturally caring, nurturing, and maternal (Forsyth, 2014; Nixon, 2010). This rhetoric is troubling because it validates patriarchal and capitalist logics that are designed to rationalise why social reproductive work should be under-paid, un-paid, or not even recognised as work. Within this concerning view, normative framing of nature cross-cuts the exploitation of ecological and labour resources. Migrant women are imagined not only as being intrinsically and “naturally” best positioned to restore equilibrium to damaged ecological systems but also as best positioned to repair globally fragmented human systems of social reproduction. Hardly “resilient” objects, it is necessary to examine how gendered migrant subjects navigate and transform socio-ecological unevenness to create new sustainable livelihoods, and their corresponding infrastructures (Tacoli, 2009), thereby deconstructing the ways in which gendered migrants at the nexus of entwined climate migration and labour migration trajectories conceptualise alternative cartographies of struggle and resistance over social and environmental justice.

Social reproductive resistance in context: Southeast Asian subjects of procedural justice Within environmental justice scholarship, questions surrounding democracy, participation, and equity have often been aggrandised – but at other times constrained  – by the pursuit of more meaningfully process-oriented, procedural forms of justice and claim-making (Bulkeley, 2013). Activists, advocates, civil society groups, and community-based organisations have arguably been more adept at identifying the linkages between environmental in/justice and broader political, economic, and socio-cultural processes, including labour and climateinduced migration, than researchers and academics have been (Doherty  & Doyle, 2006). Looking to the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region, home to more than 600 million people in its ten member states, there is tremendous potential to challenge the distributive justice paradigms that have been historically grounded in the North American context and primarily focused on distribution of benefits through a more robust examination of procedural forms of justice, as seen in Indonesian and the Filipino environmental justice movements (Chantavanich et al., 2013; Schroeder et al., 2008). In both Indonesia and the Philippines, civil society groups and grassroots coalitions have conceptualised their organisational mandates and guiding visions through multi-issue frameworks and nexus thinking from their earliest formations. This reality is in sharp contrast to hegemonic stereotypes that imagine the global “South’s” participation in transnational environmental negotiations and decision-making through a deficit lens, thereby emphasising the limitations surrounding technical expertise or financial capital compared to global North

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contexts and simultaneously de-emphasising the global South’s many advantages when it comes to creative problem-solving and leveraging Indigenous ways of knowing to devise novel climate solutions (Okereke, 2011). Rather than focusing on resilience or adaptation, critical scholars have been encouraged to take the work of radical grassroots organisers and activists seriously when embarking on nexus thinking. The central aim of the “social reproductive resistance” framing of the gendered climate-labour migration nexus is to highlight the innovative, culturally relevant processes that are being developed by and for communities committed to transforming the social reproduction of humans and the natural world (Stewart, 2004). Importantly, the transnational scale has widened the scope of justice claimmaking and place-making practices since the eruption of new forms of social cooperation and insurgent network formations in the mid-twentieth century, such as the United Nations (Jaggar, 2009). Legacies of colonisation and decolonisation, strengthened Indigenous rights movements, and the persistent reliance on the Westphalian nation-state model for political governance have all impacted the ways these new networks and their attendant geographies formed, and consequently they have continued to exert their influence on the current power relations, policy agendas, and ideological standpoints that structure the ongoing re/production of transnational social movements (Jaggar, 2009; Doherty & Doyle, 2006). As the radical Southern platform has come to interpret climate change as an inherent, systematic failure of global capitalism’s unsustainable and destructive character, it has found multiple ways of mobilising social reproductive resistance across the scale (Bettini, 2013). Rather than narrowly blaming imperialist, global North corporations and governments for all distributive and procedural justice considerations, politically and militantly charged organisations of the Philippines in particular have persistently identified problems and potential solutions from the scale of the body all the way up to the multi-national (Lindio-McGovern, 2007). Implicating their native Filipino nation-state for their perpetuation of broader, uneven geographies of global capitalism, both GABRIELA National Alliance of Women (a feminist grassroots-based alliance of more than 200 organisations, institutions, and women’s programmes in the Philippines and overseas) and Migrante International (a transnational network of Filipino migrant organisers within the Philippines and abroad) have adopted intersectional strategies for dealing with a host of climate–change and social justice–related issues since their inception (Lindio-McGovern, 2007). Both GABRIELA and Migrante International’s recalcitrant politics and the mechanisms for resistance that they employ to oppose policies that promote economic liberalisation, privatisation, direct foreign investment, deregulation, and labour export along transnational lines, especially when it comes to the inequitable, highly gendered distribution of climate change and labour migration’s negative socio-ecological impacts on women. Additionally, they also focus profoundly on locally specific issues and what I’ve termed “social reproductive resistance” (Lindio-McGovern, 2007).

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Both groups are particularly committed to organising farmers, working-class people, the urban poor, students, and those impacted by gender-based violence. As a participant observer of Migrante’s programmatic offerings while conducting fieldwork on gendered labour migration in the Philippines in the summer of 2015, I witnessed several examples of social reproductive resistance. First, I  spoke with local youth living in one of Metro Manila’s largest urban poor community who participate in one of Migrante’s outreach programmes that was launched for young adults who each have at least one transnational parent. In this programme, youths engaged each other in highly embodied, and culturally saturated, forms of social organising. For example, young Migrante leaders would write and perform rap songs with their fellow members on topics ranging from poignant critiques of global economic inequality and the Philippines government’s labour export policy to their aspirations for the future. On other occasions, youth would coordinate gatherings to promote environmental stewardship. This would involve activities such as garbage collection and the clearing of small waterways located throughout their community. Migrante youth leaders also played a key role in larger events hosted by the umbrella organisation, including large-scale public protests and marches such as “The State of the People’s Address”. Migrante’s “The State of the People’s Address” was organised as a counter-narrative to the Filipino president’s “The State of the Nation Address”. This public demonstration is notably intergenerational, informed by close attention to political pedagogy, and highly intersectional – mobilising transformative change within and between social differences and identities. The charged activism of Migrante International and GABRIELA on local, national, and international scales (as they have partner offices/affiliates in North America and Europe) powerfully unites struggles for land reform, economic distribution measures, and economic self-determination, including demands for an end to the government-sponsored labour export model and the promotion of internal job creation. In their pursuit for more institutionally and procedurally just reform for migrants in the Philippines, they have a considerable impact on migrant organising politics in the Philippines and beyond (Lindio-McGovern, 2007). From a feminist geography perspective, Migrante International’s holistic approach to socio-ecological justice is an important reminder that the gendering of the labour-climate migration nexus is not only a product of particular geographies but also a producer of its own spatial realities. Critically, the gendering of these spatial realities is not limited by gender categories. For example, the sons of migrant domestic workers in the Philippines are significantly impacted by the gendering of labour migration and the gendering of climate-induced migration, even though they are not marginalised in the same ways for being gendered as women themselves (Smith & Stenning, 2006). Turning to Indonesia, democratisation since the 1998 fall of the Suharto government has empowered new opportunities for Indonesian NGOs to collaborate with local and national government representatives and initiatives.

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Additionally, the social and political globalisation of the twenty-first century has increased cooperation between grassroots organisations and international civil society organisations, whose work touches on a range of overarching issues, including gendered labour and climate migration (Yazid, 2008). In fact, since 2000 there has been considerable national coordination and teamwork between 19 Indonesian women’s organisations (who form the Women’s Movement for the Protection of Migrant Workers alliance) focused on coordinating advocacy-building efforts, cross-sector campaigning, social movement organising, and piloting research projects that inquire into a broad range of socioecological and economic issues that impact women (Yazid, 2008). Two of the Women’s Movement for the Protection of Migrant Workers alliance’s prominent member organisations are Solidaritas Perempuan and KOMNAS Perempuan. Solidaritas Perempuan is one of Indonesia’s largest grassroots women’s solidarity unions. They demonstrate their commitment to social reproductive forms of resistance through their promotion of participatory democracy, justice, and ecological awareness. Drawing links between the feminisation of labour migration, the feminisation of subsistence agriculture, and the feminisation of struggles over land conflict and land tenure systems, Solidaritas Perempuan recognised the labour-climate juncture long before academics and scholarly literature did. The duality of human exploitation (female domestic workers) and environmental exploitation (foreign-owned mining, forestry, and palm oil industries’ EPZs) has presented organisers with complex transnational challenges. However, organisations like Solidaritas Perepuan have found creative ways of devising solutions capable of promoting climate justice beyond conventional analytical silos. This kind of cross-sectional collaboration has involved working with international anti-human trafficking coalitions like the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, faith-based groups like Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts, and regionally based research centres like the Coordination Action Research on AIDS and Mobility Asia (Solidaritas Perempuan, 2013; Yazid, 2008). KOMNAS Perempuan, the Indonesian National Commission on Violence Against Women, analogously recognises the interrelationships in what they identified as their Priority Issue #3: “[recognising] violence against women as a consequence of women’s impoverishment, including within the context of migration, exploitation of labour within factories and domestic work, exploitation of natural resources and internal displacement”(KOMNAS Perempuan, n.d., Priority Issue #3). Similarly, transnational in their organisational collaborations, KOMNAS Perempuan works closely with international advocacy forums including the Asia Pacific Women, Law and Development Network (APWLD) network, and “The Jakarta Process” – a collaborative platform for national and regional human rights commissions and migrant advocacy groups (KOMNAS Perempuan, n.d.). Both Solidaritas and KOMNAS do important work to provide legal frameworks for justice claim-making as it pertains to gender-based rights and socio-ecological rights. Additionally, they work at the community level to provide services and training modules, and to encourage

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public participation in legal and human rights advocacy (KOMNAS Perempuan, n.d.; Solidaritas Perempuan, 2013) As Doherty and Doyle (2006) suggest, social movements are critical sites of public practice, protest, place-making, and multi-dimensional social reproduction. These Indonesian and Filipino organisational case studies exemplify the hybridity of spatial and temporal expansion in an unprecedented time of global climate change and transnational labour migration, as they work across time and space to promote human agency and environmental transformation (Gandhi, 2003). GABRIELA, Migrante, Solidaritas, and KOMNAS each use “gendering” as a critical lens through which organising and movement-­ building can socially reproduce resistance through imaginative practices, placemaking, and claim-making. Within and in-between structural constraints, these ­organisations have found ways to actively construct peripatetic forms of transnational civic life that are simultaneously located at the scales of the individual body, the community, the nation, and the globe. Their attention to historic legacies of Indigenous dispossession/colonialism/racial capitalism, identity intersectionality, and the politics of scale has created new sites of counter-hegemony. As illustrated by these cases, the gendering of the climate-labour migration nexus does not exclusively refer to or impact women; instead, it is inclusive of both human and natural processes, and of all male, female, and gender nonconforming actors. On the ground, the politics of dominance and resistance can be actualised together, or critically diverge in the pursuit of procedural justice (Gandhi, 2003). While critical scholars often, for sound reasons, read international policy measures with a high degree of scepticism, recent examples of transnational policy and social movement building has highlighted the transformative potential of procedural justice and multi-stakeholder participatory engagement in ways that have demanded a re-thinking of any hastily made dismissals (Fish, 2015). The need to re-think the impact of international policy measures is exemplified by the tremendous engagement and transnational collaboration surrounding the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) ratification of Convention C189 “Decent Work for Domestic Worker” in 2011. Fish (2015) argues that while international policy instruments like C189 may only improve the daily realities of domestic workers in places where there are effective monitoring and enforcement (a degree of oversight and accountability that the ILO has been inconsistent with actually delivering), researchers and policy analysis should not underestimate the gravity of the transformative potential that can and does arise from establishing new lines of communication between employers, domestic workers, government representatives, and civil society groups. In the C189 advocacy and ratification process, domestic workers were given the opportunity to participate in high political dialogue as a powerful, collective voice unlike ever before. As a result of their organising, domestic workers’ previously unrecognised work was given formal legitimacy on the world stage. This critical moment for domestic worker organisers from around the globe also catalysed the creation of the first International Domestic Worker’s

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Federation (IDWF) – the first transnational domestic worker organisation and one of the few organisations of the international labour movement to be led entirely by women (Fish, 2015). Making visible a labour segment that was long un-recognised as work, the traction that has been gained from this key policy moment suggests to academics and activists alike that it is through a commitment to process, rather than an overly narrow focus on outcomes, that international policies can play a meaningful role in empowering social reproductive resistance via procedural approaches to justice and place-based claim-making processes (Fish, 2015).

Conclusion: towards active theory and analytical practice The dynamisms and complexities of the gendered climate-labour migration nexus offer exciting considerations for how socio-ecological justice might be more critically practised within geography, labour studies, and environmental justice studies (Holifield, Porter, & Walker, 2009). As a generative theoretical and applied space to question the imagined divides between activists, scholars, and policy thought leaders, the widening field of action-oriented research is helping to expand participation in social movement and ignite positive interscalar change (Brickell, 2012; Hugo, 2011). As the distribution of global climate change’s negative repercussions remains largely uneven, and increasingly contested, there is a growing need for procedural justice mechanisms to attend to both assets and deficits through an expansive politics of scale. Critical frameworks and methodologies that imagine geographic scale and place-making practices as nested, active, and differentiated can inspire more experimental conversations and initiatives amongst grassroots NGO, multi-national organisations, law and policy-makers, and researchers alike (Smith & Stenning, 2006). Thus, by gendering bodies as subjects rather than objects of social reproductive resistance, the gendered migration-labour nexus discourse can thoughtfully identify recalcitrant, socially reproductive spaces of individual and collective actualisations of environmental, social, and economic justice that are participatory, emancipatory, and inclusive.

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108  Symon James-Wilson Hugo, G. (2011). Future demographic change and its interactions with migration and climate change. Global Environmental Change, 21S, S21–S33. Jaggar, A. M. (2009). The philosophical challenges of global gender justice. Philosophical Topics, 37(2), 1–15. Khatri-Chhetri, A., Prasad Regmi, P., Chanana, N., & Aggarwal, P. K. (2020). Potential of climate-smart agriculture in reducing women farmers’ drudgery in high climatic risk areas. Climatic Change, 158(1), 29–42. KOMNAS Perempuan. (n.d.). Profile. Retrieved from www.komnasperempuan.go.id/en/ about/profil/ Kurtz, H. E. (2003). Scale frames and counter-scale frames: Constructing the problem of environmental injustice. Political Geography, 22, 887–916. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2014). Experiencing, coping with change: Women-headed farming households in the Eastern Gangetic plains. Canberra:  Australian Council for International Agricultural Research. Retrieved from www.aciar.gov.au/node/12216 Lindio-McGovern, L. (2007). Neo-liberal globalization in the Philippines: Its impact on Filipino women and their forms of resistance. Journal of Developing Societies, 23(1), 15–35. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2013). Plantation futures. Small Axe, 17(3), 1–15. McLeman, R., & Smit, B. (2006). Migration as an adaptation to climate change. Climatic Change, 76, 31–53. Methmann, C.,  & Oels, A. (2015). From “fearing” to “empowering” climate refugees: Governing climate-induced migration in the name of resilience. Security Dialogue, 46(1), 51–68. Michel, S., & Peng, I. (Eds.). (2017). Gender, migration, and the work of care: A multi-scalar approach to the Pacific Rim. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Mueller, V., Doss, C., & Quisumbing, A. (2018). Youth migration and labour constraints in African agrarian households. The Journal of Development Studies, 54(5), 875–894. Naser, M. (2012). Climate change, environmental degradation, and migration: Complex nexus. William Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, 36(3), 713–768. Ng, R. (2011). Decolonizing teaching and learning through embodied learning: Toward an integrated approach. In R. Foshay (Ed.), Valences of interdisciplinary: Theory, practice, pedagogy. Edmonton: AU Press. Nixon, R. (2010). Unimagined communities: Developmental refugees, megadams, and monumental modernity. New Formations, 69(1), 62–80. Okereke, C. (2011). Moral foundations for global environmental and climate justice. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 69, 117–135. Parreñas, R. S. (2000). Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labour. Gender and Society, 14(4), 560–581. Parreñas, R. S. (2003). The care crisis in the Philippines: Children and transnational families in the new global economy. In B. Ehrenreich & A. R. Hochschild (Eds.), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (pp. 39–54). New York: Metropolitan Books. Parreñas, R. S. (2015). Servants of globalization: Migration and domestic work (2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pattnaik, I., Lahiri-Dutt, K., Lockie, S., & Pritchard, B. (2018). The feminization of agriculture or the feminization of agrarian distress? Tracking the trajectory of women in agriculture in India. Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 23(1), 138–155. Rana, J. A. (2011). Terrifying Muslims: Race and labour in the South Asian diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Social reproductive resistance  109 Rajan, S. R. (2001). What disasters tell us about environmental violence: The case of the Bhopal gas disaster. In N. L. Peluso & M. Watts (Eds.), Violent environments (pp. 380–398). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2010). Strategic gendering as capability: One lens into the complexity of powerlessness. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 19(1), 179–200. Schroeder, R., Martin, K., Wilson, B., & Sen, D. (2008). Third world environmental justice. Society & Natural Resources, 21(7), 547–555. Silvey, R. (2004). Power, difference, and mobility: Feminist advances in migration studies. Progress in Human Geography, 28(4), 490–506. Silvey, R. (2009). Transnational rights and wrongs: Moral geographies of gender and migration. Philosophical Topics, 37(2), 75–91. Silvey, R. (2012). Gender, difference, and contestation: Economic geography through the lens of transnational migration. In T. J. Barnes, J. Peck, & E. Sheppard (Eds.), The WileyBlackwell companion to economic geography. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing. Silvey, R., & Bissonnette, J. F. (2014). Bodies. In R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, C. Philo, . . . C. W. J. Withers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of human geography. London: Sage. Smith, A., & Stenning, A. (2006). Beyond household economies: Articulations and spaces of economic practice in postsocialism. Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 190–213. Solidaritas Perempuan. (2013). Women sovereignty land program. Retrieved from http:// translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=www.solidaritasperempuan.org/ #translate-en Stewart, J. (2004). When local troubles become transnational: The transformation of a Guatemalan indigenous rights movement. Mobilization: An International Journal, 9(3), 259–278. Tacoli, C. (2009). Crisis of adaptation? Migration and climate change in the context of high mobility. Environment & Urbanization, 21(2), 513–525. Thuy, P. T., Moeliono, M., Locatelli, B., Brockhaus, M., Di Gregorio, M., & Mardiah, S. (2014). Integration of adaptation and mitigation in climate change and forest policies in Indonesia and Vietnam. Forests, 5, 2016–2036. Tiwari, P. C.,  & Joshi, B. (2016). Gender processes in rural out-migration and socioeconomic development in the Himalaya. Migration and Development, 5(2), 330–350. Urkidi, L., & Walter, M. (2011). Dimensions of environmental justice in anti-gold mining movements in Latin America. Geoforum, 42, 683–695. Van Houtum, H., & Van Naerssen, T. (2002). Bordering, ordering, and othering. Tijdschriftvoor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 93, 125–136. Wells, D., McLaughlin, J., Lyn, A., & Mendiburo, A. D. (2014, Autumn). Sustaining precarious transnational families: The significance of remittances from Canada’s seasonal agricultural workers program. Just Labour: A Canadian Journal, 22, 144–167. Yazid, S. (2008). Activism of Indonesian NGOs on the issue of women migrant workers: Engaging in national and international co-operation. PhD thesis, Monash University. Retrieved from http://repository.unpar.ac.id/bitstream/handle/123456789/1863/MAKLH_Sylvia_ Activism_of_Indonesian-p.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

7 Hands that adapt Seasonal labour migration, climate change, and the making of adaptable subjects in Turkey Ethemcan Turhan Introduction Market-oriented agriculture  – particularly labour-intensive forms of it  – is heavily dependent on mobile and seasonal labour. Over-exploitation of natural resources, socio-economic upheaval, and rapid environmental change increasingly mark the limits of such labour-intensive production in the Mediterranean Basin, a region severely threatened by climate change (Cramer et al., 2018). Increasingly uncertain climatic patterns, insecure labour conditions, mass displacement due to proxy wars, and ever-shifting typologies of human mobility all contribute to the persistence of “cheap food, cheap labour and high profits” logic (Corrado, 2016). Adaptation to climate change has emerged as a timely topic at this juncture with significant potential for instigating transformative change or, in the worst case, emboldening the status quo. While changing temporalities and deteriorating environmental conditions reveal complex dynamics in the Mediterranean agro-migration system, the protagonists of this activity, migrant seasonal agricultural workers are often side-lined in political ecology, critical human geography, and climate change adaptation studies (for some exceptions, see Minkoff-Zern, 2019; Jimenez-Soto, 2020; Klocker, Head, Dun, & Spaven, 2018; Barnett & McMichael, 2018). Yet with their precarious labour being indispensable to “save the crops” (Mitchell, 2012), the livelihoods of the seasonal agricultural workers who labour and harvest these crops with their hands (Rothenberg, 2000) are directly and indirectly affected by multidimensional environmental and socio-economic changes. This is increasingly the case today after their designation1 as an exception to the mobility restrictions implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic. As Weisskircher, Rone, and Mendes (2020) put it, seasonal workers are “the only frequent fliers left”, enabling the constant flux of cheap labour who put up with “long hours of grueling and low-paid work under the spring and summer sun, [which] is not something many westerners are keen on doing”. This chapter focuses on migrant seasonal agricultural workers (hereafter seasonal workers) in Turkey’s labour-intensive agricultural landscapes, focusing in particular on the political ecology of climate change adaptation policies. The everyday forms of resistance against exploitation practised in migrant

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labour-intensive agriculture can potentially help to advance just, transformational adaptation practices through labourers’ refusal to accept the terms of their subordination. As Scott (2013) shows in the case of the UK food system, seasonal migration often works “as a regulatory project and spatial fix” with migrant bodies primarily reduced to a labour power whose cost is lower than its value (Mitchell, 2011). Thus, the argument made here points to the need to go beyond the incremental spatial (Harvey, 1981) and spatio-temporal fixes (Jessop, 2006) towards a better understanding of the underlying interests and values in transformational adaptation research (Pelling, O’Brien,  & Matyas, 2015), with migrant seasonal agricultural labour as its focus. Transformation, in this framing, refers to challenging the existing political, economic, and social power constellations and questioning values in adaptation to yield “radical shifts, directional turns or step changes in normative and technical aspects of culture, development or risk management” (ibid). Along these lines, I first offer a glimpse into the convergence of mobile and seasonal agricultural labour and climate change, and then move on to discuss transformative approaches to adaptation. Following this, I present some insights into the making of seasonal workers as adaptable subjects in Turkish agriculture and finally conclude with some suggestions for future research.

Seasonal agricultural labour migration and climate change adaptation: a necessary convergence The life worlds of migrants working temporally and seasonally in agriculture are characterised by distinctive spatio-temporalities (Rogaly, 2009). These spatio-temporalities are also the result of negotiated power relations between seasonal workers, landowners, and state authorities, which are reflected in the micro-spaces of work (as regards access to food, shelter, safe work conditions, decent income, and social integration) as particular “time-spaces of precarity” (Strauss, 2018). The presence of seasonal workers shapes how the temporal intersects and combines with the spatial “(i) to produce particular subject positions and (ii) to enable or constrain workers who are traveling away from their hometowns to make a living and whose struggles have not yet received the attention they deserve” (Rogaly, 2009). The spatial embeddedness of the everyday lives of seasonal workers shapes both their material and subjective experiences by (re)producing agricultural spaces of work (ibid.). Moreover, the production of agricultural work spaces encompasses not only commanding and modifying space but also actively changing its meaning for the workers involved – something that will only be exacerbated by climate change. If “there is nothing more permanent than temporary workers” (Ruhs, 2006), then the shifting spatio-temporal configurations of seasonal agricultural work need to be problematised in a changing climate. In order to understand how migrant agricultural labour and climate change interact under global capitalist agriculture, it is imperative to dig deep into the processes of labour, environment, and seasonal/temporal migration. This

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calls for attention to migrants’ agency as well as the structural conundrums in which they find themselves. Indeed, Rogaly (2009) argues that the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers has been relatively neglected in labour geography, particularly when it comes to how their agency is or is not manifested in spaces of production. In relation to agency, Mitchell (2011) cautions that we should not “overestimate the degree to which workers can make their own spatial fixes”, given the impediments to their shaping of the geographies of capitalism due to systematic discrimination, the brutal tactics of capital, and the complex politics of the state-led construction and management of their ­precarity (Strauss, 2020). This word of caution is also supported by the sporadic – and far from comprehensive – state of the existing literature on migrant seasonal agricultural labour and climate change (among the few exceptions to this norm are Vásquez-León, 2009; Greene, 2018). What is even more striking is the general lack of reliable and verifiable data on the conditions of seasonal workers, which is even more concerning because it indicates a lack of interest in and ignorance about the people at the bottom of agri-food systems, if not full indifference towards them. Although recent years have seen rising interest in the study of climate change and migration relations (albeit not always without problems, see Boas et  al., 2019), only a very small fraction of these studies have problematised the entanglement of seasonal and temporal forms of migrant agricultural labour with climate change (see also Lemos, Eakin, Dilling, & Worl, 2018). The majority of academic work on migrant seasonal agricultural labour remains in a rather narrow set of disciplines, among which are rural sociology, public health, occupational health and safety, and agricultural economics. Despite the proliferation of research that attempts to link environmental change and the labour dynamics of migrant seasonal agricultural workers, there are still considerable lacunae in the literature. Yet migrant seasonal agricultural workers are arguably the social group most dependent on natural resources and climatic conditions for their health, economic safety, and livelihoods. For example, in the context of the United States, Burke, Bethel, and Britt (2012) observed that “low-income, socially isolated migrant and seasonal farmworkers are particularly susceptible” to the adverse impacts of climatic extremes such as storm surges and flash flooding. When we combine this with “the variations of climate between years, unexpected shocks and more predictable life-cycle changes” (Rogaly & Coppard, 2003) leading to major fluctuations in the supply, demand, and availability of agricultural labour, we get a better picture of the challenge. Similarly, in a recent study of climate impacts on agricultural workers in the United States, Tigchelaar, Battisti, and Spector (2020, in press) found that unsafe work conditions (mainly due to heat exposure) will double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. While adaptation can mitigate risk to some degree, the authors concluded that it will only be possible with an extensive restructuring of agricultural labour. As Dufty-Jones (2014, p. 373) observes in her analysis of rural economies in an age of migration, productivity increases and agricultural intensification are

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often achieved at the price of maintaining a more vulnerable, compliant, and easy-to-control body of migrant seasonal labour. Thus, a key way to continue capital accumulation in the global labour-intensive agricultural industry under the grim scenarios of climate change and pressures from global markets is to exert control over profits by ensuring the circulation of cheap and precarious seasonal workers by coercion when necessary. For instance, when Bangladeshi strawberry pickers in Manolada, Greece, resisted inhumane conditions of work and dwelling spaces in 2013, the landowners responded by fatally shooting 35 of them (Gialis & Herod, 2014).2 Similar stories of persistent migrant seasonal worker exploitation under everyday violence can be found across the entire southern Mediterranean, which turned to the use of migrant labour and the flexible use of this labour force after its full integration with neoliberal agrifood systems (Corrado, 2016). The availability of cheap, docile, and flexible labour is a fundamental factor in the restructuring of agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin, which seeks to stay afloat in the face of neoliberal globalisation and climate change (Corrado, 2016). When matched with the uninsurability of irregular migrant workers (Baldwin, 2017) – a sort of perverse adaptive capacity, wherein crops can be insured, but the hands that pick them cannot – the overexploitation of migrant labour serves as a buffer for landowners to fence off economic losses in the face of market instabilities and climate extremes while protecting their profit margins. As Baldwin (2017) suggests: If insurability is an index of adaptability, and thus a key trait of a valued life under changing climatic conditions, then insurability must also be understood to imply its opposite, uninsurability, where uninsurability signifies unvalued or devalued life. If a body cannot be insured, then it falls outside the definition of a valued life and thus becomes exposed to all manner of humiliations. The imperative of agri-food systems to adapt simultaneously to global market demands and climate risks (and in the meantime, impose humiliations on migrant bodies) leads to new spatio-temporal fixes. Gertel and Sippel (2014) observe that these spatio-temporal fixes are often manifested as a struggle between flexicurity (a combination of flexible and insecure labour) and flexiprofity (flexible and profit-seeking capital). Gertel and Sippel further suggest that the actors who have the power to decide and act in different spatio-temporal configurations (i.e. hard or market-based adaptation interventions such as more efficient irrigation systems or agricultural insurance schemes for climate extremes) are able to take advantage of changing conditions while “the vulnerable are exposed and lose out and have to increasingly act under conditions of flexicurity” (ibid). This “induced immiseration” (Mitchell, 2011) stemming from an interaction between the ever-increasing demands of the global agrifood system, the dehumanisation of seasonal agricultural labour power, and the sharpening of climatic impacts on labour-intensive agriculture can be found in countries as diverse as Canada (Cohen, 2019), Italy (Perrotta, 2016), Greece

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(Kotsila & Kallis, 2019), the United States (Greene, 2018), and Spain, (Hoggart & Mendoza, 1999; Gadea, Pedreño, & de Castro, 2016), amongst others. To overcome this immiseration, a rethinking of adaptation as transformation might offer solid political possibilities, as I discuss in the next section.

Transforming adaptation Tania Murray Li (2007) draws our attention to the “inevitable gap between what is attempted and what is accomplished” in development projects. Once crafted as techno-fixes, development projects serve to control, regulate, and benefit from people through an obstinate belief in linear and one-dimensional progress. Climate change adaptation policy, which is aligned to serve development goals, is no exception. From a mainstream perspective, adaptation deals with or softens the threats posed by climate change as long as the proposed adaptive strategies and practices do not challenge the existing modes of capital accumulation and maintain favourable conditions for those in power at the local, national, and supranational scales. Adaptive interventions of this sort therefore give the impression that problems are being addressed but actually delay necessary changes in the institutions and structures of power (Fieldman, 2011). Yet this is not inevitable. Climate change adaptation policies should stop short-circuiting the grand questions about the goals of our socio-ecological systems in rushing to produce immediate responses to local manifestations of global environmental change (Castree et  al., 2014). This is where transformation comes into the picture as an overarching strategy for adaptation that goes beyond building resilience or inducing incremental change with attention to uneven power relations and structural barriers (O’Brien, 2012; O’Brien, Eriksen, Inderberg, & Sygna, 2014; Pelling et al., 2015). The distinctiveness of adaptation as transformation arises from its opposition to the hidden social preferences that reproduce dominant relations of power. Climate change adaptation, in this sense, is not only part of a domain of policy and action but also forms part of a wider epistemological interest, which operates across spatial and temporal boundaries. While most national policies depict adaptation as a technical, rational, and manageable process, adaptation requires multi-scalar, multi-actor, and multi-temporal action (Conway & Mustelin, 2014). Adaptation experiences will, therefore, necessarily differ from one another, not only politically and economically, but also socially and culturally. A  comprehensive understanding of existing vulnerabilities, their root causes, and the steps to reducing them are therefore crucial for adaptation. This calls for extensive and intersectional social mobilisation. A multi-scalar and multitemporal focus on adaptation cannot ignore the broader political and economic interests embedded in the spaces of agricultural production. While poverty and persistent structural inequalities are among the most salient conditions that give rise to vulnerability, it is important not to conflate poverty with vulnerability (Ribot, 2014). In this sense, adaptive interventions of the transformative sort need to address the root causes of problems rather than the symptoms.

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Accordingly, vulnerability in relation to adaptation needs should be considered to intersect and interact with other aspects of social exclusion (including gender, race, ethnicity, class, and caste) in uncanny ways that reinforce existing societal inequalities and can lead to new ones (Leichenko & Silva, 2014). At this juncture, socio-ecological cost-shifting acts as an enabling condition for capital accumulation: an immiseration of seasonal workers that results from their double exposure to the crushing demands of the global agri-food system and deteriorating work conditions. Cost-shifting practices make power asymmetries and distributional issues explicit, particularly when they emerge under climatic contingencies. Yet these deleterious transitions are viewed as the “cost-shifting successes” (Martinez-Alier, 2009) of landowners, market actors, and state authorities. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Turhan, Zografos, & Kallis, 2015; Turhan, Kallis, & Zografos, 2019), the state’s law enforcement and regulatory agencies foster and protect the accumulation of capital by circulating agricultural labour and remaking the spaces of agricultural work: a maintenance of precarious labour flows in agri-food systems that must also be included in this picture. In this sense, one can argue that adaptation interventions often serve to keep development projects intact, rather than safeguarding the vulnerable groups within them. Indeed, as McMichael (2009) has argued, the ultimate goal of the global development project is “to sustain energy, capital, and commodity flows for purposes of military and political security”. Rather than a flow (which suggests one-way movement), therefore, the development project seems to be more inclined towards sustaining circulation (Bettini, 2017; Barnett & McMichael, 2018), an emphasis that often caters to politically shaped development interests to make up for the agricultural labour deficit in Mediterranean agriculture (Gertel & Sippel, 2014). Transformation, with its attention to uneven power relations and hidden social preferences, offers another type of adaptation. According to Pelling (2011), not only the scale, speed, and extent of the threats generated by climate change, which we want to mitigate, but also our adaptive responses provide a window of opportunity for social reform through the “questioning of values that drive inequalities in development and our unsustainable relationship with the environment”. Transformation, in this sense, refers to a fundamental change in “over-arching political-economy regimes and associated cultural discourses on development, security and risk” (ibid.). However, most measures taken in the name of adaptation in labour-intensive agriculture today end up safeguarding the current socio-economic status quo by benefitting powerful actors. This safeguarding is achieved in two principal ways: (a) by shifting the social, physical, and monetary costs of adaptation onto vulnerable social groups, and (b) by establishing governance mechanisms that design and operationalise processes that are conducive to the continuation of business-as-usual (see Turhan et al., 2019). In doing so, these adaptation policies wilfully comprise incremental adjustments of spaces of production, aimed at mitigating imminent threats to circuits of capital accumulation in labour-intensive agriculture, while failing to steer the overall system away from a collision course (Pelling, 2011). In other

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words, adaptive interventions designed as resilience-building measures cater to the protection and reproduction of the socio-economic structures that are insecure by design. They yield what Baldwin (2017) calls “the figure of potential”, the adaptive migrant worker. As climate proofing becomes the “new profit frontier” (McMichael, 2009) in labour-intensive agriculture, we also witness the rise of the figure of the adaptive migrant worker. Reducing the opportunity provided by adaptation to rethink the end goals of our socio-ecological system to a fraction of its potential does injustice to the vulnerable social groups within productive sectors, not least seasonal workers in agriculture. By putting seasonal workers in exceptional categories and requiring them to adapt to rapid changes in their work environment, climate change adaptation policies often render them invisible. Therefore, a transformational approach to adaptation in labour-intensive agriculture needs to address these shortcomings first and foremost. It needs to construct a different vocabulary through which to articulate the necessity and reality of climate change, while being able to welcome this inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world and new life beyond that which we have known up until now. (Evans & Reid, 2014) While “the challenges of adapting to the radical uncertainties and perturbations of global climate change invoke a new sense of homo economicus” (Watts, 2015), rethinking adaptation as a socio-political process that can “alter the fundamental attributes and processes in society driving vulnerability” can be promising (Eriksen, Nightingale, & Eakin, 2015). This entails claims and struggles over the production of space, the use of authority, and the making of knowledge and subjectivities across scales (ibid.). All these issues indicate that there is a need for a new political economy of adaptation, since solutions that “rely on a linear apolitical view of the policy process and tend to frame solutions in technical and managerial terms” do not suffice to address the challenges of climate change (Tanner & Allouche, 2011). Nightingale et al. (2020) contend that an understanding of adaptation through co-evolving socio-natures helps us to see “vulnerability as produced by our current political economic system and the injustices that are inflicted on people”. This assessment reinforces the need for a relational approach to vulnerability and adaptation in agrarian environments by foregrounding questions of power (Taylor, 2013).

Seasonal agricultural workers as adaptable subjects in Turkish agriculture Turkish agriculture has had its fair share of transformation perpetrated by capitalist development in the form of “the commercialization of production leading inexorably to the elimination of peasant family farming, a process of

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depeasantization linked in turn to the growth of landless workers” (Jacoby, 2008, p.  260). Huricihan İslamoğlu (2017) reports that the key outcome of IMF-led market reforms in Turkish agriculture over the past two decades has been the acceleration of massive population movements out of agriculture with significant reductions in its share in employment and GDP. Arat and Pamuk (2019) note that the share of agriculture in total employment declined from 50% in 1980 to 20% in 2015 with a related decline in agriculture’s contribution to GDP to less than 10%. This decline happened against the backdrop of commercialisation of agriculture as promoted and reinforced by World Bank projects such as Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP), which sought to reduce subsidies to increase productivity and boost the competitiveness of export-driven Turkish agriculture (Öztürk, Jongerden, & Hilton, 2018). While fresh fruit (13.68%) and vegetable (1.96%) production has generally expanded in Turkey, this expansion has been at a much larger scale in places like the eastern Mediterranean region, a hotspot of seasonal agricultural labour migration, with a 96.8% expansion in fresh fruits and a 3.18% expansion in vegetables from 2008 to 2012 (AGV, 2013). Turkey’s total fresh fruit and vegetable production increased by approximately 20% from 2010 to 2018 (TZOB, 2019). In the absence of official figures, Kalkınma Atölyesi (2020) estimates that approximately 500,000 migratory seasonal workers in Turkey are engaged in this type of production, traveling mainly from the eastern and southeastern provinces of the country to a total of 50 cities for 6–7 months a year. A large portion of this labour power is comprised of Turkey’s internally displaced and ethnically discriminated Kurdish population (Duruiz, 2015), while the arrival of Syrian refugees after the onset of the Syrian civil war introduced a new segment of racialised workers placed at the bottom of power relations in agricultural landscapes (Akay Ertürk, 2016; Pelek, 2019). On this point, Pelek (2020) argues that while the making of “new peasantry” under neoliberal restructuring attracted significant scholarly attention, ethnicisation of the agricultural labour market in Turkey was not fully investigated. As Atasoy (2017) also attests in her study of the case of Turkey within the global agri-food system, “there is no comprehensive study of the employment of Kurdish migrant workers in the commercialisation of Turkish agriculture, its effects on migrants’ livelihoods and the various interactions with the rural society in which they live”. The observations here are based on three months of fieldwork and 30 semistructured in-depth interviews with landowners, seasonal workers, local and provincial authorities and agricultural experts as well as many casual encounters in Karataş, Adana, from February to April 2011. Karataş is located in the lower Seyhan River Basin on Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean coast. It is host to about half of the labour-intensive, low-height greenhouse type of production in the province of Adana with plans to expand this production and eventually establish an organised agricultural economic zone. One of the first land consolidation projects (agglomerating small landholdings into bigger, more efficient farms) as well as the first pilot climate change adaptation project in Turkey (led by UNDP Turkey with the Turkish Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation

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as the key beneficiary) was implemented here from 2008 to 2012. Given the historical context of land ownership and clientelist relations with national authorities (Toksöz, 2010), landowners in Karataş have strong nationalist sentiments, most of which are inimical to Kurdish workers whom they treat with suspicion and contempt, despite their mutual interdependence. The region also hosts one of the most vulnerable spaces of agricultural production in the country with average temperatures expected to increase by 5°C by the end of the century with significant water shortages of up to 35% anticipated (Selek, Yazici, Aksu, & Özdemir, 2016). Altın and Barak (2017) predict fundamental risks for human health and significant crop losses in the region due to the trend of rising summer temperatures. High evaporation rates, sudden onset events such as flashfloods and hailstorms as well as low groundwater recharge rates are all expected to have deleterious impacts on labour-intensive agricultural production in the region, which is only sustained through the annual circulation of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of seasonal workers. On the adaptation side of things in the region, the aforementioned UNDP project had seasonal workers as one of its focuses. However, the seasonal workers, who reside in makeshift tent villages that are usually far from settlements, close to agricultural lands and next to irrigation channels, were only of interest to the decision makers for the tropical diseases they may develop due to changing climatic patterns. Pelek (2020) argues that these temporary settlements should rather be seen as permanent rural ghettos. The pilot climate change adaptation proposals developed for these rural ghettos, however, came nowhere near addressing their needs for providing proper housing, safe work conditions under increasing climatic uncertainty or even basic health and social security coverage. The seasonal workers living in these rural ghettos labour the land day and night without adequate sanitary infrastructure, and only with very limited access to water and other basic services. What was on offer for them in terms of adaptation, nonetheless, was “behavioral change among the target group in terms of hand and mouth hygiene, and separating cooking and living spaces” (UNDP, 2012) as a response to outbreaks of disease. While adaptation options such as crop-shifting, more efficient irrigation infrastructure, early warning systems and state-subsidised agricultural insurance schemes were considered for the landowners, what seasonal workers got at the end of the day was “hygiene products, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shoes, t-shirts and blankets” and training in sanitation and hygiene (Turhan et al., 2015). The adaptive capacity of seasonal workers, in other words, their agency to adapt to climate change in their spaces of work and dwelling, and to take care of themselves was addressed merely by teaching them how to be hygienic, rather than ensuring that they have access to basic services and health insurance. When asked about adaptation strategies in the face of climatic extremes, one seasonal worker in Karataş confirmed his induced immiseration: We just pack up and leave. Last year there was a flood over there [pointing to the plain], where we had our tents. It came overnight and drenched

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everything. Our family had seven or eight tents, and everything got soaked. There was another tent site up there on the hill where they work in watermelon like us. We took everything up there. We were lucky that the landowner gave us our pending wages because when they cannot earn, it is hard to get your money from them. When the harvest is over, they sell the watermelon. If the year’s market prices are low, and watermelons do not cost a dime, what are you going to do? Are you going to kill the landlord? (seasonal worker, male, 43) In a similar fashion, when asked about what they deem to be necessary adaptation measures, most of the seasonal workers mentioned their living conditions: At least the [tent] site should be good. It shouldn’t flood. It should be close to villages. We are in the fields where we work. If we were close to the village, if only there was solidarity, if only there were livable tents, if only there was a fountain [to get water from]. It happens a lot in Ankara. Once it rained, and everywhere flooded. Then there was a hailstorm. All of our tents were destroyed. (seasonal worker, female, 57) Maybe it would be different if they asked the workers what they need. They didn’t ask where to put the portable latrines. There was no one to advise us about health. They can give training, yes, public health is a must. If something happens to our hand, we put tomato paste on it. We cannot go to the doctor [since we don’t have social security coverage]. When chemicals are applied, we use our hands. If we knew what to do, we would rather put on gloves and have protective clothing. People go to bed ­wearing the same clothes they wore while using agricultural chemicals. No one cares. (seasonal worker, female, 28) While the effects of slow-onset climate change on seasonal agricultural workers are difficult to pin down, the key issue becomes the invisibility and disposability of these populations. The unreported and undetected impacts of flash floods and heat strokes on workers’ physical and mental health as well as their broader livelihoods are parts of the everyday lives of thousands of seasonal workers in Turkey’s agricultural landscapes. Moreover, power asymmetries, along ethnic, class, and gender lines, lead to cost-shifting under changing climatic conditions. Uneven power relations, societal divisions and informality allow powerful groups to benefit from opportunities to fence themselves off from climate-induced losses while outsourcing the responsibility for adaptation and putting it on the backs of workers (Turhan et  al., 2019). These uneven power relations are by and large a result of the ethnicised agricultural labour market which has provided “producers with greater opportunities for profit maximization, enabling them to better compete in the market” at the expense

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of the seasonal workers (Pelek, 2020). Rendering seasonal agricultural workers as adaptable subjects who can make do with behavioural changes and go on without compensation in times of loss or who can simply move elsewhere to work is only reproducing and reinforcing the highly vulnerable conditions of their communities. Corrado (2016) conclude that “just-in-time migrant workers are necessary to reduce production costs and to meet the just-in-time demands of supermarkets”. This is a clear depiction of the type of spatiality and temporality that characterises migrant labour-intensive agriculture on Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean coast. However, this spatiality and temporality is being disrupted and will be further disrupted by the accelerating impacts of climate change. A notable instance on this was the failure of the apricot harvest due to a sudden hailstorm in eastern Turkish province of Malatya, which supplies more than 80% of the world’s dried apricots, causing thousands of migrant seasonal workers to lose wages and/or change their migration trajectory with their families overnight (Uyan-Semerci, Erdoğan, & Sinem, 2014). The changing spatial and temporal characteristics of fruit and vegetable production in places like Malatya are in direct relation with “the environmental conditions, energy and labour costs as well as financial investments” that sustain vulnerability to ensure that business proceeds as usual in labour-intensive agriculture (Gertel  & Sippel, 2014). Another example of such damage was the December 2019 flash flooding in Karataş, where 250 seasonal workers’ tents were first flooded and then dismantled by the local authorities for being unsafe. In reality, the flooding of seasonal workers’ tent sites was more the result of the failure of the irrigation system’s discharge pumps than the heavy rainfall, but the immediate response was to remove the tents without compensating or resettling the workers who are essential to agricultural production in the region (IHD, 2019). It logically follows that, if adaptation interventions fail to address the underlying exploitation, exclusion and active abandonment of seasonal workers to their own devices, they have no chance of advancing towards transformation. Kavak (2016) uses the concept of hyper-precarity to define the multifaceted insecurities and uncertainties faced by seasonal agricultural workers in Turkey. The hyper-precarity of seasonal workers is only further compounded by the increasingly uncertain climatic conditions, severe disruptions and weather extremes that affect their livelihoods in these spaces of agricultural work. These disruptions often manifest themselves as unsafe health conditions, unpaid wages and bodily harm. For example, extreme heat and droughts already pose a major health problem for seasonal workers, with heat strokes being a key reason for hospitalisation (THAUM, 2010). The risks of increasing heat-related and waterborne contagious diseases after flash floods due to maladaptation or the lack of adaptive measures only adds to these existing risks. The informality and flexibility of labour practices of seasonal workers also imply that they have no say in local politics and decisions. They have no direct bargaining power, other than through labour intermediaries, due to the absence of a worker-organised union. Intermediaries do have strong incentives to secure higher wages for the sake of their own commission (10% of the daily wage of each worker), and

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indeed previously organised a wildcat strike in 2007 that saw the participation of approximately 50,000 seasonal workers in the wider area. Yet these labour intermediaries are much less concerned with the working or dwelling conditions of seasonal workers since their own existence also relies on the hyperprecarity of labour. Worker-led attempts to self-organise in the region have all been stalled by the local authorities on political grounds (see Figure 7.1). Thus, it may be even more telling that the key demands voiced by the pro-Kurdish

Figure 7.1 Poster of Adana Agricultural Workers’ Convention in 2005, the first and, unfortunately, the last convention of its sort. Their demands were for living wages, amelioration of work and living conditions, health insurance, pension rights and permanent unionisation Source: Author’s photo.

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HDP’s (Peoples’ Democratic Party) seasonal workers report converge on the safe working and dwelling spaces, social security coverage and the right to unionise (HDP, 2017). As with the Covid-19 pandemic, the plight of seasonal workers only becomes visible in times of crisis: something we can easily expect to see more of as ­climate change in the spaces of agricultural work in Karataş intensifies. As Duruiz (2011) argues: Short-term actions for the betterment of the social and working conditions can be instrumental, if and only if the workers are regarded as subjects capable of reflecting on the problems they experience in the field and of coming up with innovative ways to overcome them. This inevitably requires including seasonal workers in planning for adaptation to climate change both in the short and the long term. Consequently, it is imperative to go beyond spatial and spatio-temporal fixes in sustaining and safeguarding the competitive edge of labour-intensive agriculture in the region and moving towards a transformational approach. As Nightingale et al. (2020) suggest, this may include a “[rejection] of the concept of adaptation altogether in favor of an alternative that can better capture socionatural dynamics”. A socionatural framing of adaptation encompasses imaginations, affects, experiences and social relations as its point of departure, which helps us to see that global agri-food system-dictated forms of labour-intensive agriculture and the immiseration that are inflicted on seasonal workers within them are the real problem. In sum, the incorporation of seasonal workers’ aspirations, perceptions, legitimate demands and values regarding their working and living conditions is indispensable for a just, transformational adaptation to climate change.

Conclusion Powerful groups create, manage and deal with vulnerability to climate change. They adapt by “appropriating the cause of the vulnerable, depoliticizing the causes of vulnerability, and promoting  .  .  . markets as solutions” (Barnett, 2020). Therefore, it is important to frame the adaptation question in a way that exposes the uneven power relations and exploitative politics behind the scenes. Among other things, this involves refusing to accept vulnerability as the inherent condition of a population, rejecting the focus on individual adaptability and holding to account those in positions of power who render populations adaptable by avoiding their own responsibility. It is striking that even the Covid-19 pandemic and the immediate threats it poses to public health did not cause anything but increased labour control and surveillance in spaces of agricultural work on Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean coast (Evrensel, 2020). The everyday experiences of seasonal agricultural workers, in this regard, are generated by a

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historically constituted assemblage of economic, political and ideological forces that span the planet (Holmes, 2013). These forces are closely tied to the despotic forms of capital accumulation in contemporary global ­capitalism – that make possible the existence of a food production system that p­ rovides healthy, fresh food to a small fraction of the world population at the expense of the exploitation of an extensive mass of laborers who provide to that system their subordinated, flexible and cheap labor force. (Rivas, 2014, p. 384) In order to disentangle these assemblages under double exposure to the neoliberal agri-food system and the climate crisis, this chapter joins the calls for the deployment of carefully selected, contextually specific research strategies to “push the boundaries of socionatural conceptualizations and methodologies to grasp dynamic change” (Nightingale et al., 2020) for the most vulnerable populations. Critical approaches to research subjects and a careful selection of participatory methodologies (including long-term ethnographic research and visual methods) have important roles to play here to avoid the rendering of seasonal workers as adaptable subjects and promote all-out political-economic transformations rather than spatial fixes. Transformation, when understood as system change, “conveys something more radical than mere change or even transition to a new world where climate change effects are a reality” (Tschakert, van Oort, St. Clair, & LaMadrid, 2013). It calls for a systemic, multi-dimensional and intersectional approach within a resistance-centred perspective that prioritises alternative visions, new subjectivities, dismantling power relations, revealing inherent values and reconfiguring institutions (Temper, Walter, Rodriguez, Kothari,  & Turhan, 2018). Such visions require a thorough rethinking of system goals beyond developmentalism (Turhan, 2016), where both changes in system goals (major changes in land use and employment patterns), and changes in the spatial aspects of agricultural activity are scrutinised and considered (Rickards  & Howden, 2012). By merging labour geography’s attention to agency and spaces of work with political ecology’s attention to uneven power relations in explaining asymmetries in the distribution of risks and political opportunities, future research on adaptation needs to involve longitudinal analyses of the labour relations in new climatic conditions. Comparative studies of different labour-intensive agricultural hotspots (such as, in-depth comparisons of productivist and post-productivist agricultural settings) might produce further useful results in this respect. The gendered, racialised and class-based nature of adaptation responses and the resistance of seasonal workers against spatial fixes in the guise of adaptation must be at the core of such an endeavour. Nothing short of this can improve the conditions and hidden lives of people whose hands sow, cultivate and harvest the food we eat.

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Notes 1 The Council of the European Union, the Union’s highest decision-making body, designated seasonal workers in agriculture as “travelers with an essential function or need” on par with healthcare professionals, border workers, transport staff and diplomats among other exceptional categories on June 30, 2020. 2 Although the case was eventually taken to the European Court of Human Rights and ended with a ruling against the Greek authorities, the fruits of resistance were short-lived due to multiple dimensions of migrant seasonal labor precarity that are hard to overcome solely with place-based mobilisations (Papadopoulos, Fratsea, & Mavrommatis, 2018).

References AGV. (2013). Adana Vizyon 2023: Adana İli Tarımsal Üretim Durum Raporu. Retrieved from http://www.agv.org.tr/upload/2013/08/adana-ili-tarimsal-uretim-raporu.pdf Akay Ertürk, S. (2016). Refugees in the agricultural sector: Some notes on Syrians in Hatay province, Turkey. In A. Corrado, C. de Castro, & D. Perrotta (Eds.), Migration and agriculture: Mobility and change in the Mediterranean area (pp. 168–180). London: Routledge. Altın, T. B., & Barak, B. (2017). Trends and changes in tropical and summer days at the Adana sub-region of the Mediterranean region, Southern Turkey. Atmospheric Research, 196, 182–199. Arat, Y.,  & Pamuk, Ş. (2019). Turkey between democracy and authoritarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atasoy, Y. (2017). Commodification of global agrifood systems and agro-ecology: Convergence, divergence and beyond in Turkey. London: Routledge. Baldwin, A. (2017). Resilience and race, or climate change and the uninsurable migrant: Towards an anthroporacial reading of “race”. Resilience, 5(2), 129–143. Barnett, J. (2020). Global environmental change II: Political economies of vulnerability to climate change. Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/0309132519898254 Barnett, J., & McMichael, C. (2018). The effects of climate change on the geography and timing of human mobility. Population and Environment, 39(4), 339–356. Bettini, G. (2017). Where next? Climate change, migration, and the (bio) politics of adaptation. Global Policy, 8, 33–39. Boas, I., Farbotko, C., Adams, H., Sterly, H., Bush, S., van der Geest, K., . . . Blondin, S. (2019). Climate migration myths. Nature Climate Change, 9(12), 901–903. Burke, S., Bethel, J. W., & Britt, A. F. (2012). Assessing disaster preparedness among Latino migrant and seasonal farmworkers in eastern North Carolina. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 9(9), 3115–3133. Castree, N., Adams, W. M., Barry, J., Brockington, D., Büscher, B., Corbera, E., . . . Newell, P. (2014). Changing the intellectual climate. Nature Climate Change, 4(9), 763–768. Cohen, A. (2019). “Slavery hasn’t ended, it has just become modernized”: Border imperialism and the lived realities of migrant farmworkers in British Columbia, Canada. ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(1), 130–148. Conway, D., & Mustelin, J. (2014). Strategies for improving adaptation practice in developing countries. Nature Climate Change, 4(5), 339–342. Corrado, A. (2016). Agrarian change and migrations in the Mediterranean: From a food regime perspective. In A. Corrado, C. de Castro, & D. Perrotta (Eds.), Migration and agriculture: Mobility and change in the Mediterranean area (pp. 311–331). London: Routledge. Corrado, A., de Castro, C., & Perrotta, D. (Eds.). (2016). Migration and agriculture: Mobility and change in the Mediterranean area. London: Routledge.

Hands that adapt  125 Cramer, W., Guiot, J., Fader, M., Garrabou, J., Gattuso, J. P., Iglesias, A., . . . Penuelas, J. (2018). Climate change and interconnected risks to sustainable development in the Mediterranean. Nature Climate Change, 8(11), 972–980. Dufty-Jones, R. (2014). Rural economies in the “age of migration”: Perspectives from OECD countries. Geography Compass, 8(6), 368–380. Duruiz, D. (2011). Seasonal agricultural workers in Manisa: Materialization of labor, bodies and places through everyday encounters (Unpublished M.A. thesis). Boğazici University Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul, Turkey. Duruiz, D. (2015). Embodiment of space and labor: Kurdish migrant workers in Turkish agriculture. In Z. Gambetti & J. Jongerden (Eds.), The Kurdish issue in Turkey: A spatial perspective. London: Routledge. Eriksen, S. H., Nightingale, A. J., & Eakin, H. (2015). Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change adaptation. Global Environmental Change, 35, 523–533. Evans, B.,  & Reid, J. (2014). Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Evrensel. (2020). Mevsimlik işçilerin koşulları salgında da değiştirilmedi. Retrieved July  10, 2020, from www.evrensel.net/haber/405002/mevsimlik-iscilerin-kosullari-salgindada-degistirilmedi Fieldman, G. (2011). Neoliberalism, the production of vulnerability and the hobbled state: Systemic barriers to climate adaptation. Climate and Development, 3(2), 159–174. Gadea, E., Pedreño, A.,  & de Castro, C. (2016). Producing and mobilizing vulnerable workers: The agribusiness of the region of Murcia (Spain). In Migration and Agriculture (pp. 103–118). London: Routledge. Gertel, J., & Sippel, S. R. (Eds.). (2014). Seasonal workers in Mediterranean agriculture: The social costs of eating fresh. London: Routledge. Gialis, S., & Herod, A. (2014). Of steel and strawberries: Greek workers struggle against informal and flexible working arrangements during the crisis. Geoforum, 57, 138–149. Greene, C. (2018). Broadening understandings of drought  – the climate vulnerability of farmworkers and rural communities in California (USA). Environmental Science & Policy, 89, 283–291. Harvey, D. (1981). The spatial fix – Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx. Antipode, 13(3), 1–12. HDP. (2017). Mevsimlik Tarım İşçileri Raporu. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from www.hdp.org. tr/images/UserFiles/Documents/Editor/mti-rapor(1).pdf Hoggart, K.,  & Mendoza, C. (1999). African immigrant workers in Spanish agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis, 39(4), 538–562. Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. IHD. (2019). Adana’nın Karataş İlçesi Karagöçer Köyü Tarım İşcilerinin Çadırlarının Sökülmesine İlişkin Rapor. Retrieved March 12, 2020, from www.ihd.org.tr/9143-2/ İslamoğlu, H. (2017). The politics of agricultural production in Turkey. Neoliberal Turkey and its Discontents: Economic Policy and the Environment Under Erdoğan, 75–102. Jacoby, T. (2008). The development of Turkish agriculture: Debates, legacies and dynamics. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 35(2), 249–267. Jessop, B. (2006). Spatial fixes, temporal fixes and spatio-temporal fixes. In N. Castree & D. Gregory (Eds.), David Harvey: A critical reader (pp. 142–166). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Jimenez-Soto, E. (2020). The political ecology of shaded coffee plantations: Conservation narratives and the everyday-lived-experience of farmworkers. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–20.

126  Ethemcan Turhan Kalkınma Atölyesi. (2020). Korona Virüs Salgınının Mevsimlik Gezici Tarım İşçileri ve Onların Çocukları ile Bitkisel Üretime Olası Etkisi: Hızlı Bir Değerlendirme. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from www.ka.org.tr/dosyalar/file/Yayinlar/Raporlar/TURKCE/Virus%20mu%20yok sulluk%20mu.pdf Kavak, S. (2016). Syrian refugees in seasonal agricultural work: A case of adverse incorporation in Turkey. New Perspectives on Turkey, 54, 33–53. Klocker, N., Head, L., Dun, O.,  & Spaven, T. (2018). Experimenting with agricultural diversity: Migrant knowledge as a resource for climate change adaptation. Journal of Rural Studies, 57, 13–24. Kotsila, P.,  & Kallis, G. (2019). Biopolitics of public health and immigration in times of crisis: The malaria epidemic in Greece (2009–2014). Geoforum, 106, 223–233. Leichenko, R., & Silva, J. A. (2014). Climate change and poverty: Vulnerability, impacts, and alleviation strategies. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(4), 539–556. Lemos, M. C., Eakin, H., Dilling, L., & Worl, J. (2018). Social sciences, weather, and climate change. Meteorological Monographs, 59, 26.1–26.25. Li, T. M. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Martinez-Alier, J. (2009). Social metabolism, ecological distribution conflicts, and languages of valuation. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 20(1), 58–87. McMichael, P. (2009). Contemporary contradictions of the global development project: Geopolitics, global ecology and the “development climate”. Third World Quarterly, 30(1), 247–262. Minkoff-Zern, L. A. (2019). The new American farmer: Immigration, race, and the struggle for sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mitchell, D. (2011). Labor’s geography: Capital, violence, guest workers and the post-world war II landscape. Antipode, 43(2), 563–595. Mitchell, D. (2012). They saved the crops: Labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in Bracero-era California. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Nightingale, A. J., Eriksen, S., Taylor, M., Forsyth, T., Pelling, M., Newsham, A.,  .  .  . Bezner Kerr, R. (2020). Beyond technical fixes: Climate solutions and the great derangement. Climate and Development, 12(4), 343–352. O’Brien, K. S. (2012). Global environmental change II: From adaptation to deliberate transformation. Progress in Human Geography, 36(5), 667–676. O’Brien, K. S., Eriksen, S., Inderberg, T. H.,  & Sygna, L. (2014). Climate change and development. In T. H. Inderberg, S. Eriksen, K. S. O’Brien, & L. Sygna (Eds.), Climate change adaptation and development: Transforming paradigms and practices (pp. 273–289). London: Routledge. Öztürk, M., Jongerden, J., & Hilton, A. (2018). The (re) production of the new peasantry in Turkey. Journal of Rural Studies, 61, 244–254. Papadopoulos, A. G., Fratsea, L. M., & Mavrommatis, G. (2018). Governing migrant labour in an intensive agricultural area in Greece: Precarity, political mobilization and migrant agency in the fields of Manolada. Journal of Rural Studies, 64, 200–209. Pelek, D. (2019). Syrian refugees as seasonal migrant workers: Re-construction of unequal power relations in Turkish agriculture. Journal of Refugee Studies, 32(4), 605–629. Pelek, D. (2020). Ethnic residential segregation among seasonal migrant workers: From temporary tents to new rural ghettos in southern Turkey. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–24. doi:10.1080/03066150.2020.1767077 Pelling, M. (2011). Adaptation to climate change: From resilience to transformation. London: Routledge.

Hands that adapt  127 Pelling, M., O’Brien, K. S., & Matyas, D. (2015). Adaptation and transformation. Climatic Change, 133(1), 113–127. Perrotta, D. (2016). Processing tomatoes in the era of the retailing revolution: Mechanization and migrant labour in Northern and Southern Italy. In A. Corrado, C. de Castro, & D. Perrotta (Eds.), Migration and agriculture: Mobility and change in the Mediterranean area (pp. 82–100). London: Routledge. Ribot, J. (2014). Cause and response: Vulnerability and climate in the anthropocene. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(5), 667–705. Rickards, L., & Howden, S. M. (2012). Transformational adaptation: Agriculture and climate change. Crop and Pasture Science, 63(3), 240–250. Rivas, E. (2014, Spring). Review: Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. Labour/Le Travail, 73, 384–386, PRINTEMPS. Rogaly, B. (2009). Spaces of work and everyday life: Labour geographies and the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers. Geography Compass, 3(6), 1975–1987. Rogaly, B., & Coppard, D. (2003). “They used to go to eat, now they go to earn”: The changing meanings of seasonal migration from Puruliya district in West Bengal, India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 3(3), 395–433. Rothenberg, D. (2000). With these hands: The hidden world of migrant farmworkers today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruhs, M. (2006). The potential of temporary migration programmes in future international migration policy. International Labour Review, 145, 7. Scott, S. (2013). Labour, migration and the spatial fix: Evidence from the UK food industry. Antipode, 45(5), 1090–1109. Selek, B., Yazici, D. D., Aksu, H.,  & Özdemir, A. D. (2016). Seyhan Dam, Turkey, and climate change adaptation strategies. In Increasing resilience to climate variability and change (pp. 205–231). Singapore: Springer. Strauss, K. (2018). Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity?. Progress in Human Geography, 42(4), 622–630. Strauss, K. (2020). Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency. Progress in Human Geography, 44(1), 150–159. Tanner, T., & Allouche, J. (2011). Towards a new political economy of climate change and development. IDS Bulletin, 42(3), 1–14. Taylor, M. (2013). Climate change, relational vulnerability and human security: Rethinking sustainable adaptation in agrarian environments. Climate and Development, 5(4), 318–327. Temper, L., Walter, M., Rodriguez, I., Kothari, A., & Turhan, E. (2018). A perspective on radical transformations to sustainability: Resistances, movements and alternatives. Sustainability Science, 13(3), 747–764. THAUM [Cukurova University Tropical Diseases Research and Application Center]. (2010, December  16). Transmitted diseases observation and control system. Final Project Report, Unpublished project report presented to UNDP Turkey. Tigchelaar, M., Battisti, D., & Spector, J. (2020, in press). Work adaptations insufficient to address growing heat risk for U.S. agricultural workers. Environmental Research Letters. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab86f4 Toksöz, M. (2010). Nomads, migrants and cotton in the Eastern Mediterranean: The making of the Adana-Mersin region, 1850–1908. Boston, MA: Brill. Tschakert, P., van Oort, B., St. Clair, A. L., & LaMadrid, A. (2013). Inequality and transformation analyses: A complementary lens for addressing vulnerability to climate change. Climate and Development, 5(4), 340–350.

128  Ethemcan Turhan Turhan, E. (2016). Value-based adaptation to climate change and divergent developmentalisms in Turkish agriculture. Ecological Economics, 121, 140–148. Turhan, E., Kallis, G.,  & Zografos, C. (2019). Power asymmetries, migrant agricultural labour, and adaptation governance in Turkey: A political ecology of double exposures. Facing Hydrometeorological Extreme Events: A Governance Issue, 261–281. Turhan, E., Zografos, C., & Kallis, G. (2015). Adaptation as biopolitics: Why state policies in Turkey do not reduce the vulnerability of seasonal agricultural workers to climate change. Global Environmental Change, 31, 296–306. TZOB. (2019). ZİRAİ VE İKTİSADİ RAPOR 2015–2018. Retrieved March 12, 2020, from www.tzob.org.tr/File/PdfViewer?guid=b2954740-3d4b-4c77-b375-ba301b775f46 &category=file&pageCount=440 UNDP. (2012). Final MDG-F 1680 joint programme narrative report. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from http://mptf.undp.org/document/download/11454 Uyan-Semerci, P., Erdoğan, E., & Sinem, K. (2014). Mevsimlik gezici tarım işçiliği raporu 2014. İstanbul: Hayata Destek Derneği. Retrieved March 12, 2020, from www.hayatadestek. org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/mevsimlik-gezici-tarim-isciligi-2014-arastirmaraporu.pdf Vásquez-León, M. (2009). Hispanic farmers and farmworkers: Social networks, institutional exclusion, and climate vulnerability in southeastern Arizona. American Anthropologist, 111(3), 289–301. Watts, M. J. (2015). The origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge, & J. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of political ecology (pp. 19–50). London: Routledge. Weisskircher, M., Rone, J., & Mendes, M. S. (2020). The only frequent flyers left: Migrant workers in the EU in times of Covid-19. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from www.opendemocracy.net/ en/can-europe-make-it/only-frequent-flyers-left-migrant-workers-eu-times-covid-19/

Part 3

Resistance

8 Workers and environmentalists of the world unite? Exploring red-green politics in union support for Heathrow expansion Maya Goodfellow and Nithya Natarajan Introduction In 2018 Len McCluskey, the leader of UK’s then-largest trade union Unite the Union (Unite hereafter), explicitly supported plans to construct a third runway at Heathrow Airport in London (Elgot & Taylor, 2018), which by 2017 was already the second busiest airport in the world (Coffey, 2018). The union’s decision was made despite research detailing the detrimental environmental impacts of the runway, particularly on air quality (Yim, Stettler,  & Barrett, 2013): a particular concern as in 2017 given that London once again reached the annual “safe” air pollution target by the end of the first week of January (Carrington, 2017). The decision enraged environmental groups (see for example Somerville, 2019), and was at odds with parts of the Labour Party (Elgot & Taylor, 2018). Moreover, it held a wider significance, because as Perry (2019) argues, “working class environmentalism is part of the solution to the climate crisis”. This chapter explores Unite’s decision to back Heathrow airport’s expansion, using this case as a focal point from which to understand how concerns about climate change and labour relations are articulated within organised labour in the UK. A burgeoning scholarship explores the articulation of red-green agendas in recent years. After decades of apparent dissonance, where environmental movements were often seen as being at odds with trade unions in promoting the dismantling of jobs in high-emissions sectors (Räthzel  & Uzzell, 2013), more recent moves towards cohesive political agendas such as “Green New Deal” policies (see, for example Herndon, 2019; Labour for a Green New Deal, 2019) have opened up new avenues of thinking. Within this, scholarship highlights the drivers of historical discord between unions and environmental movements (Barca, 2019), as well as instances of cohesion, where concerns about the uneven impacts of climate and environmental change upon the working poor drove unions to better centralise such concerns within their work (Hampton, 2018). Wider research also advocates specific agendas for reform and ­alliance, including a “labour environmentalism” research agenda which addresses “strategies of unions, union members, and workers  – to

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combat environmental degradation, predominantly climate change” (Stevis, Uzzell, & Räthzel, 2018, p. 440). Yet such work largely fails to link with wider research in labour studies which explores the secular decline of trade union membership in the latter half of the twentieth century, and up to the present day. As such, theoretical conceptions of the changing role of the trade union, and how this has reshaped patterns of membership vis-à-vis a changing labour market across the global North, are yet to be linked to environmental concerns in trade unions. Such an approach, we argue, sheds light on why environmental concerns have been historically side-lined by some trade unions, why in some cases they continue to be, and what this tells us about who constitutes “labour” within emerging labour environmentalism (Barca, 2019). This chapter looks to address this gap, through a discourse analysis of speeches and statements made by figures within Unite  – including letters signed by Unite officials along with those from other UK trade unions, in justifying the decision to back a third runway at Heathrow Airport. We utilise Barca’s (2019) work, to ask who constitutes “labour” within the trade union movement, and thus within more recent attempts to move towards a “labour environmentalism”. We also draw on Virdee’s (2000) notion of trade unions as defensive organisations, intent on securing working conditions for a specific constituency of the workforce, to suggest that the normative worker underpinning Unite’s communications is concerned with British growth, job creation, and good working conditions, with the union seeing its own role as limited to the enshrining of these. Indeed, this sits in arguable tension with the concern the union movement articulates for local, national and international workers, many of the same people who will be negatively impacted by expansion and are being impacted by the climate crisis. The chapter goes on to think about why, in the context of long-term declining trade union membership, unions should rethink their stance vis-à-vis the climate. Drawing on the work of McAlevey (2016) and also Barca (2019), we argue for unions to take a more expansive and holistic role vis-à-vis workers and social justice. This means embracing a more complex, heterogeneous understanding of who the “worker” is, and understanding how fighting oppression extends beyond the workplace and into social life. This also means understanding how environmental plunder is central to capitalist accumulation, articulated with and through racialised and gendered forms of labour exploitation. We ultimately argue that unions need to look beyond their perceived membership base and their role as workerist organisations to remain salient as a political force, and that part of this includes a more coherent and unifying understanding of environmental concerns as labour concerns. This chapter is structured as follows: first we explore the rise and decline of trade unions in the UK, looking to conceptualise unions as political organisations. We go on to undertake a discourse analysis of key documents relating to Unite’s support for Heathrow expansion, using this as the basis to understand how the union conceptualises its role vis-à-vis workers and the environment. Through this, we analyse the normative worker and core interests of Unite,

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arguing for a more holistic approach to understanding both workers and unions themselves in building a more environmentally coherent approach to organising in the future.

British trade unions and environmentalism British trade unions first arose in the early to mid-nineteenth century, as the country underwent a process of agrarian-industrial transformation, which saw the emergence of a low-paid industrial workforce, and collective organising to improve working conditions (Davis, 2020). Between the 1890s and the start of the First World War, trade union membership rose rapidly (see Figure  8.1), as rising instances of successful strike action led to increased organising among so-called less-skilled and semi-skilled workers. The struggle for women’s suffrage in the 1910s, culminating in votes for all women from 1928 onwards, led to an increase in female union membership in this period, and a consequent boost for the movement (Davis, 2020). Following the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the process of decolonisation across British overseas territories, the country saw a further increase as the post-war depression gave way to a boom period and concurrently rising trade union membership. In this period of capital expansion centred on the Fordist model of production, when British trade unions were at their historical strongest point, the image of the normative trade unionist was arguably presumed to be a white, male, industrial blue-collar worker. Whilst it is plausible to presume such a worker remains a historical exception in the global workplace (see Breman & van der Linden, 2014), the normative underpinnings implied by such a target worker have had profound impacts on union politics both historically and in the current era in the UK.

Figure 8.1  British trade union membership rates, 1892–2017 Source: ONS (2019). Note: The varied intervals in the x axis reflect shifting periods of data collection by the ONS.

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Figure 8.2  UK trade union membership compared with employment, 1971–2017 Source: ONS (2019).

From the 1970s onwards, British union membership has been in decline in clear contrast to the rising numbers in the British workforce, as shown in Figure 8.2. This trend is echoed in unions across the global North, speaking in part to a dissonance between union organising and existing workforces. In linking this back to the issue of the environment, Barca (2019) highlights the schism between European labour unions’ conceptualisation of capitalist exploitation centred upon the white, male, unionised worker typical of the Fordist era, and the more complex reality of accumulation as a racialised and gendered process rooted in the appropriation of nature. This schism, Barca suggests, fails to acknowledge: the material effects of the capitalist/patriarchal/colonial order in terms of depletion of both ecosystems and people, via extraction of unpaid labour from (mostly women) reproducers and from nature, which originated in the cultural depreciation of reproductive services, while leading to their commodification. Barca’s analysis offers key insights into how trade unions’ selective conceptualisation of capitalist exploitation shaped their focus in terms of membership and rendered invisible other forms of exploitation and appropriation. Therefore, as Barca suggests, the question we should be asking is “what counts as labour in labour environmentalism?” (2019, p. 227). In developing this line of thinking about race, Virdee’s (2000) work on postwar unionism highlights the active decision of British trade unions to attract white workers through the exclusion of the rising workforces from former colonies in Britain. Virdee suggests that unions set out to protect their existing members’ interests against other groups of workers, including in those sectors where racialised labour was thought to be a threat to existing [white] workers’

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interests. He argues that the racism in the union movement, well documented by many others (Virdee, 2014; Sundari & Pearson, 2018; Goodfellow, 2019), “may actually have been a product of the specific economic, political and ideological conditions under which trade unions attempted to secure their members’ economic interests in the decades that followed World War II” (Virdee, 2000, p.  549). Thus, rather than seeking to expand the focus and reach of unions to encompass the increasingly racialised, and exploited workforces from the global South, British unions centred their organising around cementing the interests of the perceived ideal-type worker. Crucially, for Virdee (2000), the very notion that trade unions will ever represent the interests of a general working class, or be the vehicles for radical transformation, are in question. Rather he draws on wider Marxist literature to suggest that particular unions are in fact only ever bound to defend the interests of a particular set of workers in a particular time period. Furthermore, he argues that “trade unions” are “essentially defensive organisations established by groups of workers to regulate their terms and conditions of employment strictly within the confines of the capitalist social formation” (2000, p.  548). As such, Virdee (2000, p. 549) suggests that a shift in the broader “economic, political and ideological conditions would probably induce a change in the strategy trade unions employed to secure their members’ interests”; yet critiques the notion that such organisations are ever to be understood as the locus of progressive reform of capitalism itself. Virdee’s analysis reduces our expectations of unions from engines of radical politics to defensive organisations enshrining workers’ rights for a select few. The question thus moves from exploring why they are not at the forefront of radical struggle, to instead asking how the shifting demands and politics of workers themselves transforms the union from within, to keep up with its defensive role. One form of trade unionism is (Hyman, 2001; Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011, p. 218) where “the priority for trade unions is collective bargaining and the representation and protection of occupational (rather than class or societal) interests”. This means “environmental issues” are “less likely to develop, since efforts are concentrated on workers’ interests at the workplace, and less on their interests as citizens outside the workplace” (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011, p. 1218). In taking on board this more reductive understanding of trade unions, we can still see that the dramatic reduction in British union membership highlighted in Figure 8.2 speaks to a dissonance between unions’ outreach and activities, and workers themselves. This divergence in union membership and employment numbers thus offers a starting point from which to understand how union conceptualisation of its role vis-à-vis a normative worker has altered over time, and through this, to explore the way the environment is conceptualised by the British union movement.1 This approach addresses a key lacuna within existing analyses, by linking Virdee’s conceptualisation of unions as defensive organisations with Barca’s challenge in asking “what counts as labour in labour environmentalism?” (2019, p. 227). The chapter therefore asks what counts as labour among dominant British trade unions, and how they see their role in

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relation to such a worker, through a focus on Unite’s justification for supporting the third runway at Heathrow airport, understood here as emblematic of labour-environment divergence in the union movement. It also considers how this is related to a tension between the local, national and global: namely how the conceptualisation of a specific ideal type worker within the nation or a particular focus on existing membership can erase the concerns and well-being of people and workers at a global scale.

The union discourse justifying expansion We focus here on Unite’s support for Heathrow expansion, in particular how this was expressed in the years leading up to the parliamentary vote on the subject. Indeed, the political project that advocates a third runway at Heathrow has a relatively long history. In the early 1990s a study into runway capacity in the southeast advised expansion at Heathrow and Gatwick (Aldred, 2012; Mackie, 2016). Though this was eventually rejected, the issue resurfaced in a 2003 White Paper recommending expansion at Heathrow and other airports. The New Labour government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, expressed support for the third runway but was criticised by the leader of the then-­ opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron, in 2008. However, the Conservative party lost a parliamentary vote to oppose the runway shortly before Labour were voted out of office in 2010. Having ruled out any new runways and saying they would not proceed with the expansion plan, the Coalition Government under Cameron’s leadership set up the Airports Commission in 2012 – this was at least partly due to divided opinion in the government over the plans (Aldred, 2012; Mackie, 2016). The Commission recommended expanding Heathrow’s runway capacity in 2015. A  year later, with Theresa May now Prime Minister and leading a majority Conservative Government, the government approved the third runway. However, this was followed by a public consolation and a vote in parliament. Some of the arguments articulated by Unite ahead of this parliamentary vote are the focus of our analysis. It should be noted that since we started writing this article in late 2019, anti-expansion campaign groups under the legal organisation “Plan B” have successfully appealed the decision to construct a third runway with the Court of Appeal (Carrington, 2020). Following an unsuccessful Supreme Court ruling on the issue, the Court of Appeal ruled Heathrow expansion plans illegal, on the basis that they did not take into account the government’s legal commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. Despite this turn of events, we continue to focus here on statements issued by Unite and Unite officials in relation to the parliamentary vote on Heathrow expansion in 2019, as a key moment from which to understand union environmentalism. In particular, we look at the discourse used. Critical discourse analysis enables us to identify through analysis the particular linguistic, semiotic and “interdiscursive” . . . features of “texts” . . . which are a part of processes of social

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change, but in ways which facilitate the productive integration of textual analysis into multi-disciplinary research on change. (Fairclough, 2012, p. 453) In this regard, we explore texts and statements from Unite seeking to justify and promote their decision to back the third runway, as a means of uncovering the normative “worker” underpinning their discursive approach. Discourse analysis in this chapter will be limited to statements of support for the third runway made in the year running up to MPs voting on a motion on this subject on 26 June 2018. The reason for focusing on this is that we are attempting to make sense of some of the justifications given for expansion. In particular, we looked at four different sources: •

Source A: A private letter to Labour MPs co-signed by the General Secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey and former Labour MP and campaigner for the runway as part of the group Back Heathrow Airport, Parmjit Dhanda, extracts of this were published in the Guardian (Elgot & Taylor, 2018); • Source B: A public letter co-signed by the general secretaries – though in the case of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) it was the deputy general secretary  – of GMB, Unite, the TUC, Community and British Airline Pilots’ Association (Roache et al., 2018); • Source C: A news article on the Unite website arguing why MPs should vote for the third runway (Unite the Union, 2018); • Source D: A  news article on the Unite website in favour of expansion (Unite the Union, 2019). These sources differ from one another with regard to who the intended audiences were and what the purpose of each appeared to be. Arguably, the primary purpose of sources A  and B was to persuade MPs to vote in favour of the runway. However Source B was intended for public consumption and published on the GMB website, Source A was not released in full and leaked by an unknown source to the Guardian, thus meaning only extracts of the letter were available and that it is possible it was not intended for an audience beyond MPs. In addition, Source B was signed by a number of different trade union officials, while Source A was signed by the Unite general secretary and a proHeathrow campaigner. Both sources C and D were intended to be publicly available and were directed towards a broader audience, given that they were published on the Unite website, although Source C is also explicitly addressed to MPs. Despite these differences, each source offers an insight into how the trade union justifies its position vis-à-vis Heathrow expansion to different parties (MPs, unionists, etc.), and through this, how the union conceives of its own members. By analysing these sources, we have drawn out four key themes, which are distinct but also show some overlap. The themes are (i) the notion that expansion creates “good” jobs, (ii) that unions have played a positive role in fighting

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for progressive change in the context of expansion and Heathrow, (iii) that the runway expansion will be good for the country, with a particularly forwardlooking focus, and (iv) that the expansion will be environmentally friendly. These are explored later in more detail. Creating good jobs

The first theme, which cuts across all of the sources is the idea that Heathrow was essential for job creation and importantly, good, secure and well-paid jobs. This was perhaps most straightforwardly stated in Source A, the letter cosigned by McCluskey and Dhanda, which argued that the bill about the third runway at Heathrow provided MPs with “the opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs” (cited in Elgot & Taylor, 2018, p. 2). Similarly, in Source B, trade unionists representing five different trade unions said the runway would “unlock thousands of jobs and millions of pounds in economic ­benefits at a critical time for workers across the UK”. In order to stress this point, they stated: “as the leaders of trade unions across the UK, representing over 5 million workers and thousands whose jobs rely on the continuing success of Heathrow, we continue to back the idea of expansion of the airport” (Roache et  al., 2018, p.  14; 5). The sentence formulation here helps us to understand the arguable point that is being made: they begin with the justificatory “as” and then place these two facts next to one another, referencing the large numbers of workers they represent generally and at Heathrow. The implication appears to be that they are best placed to know what is in the workers’ interests; with this sentence they establish their authority in this regard. In Source B it was also argued: “a successful Heathrow will benefit workers across the UK. A third runway at Heathrow – one of the biggest construction projects in Europe – answers the demands of many members across the UK – for more skilled, well-paid and sustainable jobs”. They went on to outline the “benefits” to “our members”: “180,000 new jobs, doubling the number of apprenticeships to 10,000 and £187  billion in economic benefits” (Roache et  al., 2018, p.  5; 6). Echoing this same logic, in Source D, Unite London and Eastern regional secretary Peter Kavanagh is quoted as saying: “Heathrow’s expansion masterplan is an important step on the road to creating 77,000 new local jobs and 5,000 new apprenticeships, as well as other benefits such as increased investment and better infrastructure” (cited in Unite the Union, 2019, p.  2). Each of these quotes listed the estimated number of jobs that would be directly created by expansion, the number of people who would be impacted or the numbers of workers already represented. The figures in this way become representative of the authority of the unions and also seem to be used to represent the case for the runway. Source B, the open letter by trade unionists, lists three different supposed benefits from the runway – new jobs, apprenticeships and economic b­ enefits – and in Source D Kavanagh lists two in the form of jobs and apprenticeship. These estimated or in some cases exact figures are importantly stated in a list,

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which seems to be used to stress the importance of the supposed positive impact the Heathrow runway will have in terms of job creation, seen as a crucial role for trade unions in the neoliberal era (Barca, 2019). The lists of two or three may also be intended to strengthen the legitimacy of this argument, in order to make the evidence appear strong and thus harder to argue against. This not only seems to be one of the core aspects to the justifications of supporting the expansion but also signals the centrality of job creation in trade unions’ self-understanding. Furthermore, as well as specific job creation at the site of Heathrow, sources also highlight the overall impact on the UK in terms of job creation. The five trade unionists wrote in Source B: This won’t just affect aviation but will positively benefit our aerospace, construction and steel industries. . . . Expansion will deliver these jobs and growth to every nation and region of the UK, from Penzance to Perth; Swansea to Southend. The third runway is not just a London-centric project  – 60% of the benefits of expansion will be felt outside of London and the South East. . . . One area where the effect will be felt strongest is in the British steel industry. An expanded Heathrow will need thousands of tonnes of UK steel and we will ensure that Heathrow is held to their commitment of using British steel, as well as ensuring that suppliers across the UK are the beneficiaries of this work. This work could have a transformative effect. Independent research concluded that orders for steel alone could sustain hundreds of jobs across the UK, including in the communities of Scunthorpe, Port Talbot and Teesside. (Roache et al., 2018, pp. 6–8) The language here is important; the argument that expansion won’t “just affect aviation” suggests there is a much bigger-reaching positive impact in terms of job creation. This is compounded once again by a list of three: “aerospace, construction and steel”. By listing these three different industries one after another, the letter suggests the impacts will be wide-ranging. The notion that expansion is essential to workers in the UK is thus afforded even more weight; furthermore, it is workers not only in the aviation sector, but from a number of different areas. The importance of expansion for jobs is also stressed through the reference to different parts of the country. It is stated that “expansion will deliver these jobs and growth to every nation and region of the UK, from Penzance to Perth; Swansea to Southend. The third runway is not just a London-centric project”. Using the phrase “every nation and region of the UK” shows how far-reaching it will be. This is then accentuated by positioning next to one another in the text two places that are geographically distance from each other; by doing this twice and using alliteration in order to do so, the letter underlines how this will have an impact on the whole of the UK. This appears to be an extremely important point as it is then clarified specifically this will not

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be a “London-centric project”, arguably addressing a potential critique of the runway that it is biased towards benefitting the capital. This significant focus on the geographical spread of the benefits is used to show that job creation is important for the country as a whole and seems to suggest the unions in favour of this expansion are not only focused on the capital, but workers in all parts of the UK. Further persuasive language is used to argue that the third runway could have a “transformative effect” and “sustain” jobs in three areas – Scunthorpe, Port Talbot and Teeside – that have been damaged by deindustrialisation. Once again we have a list of three places that have arguably been undermined economically by successive governments, underscoring the argument that the impacts will go beyond London and suggests that it will impact places that are often neglected. Thus, as well as protecting jobs that exist, the unions remain committed to scaling-up job creation, and this directed to areas experiencing decline following neoliberal globalisation. As Barca (2019) indicates, in this instance, unions appear to embrace ecological modernisation in their approach, privileging job creation over environmental concerns. Furthermore, in thinking about who unions are appealing to, the regional focus on job creation beyond London, particularly those in three key areas of historically high but now falling membership (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4) – the north-east (Teeside), Yorkshire and the Humber (Scunthorpe), and Wales (Port Talbot). As such, job creation is framed through a geographical lens that is attenuated towards regions of historical union strength and economic decline; which also speaks to how the union sees its own role. However, what is also important to note here is that there is a tension between the kind of localism or regionalism that the unions are concerned with. There is a focus on this expansion benefitting workers all around the country but this belies the

Figure 8.3  UK trade union membership by region, 1995–2019 Source: ONS (2019). Note: Northern Ireland data was not available in 1997 so please ignore the anomaly in this year.

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Figure 8.4  English trade union membership by region, 1995–2019 Source: ONS (2019).

arguable threat the runway poses to people and workers living in the vicinity of the airport whose health will likely be negatively impacted. This does not seem to significantly factor into the union’s discourse here on protecting and benefitting workers all around the country. Union as actively fighting for positive change

In addition to job creation, the union presents itself as an active player in assuring job quality. In Source B, the open letter to Labour MPs, the five union leaders argue: We have as trade unions ensured that Heathrow is now a Living Wage employer, and we will continue to hold them to their agreement that all direct employees of the airport will be paid this wage. This is welcome, and we will also make sure that Heathrow’s commitment to transition all colleagues in the supply chain to the Living Wage is met. (Roache et al., 2018, p. 10) This was accompanied by a commitment to continue to ensure “Heathrow provides a strong commitment to respectful industrial relations and works with unions to deliver a safe and dignified working environment for all” (Roache

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et al., 2018, p. 11). Although this explicit articulation of the union’s role in the process did not manifest in each of the sources looked at, it is noteworthy that it was stated in the lengthiest justification given for the runway that was examined and in a letter that was intended for MPs, to persuade them to vote in favour of the runway. By highlighting that Heathrow is a Living Wage Employer and using language such as “strong commitment” and “dignified working environment”, the explicit suggestion is not only that jobs be created, but that those jobs will be high quality and well-paid. By using emphatic words like “strong” and “dignified”, the suggestion is that Heathrow as an employer can be trusted. Crucially, though, what is highlighted first is the role of the trade unions, which “ensured” Heathrow was a Living Wage Employer and were thus instrumental in creating this work environment. The language of “transition” is used once again to suggest that this is part of a shift in the labour market and that the new jobs created through expansion will be part of this union-driven change. In the UK and more widely, there is a rising sense that newer jobs are increasingly precarious – low-paid, insecure and with poor working conditions (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008); and that this is an outcome of Thatcherite neoliberal reforms. As such, the union promises here to be an active political player in shifting to a new paradigm. Language such as “ensured” and “hold them to their agreement” position the unions as active players in fighting this change. Arguably amending Virdee’s formulation, unions do position themselves as vehicles of political change, albeit within particular, limited notions of what constitutes progress. In linking this to “business unionism” (Hyman, 2001; Räthzel & Uzzell, 2013), where unions privilege occupational rather than class or societal interests, it seems clear that high-quality job creation is privileged over environmental degradation, with the latter not seen as within the purview of union concern. Thus, unions’ role in political progress is defined in narrow and labourist terms, with the concerns of its normative worker being centred on quality jobs and in tension with the likely negative environmental impact of expansion on people and workers living in the vicinity of the airport. Good for the country

The third, overlapping theme identified in the two sources aimed at MPs is the notion that the third runway is good for the country, not only in an economic sense but in relation to the country’s world standing as a centre of capital accumulation. Source A, the letter from McCluskey and Dhanda, stated that if MPs voted for the third runway, they could “ensure our country remains a world leader in aviation and aerospace, industries containing high-quality, unionised jobs” (cited in Elgot & Taylor, 2018, p. 8). Similarly in Source C, the Unite article urging MPs to vote for the runway proposals, Unite national officer Oliver Richardson argued that “the UK is a world leader in aviation and aerospace” and MP should support expansion “to create and maintain high quality jobs” (cited in Unite the Union, 2018, p.  7). The use of the phrase “world leader” paired with the notion of “high-quality jobs” in both sources

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thus reframes the core role of unions through a nationalist lens, where the national interest is used to encourage MPs to vote for the runway. Similarly, Richardson (Unite the Union, 2018, pp. 4–5) argued in the same article that expansion is: critical for the wider economy. . . [because] as a nation, we cannot continue to have a never-ending holding pattern of inaction. It will not only postpone the economic boost and jobs a third runway would bring to the UK economy, but hand rival airports like Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle in Paris a keen competitive advantage. In this instance, the UK economy is pitted against “rival” airports; failing to back the runway is constructed as undermining the country, whereas unions are held as promoting the UK as well as good quality jobs, or rather promoting the country through these jobs. This recourse to nationalist language appears intended to appeal to MPs and cements the union’s role as an arbiter of national growth. Thus not only does the union sit within Barca’s notion of ecological modernisation, it is also, as Virdee (2000) suggests, rooted in defending workers interests within and even through the frames of capitalist growth and the nation state, rather than challenging such wider structures. Indeed, this explicit focus on the national also sits in arguable tension with their commitment to internationalism. On their website, Unite’s “Vision and goals” contains an “international vision”, which states that their “vision is not limited to the United Kingdom. It extends throughout Europe, which we aim to manifest through our links with unions and governments across the globe” (Unite the Union, 2020). Though there is a specific focus on Europe, there is also a suggestion here that their concerns are global  – perhaps reflecting the old union adage “workers of the world unite”. This is not reflected in and indeed potentially runs counter to their nationally focused arguments about the runway. It also suggests that their image of the normative worker or their specific focus on their own members sits both in tension with the local impacts of the runway and with the global impacts of the climate crisis and the people and workers this is impacting around the world. Environmentally “sustainable”

The fourth and final theme that emerges from sources B and D is about the environmental credentials of the third runway project, and implicitly through this, a sense that unions are concerned with environmental issues. In Source B, union leaders address sustainability and climate directly, stating that they are “committed to sustainable transport” and commend Heathrow on the work they have been doing to address environmental concerns. This includes continued progress to increase the number of passengers who take public transport to the airport and Heathrow’s

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commitment to no more airport-related traffic on the roads; investment in Electric Vehicle charging points; and increased environmental charges to encourage airlines to use their cleanest, quietest aircraft. (Roache et al., 2018, p. 13) By using the phrase “environmental concerns”, the letter acknowledges and to some extent addresses the critique of the expansion as worsening the environment. In order to demonstrate that the environment has been considered, the letter then lists four ways that the airport is ostensibly reducing its impact on the environment. This is compounded by the language used: airlines are encouraged to use their “cleanest” “quietest” aircraft. By using these adjectives and this detailed list, the suggestions seem to be that a significant amount is being done to ensure the airport is environmentally friendly. In much the same vein in Source D, Unite London and Eastern regional secretary Peter Kavanagh is quoted as saying said there were “proposals on how Heathrow’s expansion can be done sustainably with welcome proposals for an ultra-low emission zone and on air quality in and around the airport” (cited in Unite the Union, 2019, p. 3). Much like Source B, this uses the language of the environmental movement, in particular with the term “sustainably”. And in both sources the focus is on air pollution “in and around” the airport, the former explicitly and the latter implicitly appearing to refer to transport to and from the airport, as well as plane themselves. Not all arguments for expansion, therefore, entirely avoid the environmental concerns of the third runway. Rather, in some of the texts examined, this is addressed by recasting sustainability within a narrower frame – for example in terms of transport to and from the airport – and thus decentring concerns about the runway and air pollution. In the statements examined, the concern the union expresses for environmental issues is thus cemented, albeit within the restrictions imposed by more central aims of good quality job creation and national development.

The case for union environmentalism Trade unions advocating the third runway at Heathrow are shown to promote environmental issues, within the confines of the perceived broader and more central remit of quality job creation and national development. As Virdee (2000) suggests, this approach foregrounds unions’ defensive rather than progressive position vis-à-vis wider structures, whereby unions adopt the ideals of ecological modernisation and thus obscure or even ignore the environmental degradation at a local, national and global scale in favour of the potential of a third runway to promote job creation. This final section of our chapter offers an overview of the reasons why this approach is short-sighted, both within the confines of seeing unions as defensive organisations, and beyond this, to thinking about how unions need to expand their remit. The first issue lies in the framing of unions as defensive organisations. In the context of falling membership, we suggest that the failure to centralise

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environmental concerns speaks to discord between the normative union worker and real workers today. A key example of this is in unions’ failure to recruit more workers, in particular younger members of the workforce. As shown in Figure 8.5, age is a stark dividing line in terms of union membership, with only 8.4% of workers aged 16–24 years unionised, and only 19.7% of those aged 25–34 years (ONS, 2019). As shown in Figure 8.6, taken together, those aged 16–34 years constituted 35% of the total labour force in the last quarter of 2019 (ONS, 2019), and yet average union membership among this growing group was only 14%. The positioning on Heathrow outlined earlier – rooted in job creation, quality jobs, nationalism, and a limited vision of environmental concerns – is a key area of dissonance we highlight here in appealing to younger workers. In a poll conducted in 2019 (Ipsos MORI, 2019, p. 1), 53% of those aged 18–34 were “very concerned” about climate change, whilst 33% were “fairly concerned”. In fact, among those aged 35–54, the numbers were not dissimilar, with 54% “very concerned” and 30% “fairly concerned”. Therefore, although low ­levels of union membership among young people can be a­ ttributed to a wide range of causal factors  – and we are not arguing Unite and other unions’ arguable ­weakness on climate is the causal factor – this suggests that ­environmental ­concerns have become a crucial political axis for mobilisation among a wide cohort of the population. This, then, may be part of a broader picture  – ­including the erosion of union power and collective bargaining – that helps us make sense of low membership among young people. In thinking about why environmental concerns have become so important, the polling company Ipsos MORI highlights the impacts of Extinction Rebellion protests, Greta Thunberg’s worldwide school strike movement,

Figure 8.5  Proportion of UK union members by age, 2019 Source: ONS (2019).

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Figure 8.6  UK labour market by age, 1992–2019 Source: ONS (2019).

and the declaration of climate emergencies among several local authorities in the UK; all leading to the dramatic polling results in late 2019 (Dickman & ­Skinner, 2019). The onset of particular events often causes such spikes – Ipsos MORI point out that a previous spike in public concerns for climate change came in 2004/05, in the wake of media coverage of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty which commits states to reducing harmful emissions, and the Stern Report looking at the economic impacts of climate change in the UK (Dickman & Skinner, 2019). Yet beyond such overarching changes in the level of concern, there are also specific structural drivers of concern around climate change, especially among more marginalised groups, which unions should heed. Obach (2004, pp. 29–31), for example, highlights how the working class stand to disproportionately suffer under environmental destruction, including through health consequences, in instances where “environmentally undesirable facilities” are “sited in or near low-income communities”, with serious implications for the well-being of those living there. Moreover, such environmental degradation is also shown to reproduce racialised inequalities, a notable example being the re-routing of an oil pipeline in the United States under an Indigenous American reserve  – Standing Rock  – home to a community of Sioux Indigenous Americans, as opposed to more affluent neighbourhoods (Estes, 2019). Parsons, in this volume, similarly highlights how rising temperatures pose an ever-increasing risk for the hundreds of millions of precarious, low-wages workers across the global South that work outside and without protections adequate to compensate for increasingly regular periods of dangerous heat stress.

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In response, there has been a rising tide of climate justice activism in the past two decades, with environmental social movements foregrounding the uneven class, race and gender-based impacts of climate change and demanding reform (Pettit, 2004). In building on such movements, labour unions have arguably been slow to catch-up. Largely analysing examples in the global North, Räthzel and Uzzell (2013) argue that labour movements have historically viewed nature as a leisure space for workers to be protected as a public utility, or as an occupational health issue with regard for water or air pollution. This has prevented a deeper engagement with how the exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature are articulated in the logics of productivist capitalism, and therefore how nature is not external to humans, but rather that people and nature are materially, substantively unified, if possessing different properties (Malm, 2017). Obach, Räthzel and Uzzell ultimately highlight that unions need to take environmental concerns more seriously for a range of reasons, and to more fundamentally reconceptualise nature in relation to labour, and within the broader logics of capitalism. Returning to Virdee, we would also suggest here that this reconceptualisation is crucial in thinking about how labour unions have scope to move beyond the narrow confines that Virdee suggests they currently sit in. In contrast to the notion of “business unionism” (Hyman, 2001; Räthzel  & Uzzell, 2011) or defensive unions, McAlevey has argued against the division of unions and social movements, suggesting that rather than simply aiming for “material gain”, successful unions need to undertake “deep organizing” (McAlevey, 2016, pp. 1–2, emphasis in original). Her approach merges “the people in unions, who are called workers, and many of the same people after they have punched the clock at the end of theirs shift and put on their SMO [social movement organisation] (or ‘interest group’) volunteer hats”; thus overcoming a division she sees as both forged by labour unions and reproduced in progressive scholarship (McAlevey, 2016, p. 2). McAlevey highlights the transformative success of both the labour and civil rights movements in mid-twentieth-century US, and suggests both are rooted in “structure-based ­organizing” (2016, p. 12), attacking a broader structure of oppression as opposed to mobilising around a self-selected group. In this regard, deep organising refers to a conceptualisation of workers beyond the confines of the workplace: as individuals, citizens, and community members, thereby widening their appeal beyond workplace issues engaging with members as part of a broader struggle. In linking this back to environmental issues, Barca (2019) has argued that there needs to be a more holistic understanding of how environmental plunder is central to capitalist accumulation, engaging in particular with racialised and gendered forms of labour exploitation, in order to effect a genuinely progressive labour politics (see also Mies, 1986; Salleh, 2017). The proliferating impacts of climate change across the world are alarming. Human-induced warming reached 1°C in 2017, and this has already resulted in profound changes to climate and weather, with an increase in extreme weather events  – floods, droughts and storms in particular – affecting hundreds of millions of people

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across the world (IPCC, 2018). It has been shown that global working poor are subject to the worst impacts of climate change, given their structural insecurity vis-à-vis labour markets and growth more broadly (IPCC, 2018; Natarajan, Brickell,  & Parsons, 2019). The centrality of progressive climate politics in labour movements is therefore more apparent than ever before. Certainly, there are numerous instances where prior to 2018, unionism and efforts to combat climate change or ecological issues have been explicitly connected. Drawing on the work of Mason and Morter (1998), Hampton (2014, pp. 79–82) highlights instances where unions have coalesced around particular environment concerns such as the campaign run by the Seafarers Union and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) to stop nuclear waste being dumped at sea, or how in the 1970s the rank and file of unions knitted ecological concerns into their plans, for instance the Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan, which focused on renewable energy sources (Hampton, 2014, pp. 81–82). Additionally, the TUC has advocated for engaging employees in how to reduce their organisations’ carbon emissions and in 2010, then deputy general secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady welcomed “everyone to the TUC  – where green runs alongside red as our colour of choice” (O’Grady, 2010, p. 2). Yet beyond such examples, McAlevey’s approach speaks to the need for unions to more fundamentally rethink their role in relation to concerns of the climate. Specifically, the environment needs to be conceptualised beyond the confines of public space and occupational health. There is certainly evidence this is happening in the UK, in fact at the 2019 UK Labour party conference, there was a vote in support of a motion focused on the “Green New Deal” (GND), which included a broad-based proposal to shift economic planning towards a decarbonised approach and a commitment to a net zero carbon target by 2030 (Labour for a Green New Deal, 2019). This offers evidence of such a reimagining. Crucially, the largest unions Unite and UNISON backed this motion. Only GMB, a union with high levels of membership in the fossil fuel industry, abstained and instead offered an alternative motion with watertight commitments regarding transitioning workers. Although it did not include the 2030 zero carbon target, this motion also passed. The GND promises significant investment in renewable energy industries, infrastructure, and nationalising assets, complete with robust job-creation throughout (Labour for a Green New Deal, 2019). Yet as Levy (2019) has argued, despite the GND’s apparent success, there remain significant tensions with regards to what it proposes and the interest bases of unions, as evidenced by some of the politics surrounding the motion during the 2019 Labour Party Conference. For example, the GND is rooted in part in opposing growth-led policies, for example closing down UK tax havens, and eliminating subsidies to international finance, which run counter to both Labour party policy and mainstream union ecomodernism. As such, union commitment to green policies, we argue, needs to look beyond its traditional approach and instead think more about how to draw energy

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from the rising climate concern and activism among it supporter base, which includes a structural opposition to the forces of ecological plunder.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored the tensions between parts of the union movement and the left’s engagement with and mobilisation around climate change. To do this we focused on how unions – in particular, though not exclusively, Unite  – articulated their support for Heathrow expansion. By mapping the tropes that appear in both their public statements in favour of the runway and in their correspondence with MPs prior to the parliamentary vote, and by drawing on existing theoretical analysis of unions as defensive organisation, we have established the limitations of a union movement primarily concerned with protecting and creating jobs. In particular there is an arguable tension between this approach and who is impacted both locally, nationally and globally by expansion and rising emissions: it appears to be the image of the normative worker or the specific membership base of the union that is privileged over people and workers more broadly. This must also be seen in the context of who falling and existing union membership. From this analysis, we argue that unions must both reorient their political activities to better acknowledge the broader society they exist within and attempt to speak to new constituencies of people, many of whom are younger. This would both have the potential of growing union membership and allow them to centre climate change in their political activities. We also advance a novel approach to understanding labour environmentalism, drawing Virdee and McAlevey to link analyses of trade union politics and appeal to research on the green turn among labour unions. Through this, we argue for greater attention to labour unions and their particular role in terms of political mobilisation vis-à-vis a changing workforce, in order to sharpen analyses of labour environmentalism, its opportunities and obstacles.

Note 1 The British trade union movement is of course heterogeneous and we are unable in our analysis to provide an encompassing approach, so instead we focus on the most populous at the time of the Heathrow runway debate, UNITE.

References Aldred, J. (2012). Heathrow third runway – timeline of events. The Guardian. Barca, S. (2019). Labour and the ecological crisis: The eco-modernist dilemma in western Marxism(s) (1970s–2000s). Geoforum, 98, 226–235. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.011 Breman, J., & van der Linden, M. (2014). Informalizing the economy: The return of the social question at a global level. Development and Change, 45, 920–940. doi:10.1111/ dech.12115

150  Maya Goodfellow and Nithya Natarajan Carrington, D. (2017). London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days. The Guardian. Carrington, D. (2020, February  27). Heathrow third runway ruled illegal over climate change. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/ feb/27/heathrow-third-runway-ruled-illegal-over-climate-change Coffey, H. (2018). The 10 busiest airports in the world. The Independent. Davis, M. (2020). TUC history online: Timeline. London: Trades Union Congress. Dickman, A., & Skinner, G. (2019). Concern about climate change reaches record levels with half now “very concerned” (Ipsos MORI blogs). Retrieved March 7, 2020, from www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/ en-uk/concern-about-climate-change-reaches-record-levels-half-now-very-concerned Elgot, J., & Taylor, M. (2018). Len McCluskey at odds with Corbyn over Heathrow expansion. The Guardian. Estes, N. (2019). Our history is the future: Standing rock versus the Dakota access pipeline and the long tradition of indigenous resistance. London: Verso. Fairclough, N. (2012). Critical discourse analysis. International Advances in Engineering and Technology, 7, 452–487. Goodfellow, M. (2019). Hostile environment: How immigrants became scapegoats. London: Verso. Hampton, P. (2014). Climate change, trade unions and the promise of climate solidarity in the UK (PhD). London Metropolitan University, London. Hampton, P. (2018). Trade unions and climate politics: Prisoners of neoliberalism or swords of climate justice? Globalizations, 15, 470–486. doi:10.1080/14747731.2018.1454673 Herndon, A. W. (2019). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to rally for green new deal in Washington. New York Times. Hyman, R. (2001). Understanding European trade unionism: Between market, class and society. London: Sage. IPCC. (2018). Global warming of 1.5 °C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ipsos MORI. (2019). Ipsos MORI political monitor, climate change questions, Ipsos MORI political monitor. London: Author. Labour for a Green New Deal. (2019). Labour commits to a green new deal! Labourgnd. Retrieved September 28, 2019, from www.labourgnd.uk/ Levy, G. (2019). Battlegrounds of labour’s green new deal. The Ecologist. Mackie, I. (2016). A  history of UK airport expansion: Runways, reports, reversals. The Financial Times. Malm, A. (2017). The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming world. London: Verso. Mason, M., & Morter, N. (1998). Trade unions as environmental actors: A case study of the UK transport  & general workers’ union. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 9(2), 3–34. doi:10.1080/10455759809358791 McAlevey, J. (2016). No shortcuts: Organizing for power in the new gilded age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale. New York: Zed Books. Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., & Parsons, L. (2019). Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural  – urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a “climate precarity” approach. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. doi:10.1177/2514848619858155 Neilson, B., & Rossiter, N. (2008). Precarity as a political concept, or, fordism as exception. Theory, Culture & Society, 25, 51–72. doi:10.1177/0263276408097796

Workers and environmentalists unite?  151 Obach, B. K. (2004). Labor and the environmental movement: The quest for common ground. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Grady, F. (2010, October 11). Frances O’Grady, speech, TUC green growth conference. Tuc. Retrieved November  7, 2020, from www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/ frances-ogrady-speech-tuc-green-growth-conference-11102010 ONS [Office for National Statistics]. (2019). Labour force survey. London: Author. Perry, M. (2019, October 8). Unions can – and will – play a leading role in tackling the climate crisis. The Conversation (blog). Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/ unions-can-and-will-play-a-leading-role-in-tackling-the-climate-crisis-113226 Pettit, J. (2004). Climate justice: A new social movement for atmospheric rights. IDS Bulletin, 35, 102–106. Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (2011). Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma. Global Environmental Change, 21, 1215–1223. Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (2013). Mending the breach between labour and nature: Environmental engagements of trade unions and the North-South divide. In N. Räthzel & D. Uzzell (Eds.), Trade unions in the green economy (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. Roache, T., et al. (2018). GMB send open letter to MPs to back third runway bid. gmblondon. Retrieved November  7, 2020, from www.gmblondon.org.uk/news/gmb-sendopen-letter-to-mps-to-back-third-runway-bid Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as politics: Nature, Marx and the postmodern. London: Zed Books. Somerville, E. (2019, December  8). Extinction rebellion Heathrow protest: A ­ ctivists stage “lie in” in front of pink “bulldozer”. Evening Standard. Retrieved from www. standard.co.uk/news/uk/heathrow-extinction-rebellion-protest-latest-bulldozer-third-­ runway-a4308041.html Stevis, D., Uzzell, D., & Räthzel, N. (2018). The labour–nature relationship: Varieties of labour environmentalism. Globalizations, 15, 439–453. doi:10.1080/14747731.2018.145 4675 Sundari, A., & Pearson, R. (2018). Striking women: Struggles & strategies of South Asian women workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. Unite the Union. (2018). MPs urged to back Heathrow expansion as ministers warned over further delay. Unitetheunion. Retrieved November  7, 2020, from https:// unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2018/june/mps-urged-to-back-heathrowexpansion-as-ministers-warned-over-further-delay/ Unite the Union. (2019). Heathrow expansion “masterplan” important step on the road to creating thousands of jobs, says unite. Unitetheunion. Retrieved November 7, 2020, from https://unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2019/june/heathrow-expansion-master plan-important-step-on-the-road-to-creating-thousands-of-jobs-says-unite/ Unite the Union. (2020, August). Vision and goals. Unite the Union. Retrieved from https:// unitetheunion.org/who-we-are/visions-and-goals/ Virdee, S. (2000). A Marxist critique of Black radical theories of trade-union racism. Sociology, 34, 545–565. doi:10.1177/S003803850000033X Virdee, S. (2014). Racism, class and the racialized outsider. London: Red Globe Press. Yim, S. H. L., Stettler, M. E. J., & Barrett, S. R. H. (2013). Air quality and public health impacts of UK airports. Part II: Impacts and policy assessment. Atmospheric Environment, 67, 184–192. doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2012.10.017

9 A changing climate Indigenous participation in the extractive industry Kimberleigh Schultz

Introduction Indigenous communities in Canada1 have a long history of resisting oil, gas, and mining developments that pose ecological risks their lands and territories, and are historically shaped and driven by settler-colonial processes of growth and development. Today, climate change also is damaging northern ecosystems, which has implications for Indigenous livelihood strategies as they often include subsistence activities such as hunting, harvesting and trapping. As global warming thaws permafrost and opens seaways in the north, Canada’s oil, gas and mineral-rich sub-Arctic and Arctic region is becoming an increasingly attractive option for extractive industry. As resource development expands across Canada’s north, Indigenous communities often face a growing pressure to participate. Although oil, gas and mineral mining can pose significant risk to the lands and waters that support their livelihoods, Indigenous communities are increasingly compelled to engage in the same colonial systems of capital accumulation that are undermining their way of life. With otherwise limited options, communities are increasingly relying on the economic and employment opportunities offered by extractive industries to offset what their environments can no longer reliably provide. Yet participation in these industries further degrades the ecosystems many Indigenous peoples in the north still rely on for subsistence, and the financial gains and employment opportunities do not always benefit the communities as anticipated. There is a growing body of literature exploring northern development in relation to Indigenous communities. However, while there are many lines of inquiry that focus on Indigenous labour and resource development in the north, and Indigenous livelihoods and adaptation to climate change, there is a notable lack of literature that brings together these intersecting elements and how they are considered in relation to Indigenous livelihoods. This chapter aims to link divergent strands of thinking, viewing Indigenous community livelihoods through the overlapping lenses of work and adaptation to climate change. I  draw from literature on northern and Indigenous economies to first highlight the complex mixed livelihood strategies common in northern

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Indigenous communities in Canada, and then seek to situate the trend towards waged work in extractive industry within this model. This chapter ultimately argues that global warming, understood as being driven in part by extractivism in the region, is a driver for both adaptation and resistance. It both opens up the region for economic development, while simultaneously threatening the subsistence aspects of Indigenous livelihood strategies. Arguments here are developed using a combination of wider literature, while also drawing on compelling narratives emerging in Canadian media as well as from my personal experiences as a Métis woman with more than 10 years of professional research and policy experience related to Indigenous community development in Canada.

Understanding the context: settler-colonialism in Canada Closely linked to imperialist desires to extend power and influence through the acquisition and governance of territory, classical (or metropole) colonialism is nevertheless primarily concerned with colonising a territory to establish more permanent control over resources for the purposes of exploiting local labour and exporting goods or wealth back to the country of colonial origin. Colonisation occurs as a result of colonial interest in exerting and maintaining power over a distant territory through settlement. By definition, colonialism requires the “subjection of colonised ‘others’ ” (Veracini, 2013, p. 317). Robin Butlin’s Geographies of Empire: European empires and colonies c. 1880–1960 (2009) offers insights into some fundamental differences in the settlement efforts across British colonies, drawing interesting distinctions between different types of colonies and the strategies used to establish them: In the text itself, differentiations are made between Britain’s “settlement colonies” and other colonies, but these differentiations are largely framed in capitalist, extractive terms. Settlement is subsumed into the imperial utility of “free trade”, driven by the needs for cereals and agricultural goods throughout the empire with land valued only to the extent that it could be used for farming (or contained gold). (Barker, 2012, p. 2) Butlin describes differences between settlement strategies noting that countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were involved in large-scale colonisation efforts relative to other regions implicated in the expansion of the British empire, including India and parts of Africa (Butlin, 2009; Barker, 2012). In this way the character or nature of colonisation can, in some ways, evolve alongside its interests over time, and a number of different outcomes from colonial undertakings are possible. In very general terms, obvious possible outcomes include the continuance of the colonial territorial relationship – as is the case in British Overseas Territories, or the alternative possibility where the colonial power eventually leaves – as was the case in India.

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While these types of colonial outcomes have spawned considerable theoretical study in areas such as post-colonialism and neocolonialism, this chapter is concerned with another theoretical framework useful for understanding European colonisation of Canada – settler colonialism. A growing number of scholars have argued to theorise settler colonialism as distinct from other forms of colonial domination (Banivanua-Mar & Edmonds, 2010; Bateman  & Pilkington, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Veracini, 2013; Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonialism is a relatively new theoretical ­framework useful for analytical inquiry in understanding the experience of Indigenous peoples with colonisation in the Canadian context. Irrespective of whatever the original impetus was for establishing the colony, settler colonialism represents a theoretical line of inquiry that explores what happens when colonisers arrive with the intention of staying – establishing new narratives of national identity that obscure Indigenous presence and with it any evidence that settlers are complicit in colonisation (Regan, 2010). Indigenous scholar and settler-colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe notes that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (2006, p. 388). Scholars interested in settler colonialism argue that it differs from classic colonialism in that the settler colonisers come seeking permanent settlement and to establish a new national identity, a process that also requires the expropriation of Indigenous lands (Elkins & Pedersen, 2005; Kobayashi & de Leeuw, 2010; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Veracini, 2013; Wolfe, 2006). Through European concepts like terra nullius, expansion is justified as the lands are empty and ripe for pioneering (Harris, 2004; Bonds, 2013; Bonds & Inwood, 2016; Pasternak, 2015). Settler colonial efforts in widespread colonisation eventually and necessarily begin to require the establishment property rights, as defined by the colonial authority, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples, for whom large, natural land bases were a necessity in order to sustain hunting and harvesting and other subsistence activities without permanently harming ecosystems and depleting resources. Settler-colonial displacement was rationalised through Euro-centric interpretations of land-use that saw Indigenous landscapes as wasted or unused (Bonds  & Inwood, 2016; Hugill, 2017). These interpretations continue to influence how the state and many of its “settlers” view Indigenous territories in the context of resource development. Settler colonisation is therefore an ongoing process that persists in attempts to displace or eliminate Indigenous peoples, which Wolfe describes as the “logics of extermination” (2006). In Canada, it is (or should be) commonly known that a number of policies and practices aimed at precisely this have been implemented at various points in time, including: dispossession policies facilitating the widespread displacement of Indigenous peoples (Peters, 2000, 2001); disastrous assimilationist polices such as enfranchisement and the residential school system; and other destructive practices such as the widespread removal of Indigenous children from their homes to facilitate their adoption into non-Indigenous families (Palmater, 2016; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).

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As a result of these disastrous, assimilationist colonial policies and attempts at cultural genocide, Indigenous communities today are plagued by systemic social and economic issues, including intergenerational poverty (Palmater, 2016; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).

Indigenous livelihoods in Northern Canada In Canada, many northern and remote Indigenous communities still rely at least in part on traditional subsistence activities such as hunting, trapping, fishing, and harvesting. As is the case in remote First Nations across much of northern Ontario and Quebec (see Figure 9.1), in the fly-in2 First Nation community where I  spent several months in my youth, school is let out for a break in spring so children and families can go out on the land to hunt geese (see also Shem & Roberston, 2014). Berry picking was and continues to be a common summer activity across the north. Moose, beaver, caribou, and a variety of fish and fowl are also hunted/ harvested seasonally as well. In addition to the significant cultural importance of these subsistence activities, there are also fewer opportunities for wage labour and the cost of food in the north, particularly in remote and fly-in communities, is so high that families must hunt, trap and fish

Figure 9.1  “Delineating northern and southern Canada” Source: Census of Canadian Population (2016)

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as part of their livelihood strategies to ensure there will be enough food to eat. Those in the community who do not or cannot hunt often still receive a share of meat, therefore these subsistence activities represent a communal livelihood strategy as well. While this example is from my own experiences in a remote community, the importance of water and land-based subsistence activities both culturally, and in terms of livelihood strategies due to the high cost of food, is common to every northern Indigenous community I have had the privilege to visit, from the Nunavik region of northern Quebec to the Dene and Métis Sahtu Settlement Area of the North-west Territories.3 Although there is some disagreement in the literature about how best to characterise northern economies, it is understood that subsistence activities are a key component of life as opportunities for conventional wage labour are fewer. Elias (1997) describes no less than four models used to describe Indigenous communities in northern Canada. First, the dominant “dual economy” model (citing Chuchman, 1992), which sees polarised traditional and modern sectors, and assumes that Indigenous communities in the traditional sector aspire to working in the modern sector. This model assumes a desire among Indigenous communities to adopt a westernised mode of living and transition to waged labour, resting upon a normative assumption of progress which is not necessarily shared by Indigenous communities themselves. The second “political economy” model (citing Goodman-Draper, 1994; Loxley, 1992; Watkins, 1990) argues that Indigenous communities are underdeveloped, due to the extraction and appropriation of natural wealth from their regions by more powerful actors. This model historicises the current development scenario in northern Canada, highlighting the role of colonial extractivism in forging underdevelopment, and advocating structural change in the way natural resources are appropriated. Third, the mixed economy model (citing Cox, 1985; Fall, 1990; Feldman, 1986; Nowak, 1988), which foregrounds the desire of Indigenous communities to reproduce themselves through a range of livelihood activities, not just waged work, and which therefore prioritises the agency and autonomy of Indigenous communities in understanding their complex livelihood strategies. Fourth, the cultural model (citing Alexander, 1994; Flaherty, 1994; Pauktuutit, 1994), which emphasises the primacy of Indigenous cultural beliefs and ways of living in explaining their livelihood trajectories. It becomes evident even from this short list that there is significant disagreement among scholars about how to characterise Indigenous economies, and a frequent failure to explain the economic deprivation that faces such communities as being rooted in colonialism. I therefore draw here on aspects from several theories. I draw on the work of Usher and several others, who have characterised northern economies as “mixed”, noting a blending of hunting and harvesting subsistence-based activities with monetary income acquired through various means, such as wage employment and government payments (Langdon, 1991; Elias, 1995; Usher, Duhaime,  & Searles, 2003; Dowsley, 2010). From this perspective, the household is seen as the basic economic unit in the mixed economy, and the argument is framed around choices about production

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and consumption within the home, and community autonomy in being able to forge their own strategies of reproduction. It is important to emphasise the of cash within the mixed economy model, as it is used to obtain equipment and technology that support domestic production, such as firearms and snowmobiles (Abele, 2009; Elias, 1995). Yet although there is reference to kinship sharing within and between households, the mixed economy approach has been criticised for being overly simplistic and failing to consider “how people’s livelihood choices are embedded in culture and history, nor the economic and political settings at which [decisions affecting] subsistence now occurs” (Natcher, 2016, p.  10). In this regard, I am also drawn to work which describes northern economies as “social economies” (see Wenzel, Hovelsrud-Broda, & Kishigami, 2000; Abele, 2009; Natcher, 2009). In this case mixed economies are still understood as key systems that integrate subsistence and market activities at the household level, but this is seen as one small – but important – component of a larger, broader northern economy that operates within complex social and cultural systems. Indeed, Abele (2009) argues that mixed economies are a central component of a broader northern social economy which favours reinvestment into social objectives over the capitalist accumulation of wealth. Rodon (2015) also identifies the importance of the social economy and the blending across social and economic spheres in the north. Both perspectives conclude that hunting and harvesting activities also have deep cultural significance to northern Indigenous peoples. However the latter description tends to be used as a framework for understanding some of the broader complexities in northern economies, such as voluntary work and other non-wage activities, and how social production and resource sharing occurs within and across Indigenous kinship systems (Abele, 2009; Harder & Wenzel, 2012). This reading moves beyond an economistic analysis of Indigenous communities to adopt a more holistic lens that better considers the social and cultural elements of northern economies. Finally, I  draw insights from the political economy approach highlighted above (see Goodman-Draper, 1994; Loxley, 1992; Watkins, 1990). This body of work highlights the need to focus on wider, structural shifts to Indigenous livelihoods, and root these in a historical analysis which is attentive to relations of power. I take inspiration from this approach in ensuring the focus on changing Indigenous livelihoods is shown to be embedded in wider processes of settler colonial dynamics.

Indigenous livelihoods and climate change This chapter adopts a holistic understanding of climate livelihoods, as characterised by a mixed model which is driven by both economic and socio-cultural forces, to then explore how climate change is impacting Indigenous communities. Another line of inquiry exists within northern literature pertaining specifically to climate change and its effects on Indigenous subsistence activities,

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particularly in the far north. A framework that is often applied in this context is the “vulnerability and adaptation” approach, which has been employed in a number of studies of Arctic food systems to argue the degree to which Inuit livelihoods are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and to discuss their capacity to adapt local subsistence strategies in response to the changes in their local environment or in attempts to mitigate its effects (see Ford & Smit, 2004; Laidler et  al., 2009; Nickels, Furgal, Buell,  & Moquin, 2014). The vulnerability and adaptation approach is premised on a specific argument that climate change studies need to study the adaptive capacity of local, Indigenous communities and how they deal with the effects of climate change. The focus is on localised knowledge and factors that may shape processes of “adaptation”. Examples of adaptation include changes in hunting techniques and strategies such as species substitution to compensate for alterations in the environment (Wenzel, 2009). However, although acknowledging this research on Indigenous food systems and subsistence strategies as important, Cameron (2012) is critical of the failure to consider resource exploration and extraction in climate change studies and the broader colonial context in which “vulnerability and adaptation” literature is situated and understood. Borrowing from Li (2007), Cameron argues that a failing in these studies is that the focus is largely on the capacity of Inuk4 or Inuit communities to adapt, with no consideration given to the broader colonial context which first made them vulnerable. Put simply, the focus renders communities responsible for their own adaptation, without looking to wider drivers of climate impacts and the potential to redress these. Indeed, there is a continued failure within the literature to contemplate the role of Settler Colonialism in first creating the economic issues that necessitate consideration of extractive development and the role of climate change in exacerbating it. This chapter builds on Cameron’s critique of existing work, to develop an analysis of Indigenous climate “adaptation” through a focus on shifting livelihoods, and how these are rooted in longer-term processes of industrial extraction.

Indigenous communities, oil, gas, and mineral development, and climate change Indigenous resistance to oil, gas, and mineral development has a long history in Canada. At the time of writing this chapter there is tension across Canada over the Coastal GasLink, a natural gas pipeline through the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation that has drawn criticism for failing to first secure consent from hereditary chiefs, most of whom oppose the project (Bellrichard, 2020). There have been protests by Indigenous people across the country, with railways being blocked near the nation’s capital as a show of resistance and solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation in British Columbia. For many Canadians these times must serve as a reminder of similar events in the 1970s, when a pipeline was proposed in the Mackenzie Valley. The pipeline was to

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carry natural gas into the south from deposits found under the permafrost in the north but was stopped in its tracks due to widespread resistance from First Nations’ opposition. The protests were so widespread that Canada’s Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development at the time tasked Justice Thomas Berger with leading what would become the nationally significant “Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry”. He wrote: I discovered that people in the North have strong feelings about the pipeline and large-scale frontier development. I listened to a brief by northern businessmen in Yellowknife who favour a pipeline through the North. Later, in a native village far away, I heard virtually the whole community express vehement opposition to such a pipeline. Both were talking about the same pipeline; both were talking about the same region – but for one group it is a frontier, for the other a homeland. (Berger, 1977, p. vii) After extensive engagement with Indigenous communities his report ultimately recommended a 10 year moratorium on the development in order to settle land claims; although, notably, the terms of the Inquiry prevented him from recommending against it. Twenty-five years later many Indigenous leaders who once opposed the project had become some of its strongest proponents. Though they acknowledged concerns about the human cost to extractive development, as Chief Frank T’Seleie, who once strongly opposed the project, stated “if you take away the oil and gas industry there’s virtually no economy left” (The National, 2001). In addition to the long-term processes of extractivism that are profoundly reshaping the region, northern communities in particular are already negatively impacted by global warming, and the effects are increasing at accelerated rates compared to other parts of the world. Nearly half of Canada’s landmass is underpinned by permafrost (Anothony, 2019). Permafrost is defined as a layer, typically comprised of soil and rock bonded by ice, that remains completely frozen for at least two years. I  say underpinned because the most northern communities in Canada are often situated on continuous permafrost, where the subsurface permafrost layer stays permanently frozen, year after year. For communities in the 40–45% of the country that fall within the sub-Arctic and Arctic regions, the ice that holds this frozen ground layer together is an integral component of local infrastructure (Canadian Geographic, 2018). Permafrost forms the foundation upon which everything is built; from the buildings themselves to the local roads and airports (The Current, 2019; Watt-Cloutier, 2015). However, things are starting to shift. Literally. Rising global temperatures disproportionately affect the north, where warming occurs at twice the global rate (Villa, Migliorati, Monti, Holoubek,  & Vighi, 2017). This warming is causing permafrost to thaw at accelerated rates and as it does, the ground is destabilising (The Current, 2019). This process,

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called thermokarst, is altering the northern landscape at rates much faster than anticipated (Canadian Geographic, 2018). In Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital city, the pipes that carry water and sewage are breaking as the ground shifts, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs (Wallace, 2019). In her book “The Right to be Cold”, Inuk author and activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier (2015) writes that the melting of permafrost causes homes and buildings to sink into the ground and damages roads and other infrastructure northern communities rely on for food and supplies from the south. Many northern communities in Canada are accessible year-round only by plane. Damage to buildings and airstrips can create barriers to accessing much needed food and medical supplies. This warming has also resulted in the thinning of sea ice, disrupted seasonal freeze/thaw cycles in lakes and rivers, flooding, and changed the movement of mammals (Cochrane et  al., 2014). These changes have serious implications for populations occupying the north, particularly those who rely on hunting, trapping, fishing and traditional harvesting – the majority of whom are First Nations, Métis or Inuit. The scientific community has today reached almost full-consensus on the anthropogenic drivers of climate change (IPCC, 2018). Notably, both extractivism and the effects of climate change in the north region are rooted in historical processes of capitalist accumulation and exploitation (Moore, 2015). This context makes comments like Watt-Cloutier’s all the more poignant. In an interview on the right to be cold, she states: Nobody cared about the Arctic until the ice started to melt, but now that the resources are going to be exposed and easier to access, plane loads of people are coming up. Some companies are offering good money to the Nunavut Education Department to start developing programs for children as early as Grade 3, so they can eventually be streamed into working for them. But what happens after the mining has pulled out? Are those skills transferable to other situations? These companies have come and gone in other places in the world, leaving devastation for communities. I  am concerned by that digging the land we have held sacred for millennia and dangling money and jobs will deepen the struggles we face. (in Kahane, 2014) This quotation speaks to the key contradiction in extractive development in northern Canada – its expansion undermines subsistence activities that are so critical to livelihood strategies in northern Indigenous households, making it then a key focus to bring wage labour to Indigenous communities. With so much at stake it is clear why many communities are choosing to adapt to climate change through participation in extractive industry rather than resisting further. Nevertheless, Watt-Cloutier poses valid questions that require us to consider what the negative consequences of this form of adaptation might be. 1 Climate diets: impacts on Indigenous food

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In understanding how mining and climate change are affecting Indigenous livelihoods, I focus here on the issue of diet and subsistence, where the potential for negative impacts is significant. Indigenous communities in Canada are often situated away from urban sprawl, and there is a close link between Indigenous communities and known mineral deposits and mines (Hipwell, Mamen, Weitzner, & Whiteman, 2002). Natural Resources Canada estimates that about 1200 Aboriginal communities are located within 200 kilometres of mineral and metals activities. The Assembly of First Nations estimates that over 36 per cent of First Nations communities are located within 50 kilometres of major mine projects in Canada. (Hipwell et al., 2002, p. 4) Furthermore, global warming and ocean acidification are altering the availability of important food species that many Indigenous peoples rely on, including fish and shellfish (Cochrane et  al., 2014). Rising temperatures are also leading to warmer, drier summers, which is likely to further damage habitats and biodiversity as the frequency and intensity of forest fires are projected to increase. “Wildfire threatens Native and tribal homes, safety, economies, culturally important species, medicinal plants, traditional foods, and cultural sites” (Cochrane et al., 2014). Loss of biodiversity in Indigenous territories is also sometimes further exacerbated by nearby extractive activities and industry practices, resulting in additional and significant negative impacts for Indigenous communities (Rose, 2010). Inuit communities in Canada’s polar region also rely on traditional diets for similar reasons. Inuit communities in the north are so dependent on their traditional diet of country foods that they continued to eat fish, seal, and whale despite a growing awareness of the high concentrations of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), including toxins like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), that are accumulating in the animals’ fatty tissue and are then consumed by humans (Watt-Cloutier, 2015). Produced for use in agriculture, manufacturing and other industrial processes, POPs are used in many parts of the world. However, as they do not degrade they eventually enter marine systems where they are absorbed by zooplankton, which are eaten by invertebrates that are then consumed by fish species (Villa et al., 2017). At each level of the food chain POPs become increasingly concentrated. Watt-Cloutier discusses the spiritual, social and psychological effects on mothers who found that these POPs were concentrated in their breast milk where they posed a variety of negative health risks to their infants. However, there were, and continue to be, limited options for replacing these foods – especially with the high cost of shipping food into remote northern communities and the limited lifespan of meat and produce during transportation. The high cost of food in remote communities is further compounded by socioeconomic factors, including the high cost of energy, limited

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job opportunities and low family incomes. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (2020) notes on its website that: Indigenous and northern communities face many challenges including managing the impacts of a changing climate, addressing the high and often fluctuating costs of energy, and promoting sustainable development that balances consideration of environmental, social and economic well-being. Indigenous and northern communities in Canada are particularly vulnerable due to factors such as remoteness and inaccessibility, cold climate, aging and inefficient infrastructure, and reliance on diesel for electricity generation and space heating. The impacts of both mining and climate change upon everyday diets and nutrition are clear, leaving Indigenous communities with a complex choice in terms of trying to “adapt” to changes in their environment. In her book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that “in many cases, climate change is further increasing the economic pressure on Indigenous communities to make quick-and-dirty deals with extractive industries. That’s because disruptive weather changes, particularly in northern regions, are making it much harder to hunt and fish” (2014, p. 385). Klein therefore problematises the idea that economic development through extractive industries represents a desired form of “development” for Indigenous communities, as espoused by some proponents of resource development. Instead, in linking the need to adapt to climate change with a history of resistance in this region, we are led to ask: how can Indigenous communities faced with the erosion of the lands and resources that sustain them realistically continue to resist?

Choosing to extract: the dilemma facing Indigenous communities The melting of sea ice and thawing permafrost has made it more economically feasible to exploit the abundant mineral, oil, and gas resources in the north, making the region an increasingly attractive option for extractive industries (Byers, 2009; Dodds, 2008; Huebert, 2006, 2009; Powell, 2008). This interest in northern resource development also coincides with increased pressure to engage with Indigenous communities as a result of constitutionally recognised Aboriginal rights, the settling of comprehensive land claims, and the “duty to consult” that arises when governments in Canada are considering decisions that may affect Indigenous peoples and/or treaty rights, including consideration of applications for development for industrial and extractive purposes (Newman, 2017). The result of required consultation with Indigenous communities also means that there is increased interest on the part of the private sector in partnering with Indigenous peoples for the purpose of resource development, often formalised through negotiated agreements such as Impact Benefit Agreements

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(Fidler & Hitch, 2007). The advantages of Indigenous participation are often situated around direct economic benefits and employment opportunities for Indigenous communities, particularly via negotiated employment targets that set the minimum number of community members the developer will aim to employ. However, tensions exist around the potential benefits of Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBAs) and how they can be maximised and enforced. Gibson and O’Faircheallaigh (2010) observe they have become common practice in Canada in order to ensure Indigenous communities see benefits from large-scale mining occurring in their territories. O’Faircheallaigh has reviewed decades of the literature on mining agreements in Canada and Australia and written on the economic benefits of IBAs for Indigenous communities (2006). In his analysis he is cautiously optimistic about the potential benefits for communities, but he also identifies a number of challenges, including several barriers to the employment of Indigenous peoples, and issues with the way some IBAs are designed and implemented. A number of scholars have also criticised IBAs as being overly restrictive and limiting Indigenous involvement in environment assessments, for their lack of transparency, and for the difficulties that can arise in enforcing them (see Fidler & Hitch, 2007; Caine & Krogman, 2010). Although O’Faircheallaigh (1995) argues their benefits, he also found that tight timelines set out by developers, costly consulting fees, and the need for local expertise have also given rise to questions about the capacity of Indigenous communities to meaningfully participate in the negotiation of these agreements. He later contends there are various means of increasing the range of benefits possible; in particular, sanctions and incentives are critical to ensure mining operators prioritise Indigenous employment (2006). Although IBAs are often touted as a tool for empowering Indigenous communities in extractive development, Caine and Krogman (2010) question the power dynamics that emerge in the negotiation and execution of IBAs, arguing that although there may be some advantages for Indigenous communities under certain conditions, power is not equally distributed in the relationship and therefore  – depending on the processes undertaken – certain disadvantages can also arise, noting that Indigenous communities have little opportunity to monitor and evaluate implementation, and limited recourse where violations of the agreements occur. Some Indigenous communities have also been frustrated by failures in the implementation of IBAs and have expressed concerns that developers are withholding benefits (O’Faircheallaigh, 2002). Sharman and Fisher (2014) found that where communities are able to exercise greater control through IBAs, increased incomes, employment, and educational attainment have resulted, however they cannot say with confidence whether or not these benefits will continue when industrial operations cease. The integration of extractive labour participation into Indigenous economies highlights a key contradiction in relation to their broader history of resistance against resource development. Perspectives on the potential benefits of Indigenous participation in resource development vary greatly. Although not

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a direct response to resource development literature, Indigenous scholar David Newhouse (2001) argues that Indigenous subsistence economies are no longer sustainable and should be replaced altogether by full Indigenous participation in capitalism. Indeed, several scholars have argued resource development can be good for Indigenous communities, creating jobs and provided significant economic benefits, particularly where there are strong resource sharing or impact benefit agreements in place (see Parsons & Barsi, 2001; O’Faircheallaigh, 2006; Prno, Bradshaw, & Lapierre, 2010; Coates & Crowley, 2013; Haley & Fisher, 2014). Parsons and Barsi (2001) argued that uranium mining in northern Saskatchewan has helped the regional prospects for sustainable development by improving local infrastructure, and diversifying businesses through investment and skill building in communities. Haley and Fisher (2014) have studied the effects of mining in an Inupiat community in Alaska, and found that although there were some social and environmental challenges, there have been significant socioeconomic benefits for the community – cautiously arguing that based on parallels with the findings of Parsons and Barsi, there is further cause to be optimistic that there will be sustained benefits for communities they studied after mining operations cease. Prno et  al. (2010) concluded that the Indigenous communities that were signatories to the 14 Impact Benefit Agreements they analysed saw local benefits in the areas of employment, income, and secondary schools completion (cited in Haley & Fisher, 2014). Fidler (2010) argues that Environmental Impact Assessments, which are federally regulated, can complement negotiated agreements like IBAs for a more sustainable form of resource development that ensures Indigenous communities can make the most of extractive development. Others are less optimistic, questioning the validity of considering participation in resource industries as a form of sustainable development for Indigenous communities, citing conflicting worldviews (see Corntassel, 2014; Lauderdale, 2014) or environmental impacts (see Hassol, 2014). Corntassel notes there are various and sometimes conflicting definitions of sustainability, but from a strictly Indigenous perspective, reciprocity and giving back more than is taken are critical elements of Indigenous relationships with the land. Therefore, for many Indigenous peoples, extractive development is not in keeping with Indigenous worldviews as there is no way to replace non-renewable resources. Lauderdale is similarly critical of western definitions of sustainability, further arguing that western approaches to resource development are inherently unsustainable. Abele, Courchene, Seidle, and St-Hilaire (2009) argue that the health and sustainability of northern communities is contingent on the preservation of mixed economies, which include hunting and other subsistence alongside market activities, and they draw linkages between mixed economies and the health and well-being of Indigenous communities. The potential for negative impacts resulting from extractivism is significant. Extractive resource development necessitates damage to land and harm to ecosystems, and can therefore negatively affect subsistence activities in the nearterm. Environmental impacts of mining are well documented can continue

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into the long-term due to the difficulties associated with restoration and the storage of tailings. Indigenous communities are therefore arguably compelled to engage in processes which undermine their own way of life in order to be able to adapt to both the effects of resource development and to those resulting from climate change. Rodon and Lévesque (2015) argue that although there are some benefits for Indigenous communities participating in mining in the form of jobs and economic stimulation, there are also a number of negative social impacts that warrant consideration with respect to sustainable community development. In fact, several scholars argue that resource extraction can exacerbate gender disparities and is linked to other unintended, negative social outcomes that affect the overall health of communities (Kuyek, 2003; Gibson & Klinck, 2005; Weitzner, 2006; Cox & Mills, 2015; Pauktuutit, Czyzewski, Tester,  & Blangy, 2015). These scholars note that resource developers often fall short of employment targets for hiring local Indigenous employees and there is no mechanism to enforce these targets. Although referring to a large-scale hydro project, Kulchyski is also critical of large-scale development on Indigenous lands, citing the social and environment impacts it can have on communities (2008). Yet whether supportive or critical of resource development, there is still general agreement within the literature that it does have some potential to provide employment and other economic benefits for Indigenous communities. However, this is rooted in a context where broader structural processes of Settler Colonialism have eroded the choices for autonomy and livelihood for many Indigenous communities, leaving participation in extractive industries as one of the few remaining forms of adaptation available. As such, I would argue that the engagement in extractive industries also needs to be viewed through a lens which accounts for Indigenous communities’ desire to maintain autonomous, mixed livelihoods that include land-based subsistence activities, and the reduced capacity to do so given widespread climate change and the expansion of oil and gas in Northern Canada. Integration into extractive industries is therefore a fractious and complex form of adaptation for Indigenous communities, wrought at least in part by the narrowing of options that Settler Colonialism and associated climate impacts in the region have engendered for Indigenous communities.

Conclusion Despite the potential for detrimental health impacts  arising  from ecological damage, and a strong history of resisting extractive development, today, some Indigenous peoples and communities are increasingly choosing to participate in extractive industries to improve their negative socio-economic circumstances. With limited options outside of development, Indigenous communities in Canada cannot be expected to fare well in the face of long-term global climate change if they do not have the financial agency to adapt even to its early effects. This speaks at least partly to the economic draw afforded by seemingly

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lucrative deals offered by extractive industries operating in Indigenous territories. According to the National Aboriginal Health Organisation, although there are known potential risks to the environment and, by extension, the subsistence-based activities Indigenous so critical to Indigenous livelihoods, the economic potential associated with extractive industries can be appealing to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities that are often struggling with high rates of unemployment and poverty (NAHO, 2008). The state’s support for the mining sector further leaves Indigenous communities in Northern Canada with a complex decision, where the key means of adapting to the impacts of climate change on their livelihoods also represents a weakening of historical processes of resistance against the forces causing it. To that end, I want to be clear that I have not been questioning the choice of Indigenous communities to participate in extractive industry. Resource development provides an opportunity to bring much needed economic benefits and opportunities for wage labour into communities. Rather I am asking the question: are they participating because it is what they truly want, or because it is the best available option given resource extraction is expected to expand across the north and they have otherwise limited options available for sustaining their communities in the face of climate change? This analysis pushes us to rethink linear narratives of adaptation, and to instead situate them within a wider context of what constitutes adaptation and resistance in constrained circumstances.

Notes 1 Indigenous refers to the constitutionally recognised “Aboriginal” peoples in Canada, referred to separately as First Nations, Métis and Inuit. Other terminology appears in literature later referenced in this chapter, including “Native” and “Indian” (the latter referring exclusively to First Nations). 2 Fly-in communities are those that are accessible year-round only by plane, though some may have seasonal access through road, rail or water connections. 3 Please see also https://native-land.ca/ for an interactive map of Indigenous lands and territories. 4 Singular form of Inuit (plural), in Inuktitut – the Inuit language family.

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A changing climate  169 Hipwell, W., Mamen, K., Weitzner, V., & Whiteman, G. (2002). Aboriginal peoples and mining in Canada: Consultation, participation and prospects for change. Ottawa, ON: The North, South Institute. Huebert, R. (2006). Reinforcing sovereignty, national security and circumpolar co-opera tion. Northern Perspectives, 30, 7–10. Huebert, R. (2009). United States Arctic policy: The reluctant arctic power. The School of Public Policy Briefing Papers 2. Retrieved from www.policyschool.ca/publications/ united-states-arctic-policy-reluctant-arctic-power/ Hugill, D. (2017). What is a settler-colonial city? Geography Compass, 11(5). IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. (2018). Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Geneva: Author. Kahane, A. (2014). Sheila Watt-Cloutier on the right to be cold: “We gave up our wisdom and control to a power that we feared”. Retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/sheila-watt-cloutier-onthe-right-to-be-cold-we-gave-up-our-wisdom-and-control-to-a-power-that-we-feared/ article22151894/ Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kobayashi, A., & de Leeuw, S. (2010). Colonialism and the tensioned landscapes of indigeneity. In S. Smith, R. Plain, S. Marston, & J. Jones (Eds.), The Sage handbook of socialeographies (pp. 118–138). London: Sage. Kulchyski, P. (2008). A step back: The Nisichawayasihk Cree nation and the Wuskwatim project. In T. Martin & S. M. Hoffman (Eds.), Power struggles: Hydro development and first nations in Manitoba and Quebec. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press. Kuyek, J. (2003). Overburdened: Understanding the impacts of mineral extraction on women’s health in mining communities. Canadian Woman Studies, 23(1), 121–123. Laidler, G., Ford, J., Gough, W., Ikummaq, T., Gagnon, A., Kowal, S.,  .  .  . Irngaut, C. (2009). Travelling and hunting in a changing Arctic: Assessing Inuit vulnerability to sea ice change in Igloolik, Nunavut. Climatic Change, 94, 363–397. Langdon, S. (1991). The integration of cash and subsistence in Southwest Alaskan Yup’ik Eskimo communities. In N. Peterson & T. Matsuyama (Eds.), Cash, commoditisation and changing foragers (pp. 269–291). Senri Ethnological Studies 30. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Lauderdale, P. (2014). Collective indigenous rights and global social movements in the face of global development: From resistance to social change. In R. Bone  & R. Anderson (Eds.), Indigenous peoples and resource development in Canada. Toronto: Captus Press. Li, T. M. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development and the practice of politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Loxley, J. (1992). Manitoba: The dynamics of North-South relationships. In Y. G. Lithman, R. R. Riewe, R. E. Wiest, & R. E. Wrigley (Eds), People and land in Northern Manitoba/ Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Anthropology Papers (pp. 55–64). Manitoba: University of Manitoba. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life. London: Verso. NAHO [National Aboriginal Health Organization]. (2008). Resource extraction and aboriginal communities in Northern Canada: Cultural considerations. Ottawa: Author. Natcher, D. (2016). Normalizing aboriginal subsistence economies in the Canadian North. Lakehead University/Yukon Research Centre, Gap Analysis Report #10. Retrieved from http://

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A changing climate  171 Rodon, T. (2015). Land claim organizations and the social economy in Nunavut and Nunavik. In C. Southcott (Ed.), Northern communities working together the social economy of Canada’s North (pp. 64–77). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rodon, T., & Lévesque, F. (2015). Understanding the social and economic impacts of mining development in Inuit communities: Experiences with past and present mines in Inuit Nunangat. The Northern Review, 41, 13–39. Rose, K. (2010). Tribal climate change adaptation options: A review of the scientific literature (p. 86). Seattle, WA: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 10. Sharman, H., & Fisher, D. (2014). Indigenous employment, training and retention: Successes in challenges at red dog mine. In E. Gilberthorpe  & G. Hildson (Eds.), Natural resource extraction and indigenous development (pp. 11–35). New York: Routledge. Shem, M.,  & Roberston, E. (2014). “Goose break”: Cree tradition goes back centures. CBC News. Retrieved from www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/goose-break-creetradition-goes-back-centuries-1.2630520 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada. Retrieved from www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Usher, P. J., Duhaime, G.,  & Searles, E. (2003). The household as an economic unit in Arctic aboriginal communities, and its measurement by means of a comprehensive survey. Social Indicators Research, 61(2), 175–202. Veracini, L. (2013). “Settler colonialism”: Career of a concept. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41(2), 313–333. Villa, S., Migliorati, S., Monti, G., Holoubek, I., & Vighi, M. (2017). Risk of POP mixtures on the Artic food chain. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 36(5), 1181–1192. Wallace, C. A. (2019). Canada’s legal obligations for search and rescue in Nunavut. University of Akureyri, Master’s thesis. Retrieved from https://skemman.is/handle/1946/ 34529?locale=en Watkins, M. (1990). As equal partners: Recognizing aboriginal rights to self-determination. ThisMagazine, 24(3), 26–28. Watt-Cloutier, S. (2015). The right to be cold. Toronto: Penguin. Weitzner, V. (2006). “Dealing full force”: Lutsel K’e Dene first nation’s experience negotiating with mining companies. The North-South Institute and Lutsel K’eDene First Nation. Retrieved from http://www.nsi-ins.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/2006-Dealing-full-force-Lutselke-Dene-first-nationsexperience-negotiating-with-mining-companies.pdf Wenzel, G. (2009). Canadian Inuit subsistence and ecological instability  – if the climate changes, must the Inuit? Polar Research, 28(1), 89–99. Wenzel, G., Hovelsrud-Broda, G., & Kishigami, N. (Eds.). (2000). The social economy of sharing: Resource allocation and modern hunter-gatherers. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.

10 Climate change is class war Global labour’s challenge to the Capitalocene Sabina Lawreniuk

Introduction In August 2016, the International Geological Congress in Cape Town heard a recommendation from one of its own working groups to declare a new epoch. Twelve thousand climate stable years during the Holocene, it heard, have given way to the Anthropocene, recognising the profound impacts of humanity  – including anthropogenic climate change  – on Earth. Dating the start of the Anthropocene epoch to 1950,1 the chair of the  Working Group on the Anthropocene reflected at the time that “we have lived most of our lives” – if, for many of us, not all – “in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change” (Carrington, 2016). If Professor Zalasiewicz’s comments suggest that our collective impacts have thus far been unwitting, this remains the case no longer. Instead, argues Goodman (2017), “the corollary of the wide acceptance of a geological Anthropocene is the emergence of a new form of self-aware climate agency”, as collectively and individually we live with a greater degree of awareness, understanding, and introspection regarding our impacts on planetary machinery. As these introspections trigger public debate across diverse outlets including the Guardian, NBC News and CNN about the “overwhelming and terrifying” (Taylor  & Murray, 2020) experience of “eco-anxiety” (Nugent, 2019) and “climate grief ” (Scher, 2018), understanding “what kind of social action” our self-aware state of “climate agency” might provoke is, according to Goodman (2017), “the critical question of our era”. Here, he asserts, “the question of climate change and social movement participation is centrally important”; perhaps especially so for building public and political will for the societal and economic shifts required to address ongoing climate breakdown. In particular, he writes, we need to understand “to what extent is something that we can characterise as ‘climate agency’ emerging through social movement participation?” (Goodman, 2017). In the few years since Goodman posed his question, the answer has seemingly become clearer as the international media spotlight has fallen on the climate activism led by Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future movement and Extinction Rebellion (XR). Both have become unlikely household names within a

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relatively short 24-month period, spearheading movements that now number in the millions. Yet they have more in common than publicity. Both have been accused of forwarding a Northern, urban and elite perspective on the climate crisis whilst demographics bearing the brunt of our unfolding climate catastrophe have to date cut a startlingly quiet figure in analyses of emerging climate resistance. As this chapter argues, however, rather than being absent, the climate agency of subaltern groups in the global South whose homes, livelihoods and ways of life are already being eroded and undermined by climate breakdown is systemically overlooked in contemporary media and academic discourse. Here, I use a reframing of Goodman’s question as a starting point, seeking to move the conversation on climate resistance beyond the usual, high-profile agents, to ask: what forms of climate agency and social movement participation are emanating from those on the frontline of the climate crisis? I ground this analysis in an unlikely locus of nascent climate rebellion: a wave of labour protest that hit Cambodia’s garment industry across the years 2013 and 2014. Over December  2013 and January  2014, mass rallies brought hundreds of thousands of workers and their allies on to the streets to demonstrate for better urban wages. These demonstrations took place at a charged moment in national mood, as electoral upsets and real wage deterioration converged to create a moment of heightened political and economic tension (Lawreniuk, 2020; Arnold, 2017). Nonetheless, the simultaneous impact of concurrent severe weather shocks in 2013 has been overlooked as a trigger for the eruption of labour agitation. Although Cambodia’s farmers are familiar with unpredictable weather patterns and events, severe floods and droughts that year propelled Cambodia to an unenvied status as the world’s second-most climate-vulnerable country (Kreft, Eckstein, Junghans, Kerestan, & Hagen, 2015), compounding the slower violence of climate breakdown already undermining agricultural livelihoods in Cambodia. Using testimony from workers and trade unions gathered in the years following the disorder that identifies the effects of the changing climate as a perhaps unlikely driver of worker mobilisation, I draw on this context to show how the origins of the protests reflect a candid synthesis of labour resistance and climate agency in the South. In this understanding, climate agency refers to resistance enacted against the conditions in which labour takes place under climate change. Thus, it means resistance to climate change not as a global phenomenon, but as it manifests in everyday livelihoods and through labour relations. Climate change shapes circumstances that are themselves resisted. That single level of removal does not invalidate the wider implications of resistance. To make this case, the chapter is structured in four further parts. The first section briefly reviews the literatures on climate agency and labour resistance. Here, I argue that the technocratic framing of the climate crisis in mainstream discourse, embodied as it is in the logic of the Anthropocene narrative, has contributed to the parallel rather than symbiotic development of these literatures. Instead, I propose the alternative concept of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2017, 2018) as a better means to foreground the linkages between the crisis of

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the biosphere and the crisis of productive and reproductive work in the current conjuncture. Next, I illustrate the empirical resonance of this theoretical rapprochement in the South, exemplifying the Capitalocene’s convergence of economic and environmental crisis in driving patterns of spatially disaggregated or translocal labour and livelihoods systems that cross-cut and complicate the conventional rural-agricultural and urban-industrial divide. Third, I adopt a nuanced reading of the 2013/14 protests in Cambodia’s garment sector, to show how translocal livelihoods have given rise to forms of translocal resistance and translocal solidarities that privilege neither urban-industrial nor ruralagricultural conditions in their genesis. Finally, I finish with a conclusion that draws together key findings and contributions.

Conceptualising climate agency in the Capitalocene Since Goodman (2017) first enquired about the extent to which “something that we can characterise as ‘climate agency’ [is] emerging through social movement participation”, the answer to this “critical question of our era” has become somewhat clearer. Within a relatively short period, there has been an explosion of interest in climate movements heightened by the antics of global-scale organisers such as XR and Greta Thunberg. In particular, Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” school strikes have triggered a wave of youth protest in more than 150 countries (and counting) around the world, implanting climate activism or “climate resistance” (Hunter, 2019) firmly in public consciousness. Where the academic literature has engaged with these movements, however, it has reproduced criticisms levelled at the movements themselves. XR’s focus on the diminishing futures of “our children” – as the UK-founded organisation frames it, for example  – has attracted concern which argues that it unhelpfully distracts attention from the global South communities already facing climate catastrophe. “Does Extinction Rebellion have a race problem?” asks the Guardian newspaper (Gayle, 2019). “Too white, too middle class”, answers CNN (Lewis, 2019). Mirroring these issues, the academic literature has, similarly, coalesced predominantly on case studies and key groups that organise in urban and northern (e.g. Thew, Middlemiss, & Paavola, 2020; O’Brien, Selboe, & Hayward, 2018; Roser-Renouf, Maibach, Leiserowitz, & Zhao, 2014) locations, leaving the climate activism of rural, Southern communities understudied. In this latter respect, indeed, “though scholarship addressing these questions on social movement participation and climate change exists, the field undoubtedly remains”, as it did at the time of Goodman’s question, “relatively underdeveloped” (Goodman, 2017). Although there are notable exceptions such as Uganda’s Vanessa Nakate, Ecuador’s Helena Gualinga, and India’s Vandana Shiva, the lack of prominence afforded to Southern, non-white, and rural voices is puzzling. Although climate change affects us all, it affects us irregularly. “The Apocalypse is indeed”, as Swyngedouw (2013, p. 11) observes, “a combined and uneven one, both in time and across space”. Rural areas in the global South will – indeed, are

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already – bearing one of the highest burdens of anthropogenic climate change. As the vanguard of climate impacts, we might conversely expect to see a greater share of climate resistance emanating from these locations; an ecological flexing of Polanyi’s (2001[1944], p.  136) “double movement”, referring to the simultaneous extension of and resistance to encroaching markets characterising capitalist transitions. The issue, then, is whether the literature is overlooking existing climate resistance in the rural South, or whether that resistance is somehow being impeded in its fomentation. This North South imbalance reflects a rural-urban divide also. Rural areas are viewed, overwhelmingly, as the passive recipients of the impacts associated with the changing climate, yet far less is said about the voices raised against such developments and degradations. Given the intuitive association between climate change and the rurality, this is a startlingly consistent trait in the literature. Yet it is not one characteristic of climate scholarship alone. Rather, in a set of mirrored shortcomings, the labour geography literature – within which questions of agency are debated in great volume and with a great deal of energy – has little itself to say about climate change. This crucial nexus, appears invisible, therefore, from both sides. Indeed, as people in the South have been drawn in their millions into industrial work, the labour geography literature has corrected a once “top-down” (Cumbers, Helms, & Swanson, 2010, p. 51), “capital-centric” (Coe & JordhusLier, 2011, p.  221) approach to the expansion of global production. Here, the sub-discipline has performed crucial work highlighting the vital force of labour agency, showing how workers (re)make space through circuits of capital (Herod, 1997). Nonetheless, despite the field’s rapid growth over two decades there remains a “dearth” (Natarajan, 2020) of scholarship that explores labour in relation to the environment, as labour geographers have maintained a “conspicuous silence” (Parsons & Natarajan, 2020) on climate change, particularly in grounded, local-level analyses (Mikulewicz, 2020). Thus, “despite the inevitable impact of climate change and climate change measures on the production process and thus on work” – and vice versa – the two literatures on climate and labour agency have evolved independently: “environmental studies have largely ignored labour issues, while labour studies have paid little attention to climate change issues” (Räthzell & Uzzell, 2011, p. 1215). In part, this reflects the lingering hypothesis of a contingent empirical relation in which the interests of work and the climate are posited as antithetical, fuelling the continuation of this divergent trajectory of intellectual development through reification of a tired “jobs versus environment” narrative (Räthzell & Uzzell, 2011). Yet as the growing calls for a Green New Deal on both sides of the Atlantic attest, this is an abstraction, rooted in the false logic of mainstream scientific, techno-managerial framings of climate change and its impacts. As Swyngedouw (2011, p. 2) has cautioned, the global rise in anxiety about the planet has occurred in a conspicuously conservative guise, in which “ecology” manifests as a “new opium for the people”: “a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects”. Mainstream responses to the crisis of the

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present conjuncture that emerge from this post-political milieu “seem only to promise further entrenchment of neoliberal economic policies” (Johnson et al., 2014, p. 440). For example, by framing responsibility for averting climate catastrophe as resting upon behavioural change to the consumption choices of individuals – buy differently, fly less – and thereby conveniently obfuscating the role of corporations and complicit governments in fuelling disaster. As such, these responses merely provide a buttress to steady the status quo into the uncertain future that lies ahead, rather than provoke the disruption needed to confront an “ecological Armageddon” which is “already a reality” (Swyngedouw, 2013, p. 11). The notion of an Anthropocene epoch, as introduced at the outset, embodies this post-political tendency. Whilst working to sound “the alarm of planetary crisis” (Moore, 2018, p. 237), it offers little prescription for extinguishing the fire. The Anthropos, its anchoring concept, revels in the post-political haze, such that within it “the human species becomes a mighty, largely homogeneous, acting unit” from which “inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racism and much more . . . have been cleansed” (Moore, 2017, p. 597). Unravelling the multiplicity of human difference shrouded under the banner of the Anthropos reveals the Anthropocene as a “colossal falsification”: in which global climate change is “not the accomplishment of an abstract humanity” but “capitalogenic” (Moore, 2018, p. 237). In this way, the “non-political politics” (Swyngedouw, 2011, p. 1) of the Anthropocene moment thus work to disavow the role of capitalism in climate change, erasing the material foundations of our unfolding planetary catastrophe. Instead, Moore (2017, p. 596) argues, the term “Capitalocene” might be a more appropriate epithet for the epoch otherwise known as the Anthropocene. This alternative nomenclature signals a conceptual shift that recognises we do not inhabit the “ ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas” but the “ ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital” (Moore, 2017, p.  596). This conceptual regrounding is significant because it allows for a rapprochement of the two converging crises that define our age, acknowledging that “the ‘economic’ and ‘environmental’ problems of the present conjuncture are constitutively joined” (Moore, 2017, p. 602). Indeed, the Anthropocene’s insistence on a false binary between nature and society gives rise, as Moore describes (2018, p.  269), to “a kind of labor fundamentalism and nature fundamentalism”. It is this essentialism that is reified in the so-called “jobs versus environment dilemma” (Räthzell & Uzzell, 2011). By contrast, the logic of the Capitalocene with its insistence that ecological breakdown is capitalogenic insists on a dissolution of this binary, demanding recognition that labour and the environment are, indeed, linked and acknowledging “the degradation of nature as a specific expression of capitalism’s organization of work” (Moore, 2018, p. 270). Given these interlinkages, the parallel conceptual development of the literatures on climate and labour agency in geography requires bridging. Indeed, this is an initiative of not only theoretical but practical importance. As Moore

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(2017, p. 270) contends, to avert catastrophe in a world facing crisis on two fronts requires “articulat[ing] a politics that links the crisis of the biosphere and the crisis of productive and reproductive work”. However, whilst Moore laments that such a red-green synthesis is generally elusive, in what follows I identify the shoots of this union in the labour politics of Cambodia’s garment industry. Indeed, subaltern groups in the global South shoulder the heaviest burdens of the Capitalocene’s twinned crises, experiencing both extreme economic precarity and climate precarity, which hampers industrial and agricultural fortunes alike. In what follows, I show how the interacting influences of these twinned crises shape translocal systems of labour and livelihoods in the South. I  then move to consider how these systems produce organic expression of translocal solidarities, where concerns about unstable livelihoods in an uncertain climate may find expression in subaltern labour politics.

Beyond the rural-urban dyad: translocal labour and livelihoods in the Capitalocene In their search for an “emancipatory rural politics” in the South, Scoones et al. (2018, p. 5) note that “youth have been historically at the forefront of movements of progressive renewal, and of new ways of doing politics, challenging authority as the ‘vanguard of change’. Given the intergenerational justice concerns that skewer the motives of climate resistors (see Thew et al., 2020) – exemplified by the youthful mobilisation of Greta Thunberg’s army of school strikers and XR’s concerns for “our children” alike – there is particular impetus to look to youth as the “vanguard of change” in the South, spearheading resistance against the ongoing climate crisis. However, as Scoones et al. (2018, p. 5) also observe across the rural South, the hybrid functioning or authoritarian control of democratic and civil spaces can work to “suppress autonomous political mobilization”, co-opting or incapacitating potential youth agitators. Moreover, there are other factors at work here, too, obstructing the potential of youth climate resistance in the rural South. Scoones et al. (2018, p. 5) further note that “changing rural demographics and labour relations  .  .  . have been affected by and in turn have affected the politics of the countryside”, including “the aging of the farm population” leading to an “exodus of young people” to work in cities or across borders. The implications are clear: if we are looking for an upswing in youth mobilisations related to climate change; aging rural zones might be the wrong place to start. Scoones and his colleagues (2018, p. 4) link the exodus of youths, in particular, to “processes of financialisation particular to contemporary neoliberal capitalism” that have withered land holdings and farm profits through aggressive tactics of enclosure. Though a valid proposition, the veracity of this narrative is nonetheless circumscribed. It is, at best, a partial truth. For in many parts of the South the out-migration of youth faced with unviable rural livelihoods is not driven by the incursion of market forces alone but also by the worsening impacts of climate change (Natarajan, Brickell, & Parsons, 2019). Where

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agricultural fortunes now “depend on the sky” (Bylander, 2015) amidst the vagaries of weather patterns in a changing climate, economic and ecological crises converge and intensify, exemplifying the cruel logic of the Capitalocene. Recognising the convergence of these twinned crises is vital as it upends a persistent rural-urban dyad that characterises thinking on both climate change and labour. The assumption remains prevalent that rural areas experience climate change whilst urban areas promulgate it. Yet recent work (Lawreniuk & Parsons, 2020; Gidwani  & Ramamurthy, 2018; Etzold, 2016) spanning the mobilities, migration and development studies literatures has increasingly problematised its validity, demonstrating instead how migrants and household economies alike retain a foothold across rural and urban camps long after the former have “departed” rural areas. Rather than being cleanly separated from their rural roots when they move to the city, urban migrants remain durably connected to their home and origins through networks and flows of people, ideas, information and resources. Rural-urban labour mobility in the South has therefore taken on a “translocal” character, whereby the dynamic interconnections of spatially distant families and communities permit a “simultaneous situatedness across distant locales”, sustaining a “groundedness during movement” (Brickell & Datta, 2016, p. 4). All manner of apparently distant events resulting from chronic pressures and idiosyncratic shocks are relayed and translocally experienced within the “stretched lifeworlds” (Rogaly & Thieme, 2012, p. 2086) that urban workers and their rural households mutually inhabit. In Cambodia, for example, where the next section of this chapter turns, migrants remain active participants in translocal household livelihood arrangements. As well as returning home to contribute farm labour during peak seasons of agricultural demand, their regular flows of urban-earned income support investment in – and often sustain the very viability of – smallholder agriculture (Parsons, Lawreniuk, & Pilgrim, 2014). In this way, variations in agricultural conditions become a cornerstone of the translocal household economy, as chronic climate pressures and acute shocks upon farm livelihoods reverberate over the rural-urban continuum, impacting upon workers’ urban livelihoods via the translocal networks in which they are embedded. Rural floods and droughts are thus experienced in many cases as much by factory workers as by their smallholder farming parents, grandparents and siblings. Scholarship on deliberative livelihoods strategies and remittance practices in the South thus increasingly recognises how the translocal nature of labour and livelihoods in the Capitalocene is channelled into distinct forms of labour agency. Nonetheless, how these translocal underpinnings of labour agency feed into instances of voluble labour protest and direct action have rarely been explored. Instead, “the dominant epistemology of agency . . . rests on assumptions about the activities and sites that ‘count’ in analyses of labour” (Strauss, 2018, p. 1). Here, the “conspicuous silence” (Parsons & Natarajan, 2020) of the labour geography literature on the subject of climate change is perpetuated by a persistent industrial bias within studies of labour activism (Barrientos, 2013; Wad, 2013; Bezuidenhout & Buhlungu, 2011). Scholarship has focused

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on spotlighting “collective” (Carswell & De Neve, 2013) and “vertical” (Neilson & Pritchard, 2010) forms of agency levelled “upwards” through the supply chain, obfuscating the “horizontal” agency reflected in and shaped by worker’s embeddedness in household and community relations. Seeking a counterpoint to this analytical dualism, the next section of this chapter highlights manifestations of translocal agency obscured by this industrial focus. To do so, I explore workers’ testimony on the triggers of mass labour protests that erupted across Cambodia’s garment sector in the year 2013/14. I draw from a series of more than 25 interviews and 10 FGDs with respondents introduced by an independent union organisation with garment workers at Canadia Industrial Park in Phnom Penh, the factory enclave at the centre of the 2013/4 unrest, as well as conversations with workers’ household members, neighbours and local market traders and street sellers in the vicinity of the site. Building from this investigation of grassroots experiences and drivers of the protests, further interviews with local and national level union leaders from different sectors – including garment manufacturing, food and services, informal transport workers, a farmers’ association and more – allow for an examination of the wider organisation of the minimum wage campaign that led to the demonstrations and their unfolding. These two primary rounds of research took place between July and November 2015, although I revisited the site for further data collection in 2016 and since. Pulling together commentary from across this sample of lay workers and union leaders, in what follows I call attention to how horizontal expressions of climate agency resonate in labour activism. As these testimonies show, this ostensibly “urban” protest movement was motivated, at least in part, by the compound impact of rural and environmental pressures on industrial wages, giving rise to novel forms of translocal solidarity.

Towards translocal solidarities: locating climate agency in labour resistance “By the time I got to Canadia [Industrial Park], I could already see blood on the ground, so I knew that something violent had happened”, recalled Kunthy (24, garment worker, 13 July 2015), a garment worker, of returning to the factory enclave in Phnom Penh that became the epicentre of labour protests engulfing Cambodia’s capital at the very end of 2013. Following “a wave of strikes [that] shut down Cambodia’s entire garment industry between 24 December 2013 and 3 January 2014” (Arnold, 2017, p. 30), military police intervened to resolve the standoff. Kunthy arrived home in the midst of the confrontation. “As I was driving through, there was fighting all round”, she described. “The protestors were throwing stones at the police. The police used shock guns and some were firing real guns.” By the end of the day, at least four striking workers had been killed, a further 38 hospitalised with serious injuries, and 23 arrested (AMRC, 2014). The largest labour strikes in Cambodia’s history, bringing hundreds of thousands of workers on to the streets of the capital, thus ended in one of the bloodiest days of Cambodia’s post-war peace.

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Dovetailing with a period of wider social unrest after disputed national elections that had taken place in July  2013, the trigger for the 2013/14 strikes was a decision by Cambodia’s Labour Advisory Committee over May and December 2013 to increase the minimum wage in the garment sector – which remains the only industry in Cambodia to command a mandated minimum wage – from US$61 to US$80 and then $95 per month. Although ostensibly an improvement to worker’s incomes, the proposed rate of increase only restored real wage levels to those seen 13 years earlier (Arnold, 2017). Over the same period that real wages had stagnated, consumer inflation rocketed, with food prices in particular ratcheting up 147.7% between 2003 and 2015. Set against an offer made by the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party over the fractious election campaign to more than double the minimum wage for the sector to $160, the government’s own ineffective increase sparked a tinderbox of pent-up frustration from workers over a decade of stalled livelihoods and life chances. Nonetheless, the scale to which the strike action spread in a short period after igniting on 24th December  2013 was more remarkable for its apparent spontaneity – “an autonomous strike by rank-and-file workers who initiated actions and participated in them without instructions by union federations” (Arnold, 2017, p. 30). Though scholarship has highlighted the twin convergence of both national political crisis and micro scale urban economic contraction that propelled the general strike of 2013 (Lawreniuk, 2020; Arnold, 2017), there is a third, often overlooked (cf. Lawreniuk & Parsons, 2018), catastrophe that occurred that year, fanning the flames of the unrest. This final, crucial, crunch came in the form of ecological catastrophe, where a “severe monsoon season, which induced heavy rainfall and widespread flooding throughout a country that was still recovering from the damage of previous year’s floods” (Kreft et al., 2015, p. 7), tilted the already precarious balancing of translocal livelihood systems further towards the precipice of collapse. Cambodia’s farmers – in a nation acknowledged as “among the most vulnerable countries” (Ministry of Environment, 2016) to climate change – weather wide-ranging climate shocks most years. However the compound impacts of 2013’s floods were so unusually severe as to drive Cambodia to an unfortunate second place in the Global Climate Risk Index’s annual ranking of countries most affected by extreme weather events (Kreft et al., 2015). By contrast, Cambodia had ranked a relatively low 65th in the preceding year (Kreft & Eckstein, 2014). Thus, whilst discussions over the appropriate minimum wage for the sector focused on calculating living wage levels to meet the consumption needs of individual workers and their immediate nuclear households – with the Ministry of Labour’s own calculated living wage range for 2013 of $157-$177 studiously glossed over in its own offers (AMRC, 2014) – a crucial dimension was missing: the strain placed on worker’s urban incomes that year, and others, from the stuttering agricultural livelihoods of rural-based family. As is often elided in the estimations of outsiders, as much as 50% of workers’ salaries are remitted elsewhere immediately upon receipt (Care, 2017; Parsons et  al., 2014), sent

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to aid rural families in smoothing-over consumption needs and investing in agrarian inputs, leaving urban workers to subsist on far less than most realise or imagine possible. This remitted amount is not fixed but fluctuates according to shifting axes of poverty, need and want – on both sides. When garment orders slow or overtime is scaled back, “in the home village, they adapt and spend very little” in turn (Thida, 27 years, 17 July 2015). It is a system that helps to account for the vagaries of income on both sides, but the price of flexibility is greater for some than others. As Malea, another garment worker, explained, “if a garment worker’s family is very poor, then it is very difficult for them to find the money to support both themselves and their household” (Malea, 27, garment worker, 22 July 2015). When rural incomes and livelihoods are squeezed, the force of the pinch is transmitted to urban workers, like Rithy, who “have to send a lot of money, so they have to borrow money from somebody in the city and then they need to do overtime the next month in order to pay it back” (Rithy, 27, garment worker, 16 July 2015). Here, contemporary research shows how agricultural production and social reproduction on both sides of the rural-urban continuum are being shored by recourse to microcredit (Natarajan et al., 2019; Green, 2020). Yet as Cambodian borrowers have leveraged the highest per capita rate of microfinance loans in the world over the past two decades – at almost $4000, more than double GDP per capita (Licadho, 2020) – liabilities are increasingly unsustainable. As a result, borrowing further undermines rather than buoys households’ ability to stay afloat through periods of distress. Indeed, during difficult periods following chronic and acute shocks, the prevailing state of agricultural precarity can tip even seemingly secure translocal livelihoods into perilous positions, demanding unsustainable levels of urban-torural remittance. As one worker explained “My family is average, so it is okay for me, but it is very difficult when there is no rain because I need to send a lot of money. . . . Workers from poor families have a very difficult life because they send everything home and then have nothing left” (Rany, 22, 15 July 2015). A bad year’s rain and subsequent poor harvest can therefore place excoriating demands on the precarious juggling of urban earned incomes. For the best off, this might mean inconvenience; for the worst off, it bodes calamity. Where microfinance loans are typically secured against land titles for either agricultural or more concerningly homestead lands, failure to generate sufficient income to cover repayments at rapacious rates of interest threatens distress land sales (Green, 2020) and entry into bonded labour (Natarajan et al., 2019). Thus when Cambodia’s garment workers protested in 2013/14, their motivations ranged beyond the deteriorating conditions of their immediate urban situation to include compounding pressures placed on translocal livelihoods by the unusually severe climate shocks experienced over the same period. This is clear in workers’ testimonies of the strike action, where the burden of sustaining the family farm through the impacts of 2013’s extreme weather events is cited as a catalyst in workers’ decision to protest; an expression of resistance to increasingly climate change-impacted livelihoods that served to stir

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the fomentation of labour unrest. Chenda, for example, participated in the 2013/14 industrial action alongside her colleagues from one of the garment factories located in the Canadia Industrial Park, where the January violence ignited. “The factor that made me protest”, she outlined, highlighting the entanglement of urban and rural precarity, “is that the salary is not enough to live and send money home. Now I have to send less, but it is not enough for my family. They need to buy fertilizer and many [other] things. If there isn’t enough money then I have to borrow it from somebody else. Then I have to spend less next month to pay them back and send less money home [again] too”. (Chenda, age 24, 21 February 2015) As an uncertain environment pushes farmers to invest ever more capital in inputs such as these, as well as borrow more to fund these contributions, farmers and their urban relatives experience agricultural shocks as economic as well as climatic. According to Srey Pov, another worker who took part in the Canadia demonstrations, the strike occurred “because workers’ families were generally farming badly, so they had to buy fertiliser and everything. It costs a lot and it is hard for the workers to send enough money” (Srey Pov, 29, garment worker, 22 February 2016). In the intervening years, this recognition of the interwoven dependencies of urban and rural, farm and non-farm, global economy and local climate, that shape translocal experiences of work and activism in Cambodia has evolved into more explicit translocal solidarities. Though the bloody crackdown of 4 January  2014 forced a premature halt to what remain Cambodia’s largest labour strikes, the minimum wage movement – apprehensive but undeterred – regrouped the same year with new strategies of mobilisation. Faced with the ongoing threat of further state violence, the new campaign shifted the focus of its attention from the government to the multinational brands who subcontract Cambodia-made garments and profit from the somewhat contrary ethical reputation of the industry (Arnold & Shih, 2010). Moreover, the autonomous formation of the demonstrations of late 2013 and early 2014 segued into a more institutionalised mode of organisation, with trade unions and civil society groups brought together under a sometimes fractious but otherwise unified campaign umbrella (Lawreniuk & Parsons, 2018) asserting “The buyer must provide basic wages $177”. Aided by support from transnational networks, including organisations like United Students Against Sweatshops, a global “Day of Action” was declared in September  2014. As 10,000 Cambodian workers defied the continued threat of government intimidation to march through Phnom Penh, global organisers picketed high street stores in the United States, the UK, and Australia, sending #WeNeed177 trending worldwide on twitter feeds (Park, 2017; Mech, 2014).

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Where this globally networked activity speaks to a rather top-down hierarchy of labour organisation, however, long-standing vertical cleavages in Cambodia’s union movement suggest the grounded experience of the $177 movement at the grassroots was somewhat different. Here, local activists leveraged micro-scale networks of informal associations beyond the garment industry – siblings, kin, neighbours, friends and colleagues – to encompass the mutually interconnected interests of a largely translocal economy. As Mony and Leap, both garment workers, asserted, at the time of the strike “all of the unions joined together to do something for the general benefit of the country” (Mony, 23, garment worker, 24 July 2015). Rather than protesting for the garment industry alone, “we were protesting for the whole country” (Leap, 23, garment worker, 22 February 2015), from factory floors to rice fields. In acknowledgement of this, workers explained, rural families and communities urged their absent members to turn out in numbers for the strikes. In Kandal province, a rural zone that surrounds the capital, Phnom Penh, farming households like Thy’s confirmed, “I encourage all of my children to participate in this campaign. I don’t worry about the violence, because this campaign is for everybody, the whole country” (Thy, focus group, Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, 1 October 2015). Another farmer elaborated, The role of the rural community is very important [to the garment sector union movement] because ninety-five percent of families never say no to their children when they ask to join this campaign. The only ones who do are a very small number whose living conditions are better already. They are just waiting to get the benefits [of change and better salaries] from somebody else’s work. (Ry, focus group, Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, 1 October 2015) Moreover, deepening the significance of translocal ties, farming families in many cases moved beyond encouraging participation, becoming mobilised themselves within the $177 movement. In the 2014 round of action, farming collectives were among the most ardent supporters of the second wave of protest activity, recognising that the success of their own agricultural livelihoods depends on urban labour. In Kandal province, a community leader representing members of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community – essentially a union of smallholders – explained, it’s different from the past. In the past, only one member [of the household] would work and everybody would be provided for. Nowadays, everybody works, but it’s still not enough. Remittances [from the factories] are important, but it’s not enough for people here to live. (Boran, Community Leader, 1 October 2015)

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The development of these horizontal linkages reflects the diverse triggers of the $177 movement and its antecedents; triggers that ranged beyond the traditional concerns of the labour movement to articulate the frustrations of broader and intertwined societal, economic and ecological threats. This wave of labour antagonism was coproduced by rural agents and climate anxieties, reflecting and shaped by Cambodian labour’s recursive entanglements in rural ecologies and livelihoods under siege from environmental breakdown.

Conclusion: global labour’s challenge to the Capitalocene It has been less than two years since Greta Thunberg initiated the first of a series of “school strikes for climate”, picketing alone outside the Swedish Parliament building in Stockholm in August 2018. In the intervening period, Thunberg’s movement has spread to more than 150 countries, mobilising millions of youth and establishing the teenage activist as an unlikely household name around the world. Coinciding with the global rise of other movements including Extinction Rebellion, founded in May 2018 and launching its “Declaration of Rebellion” in the UK’s Parliament Square in October that same year, this has been an unprecedented moment for climate action, with mounting attention paid to both climate impacts and ensuing conceptions of climate agency, manifest in these overt forms of “climate resistance” (Hunter, 2019). Nonetheless, despite the “combined and uneven” (Swyngedouw, 2013, p.  11) march of planetary catastrophe, those stationed at the current frontline of climate breakdown often cut a startlingly quiet figure in such analysis. Noted among the more perverse injustices of the climate crisis, for example, is that “the people who are suffering from these impacts are the least responsible for their plight” (Ware & Kramer, 2019), where the effects of climate change “disproportionately affect low-income countries” (Levy  & Patz, 2015) and communities, increasing the burden of those in the global South. Yet whilst carrying truth, such framings are liable to render subaltern classes as passive victims of the climate crisis, beholden to its effects but bereft of any capacity to shape, contest or avert it. Indeed, these narratives find muted expression in the conspicuous absence of Southern voices – and the rural poor, in particular – in nascent conceptualisation of climate resistance, which has focused instead on the deliberately noisy, headline- and attention-grabbing activities of urban, Northern elites. Beyond these high-profile distractions, however, some of the difficulty in locating the agency of subaltern groups lies partly with an overly narrow conception of climate change and its impacts. Whilst an indubitably grave concern for the natural environment, climate change is also an economic and labour issue. Yet this fact is obfuscated by the dominant technocratic inclinations of climate change debate. Such “non-political” (Swyngedouw, 2011) – even “anti-political” (Moore, 2018, p. 239) – tendencies are exemplified in the logic of the Anthropocene, which cleaves society and politics from nature in its exposition of climate change as the undifferentiated impacts of a homogeneous

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homo sapiens on a disaggregated biosphere. In this chapter, therefore, I suggest that the concept of the Capitalocene can help us better frame processes of environmental breakdown in terms of the structures of labour and capital that shape them. Whilst previous work on the Capitalocene (Moore, 2018) has laid the theoretical foundations and imperatives for bridging both understanding of economic and ecological crises and their lived resistance, proponents still muse how this union might manifest in practice. Here, I further suggest that adopting a translocal perspective on working lives and livelihoods in the South can enlighten understanding, demonstrating how local labour protests of various kinds may also be read as protests against the pressures and inequities of global environmental change. To exemplify this, the chapter offers a re-examination of the context and triggers for industrial strikes in the Cambodian garment sector. It highlights the compounding role of climate shocks and the slower violence of climate crisis as it interacts with an increasingly precarious, commodified agricultural context in driving, sustaining and invigorating this ostensibly urban protest activity. In doing so, the chapter contributes to debates on the Capitalocene, demonstrating the value of forging connections between labour geography literature and the literature concerning the nature of environmental agency and resistance. Indeed, returning to Goodman’s question asking to what extent “climate agency” (Goodman, 2017) is emerging through social movement participation, the answer is that climate agency is already evident and urgent in even those spaces hitherto underacknowledged as likely sources of resistance. Away from the spotlight of the urban global North, the elusive red-green synthesis finds coherent articulation in a subaltern politics that intuitively links the crisis of the biosphere with the crisis of productive and reproductive work in the Capitalocene.

Note 1 The start of the Anthropocene is nonetheless disputed, with three main levels suggested – an “early Anthropocene” level some thousands of years ago; the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at ~1800 CE (Common Era); and the “Great Acceleration” of the mid-twentieth century’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015, p. 196).

References Arnold, D. (2017). Civil society, political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia. Political Geography, 60, 23–33. Arnold, D., & Han Shih, T. (2010). A fair model of globalisation? Labour and global production in Cambodia. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 40(3), 401–424. Asia Monitor Resource Centre [AMRC]. (2014). A week that shook Cambodia: The hope, anger and despair of Cambodian workers after the general strike and violent crackdown. Hong Kong: Author. Barrientos, S. W. (2013). “Labour chains”: Analysing the role of labour contractors in global production networks. The Journal of Development Studies, 49(8), 1058–1071.

186  Sabina Lawreniuk Bezuidenhout, A., & Buhlungu, S. (2011). From compounded to fragmented labour: Mineworkers and the demise of compounds in South Africa. Antipode, 43(2), 237–263. Brickell, K.,  & Datta, A. (2016). Introduction: Translocal geographies. In K. Brickell  & A. Datta (Eds.), Translocal geographies (pp. 17–34). London: Routledge. Bylander, M. (2015). Depending on the sky: Environmental distress, migration, and coping in rural Cambodia. International Migration, 53(5), 135–147. Carrington, D. (2016, August  29). The Anthropocene epoch: Scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age. The Guardian. Carswell, G., & De Neve, G. (2013). Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in global production networks. Geoforum, 44(1), 62–70. Care. (2017). Australia, C.A.R.E., “I know I cannot quit”: The prevalence and productivity cost of sexual harassment to the Cambodian garment industry. Canberra: Author. Coe, N. M., & Jordhus-Lier, D. C. (2011). Constrained agency? Re-evaluating the geographies of labour. Progress in Human Geography, 35(2), 211–233. Cumbers, A., Helms, G.,  & Swanson, K. (2010). Class, agency and resistance in the old industrial city. Antipode, 42(1), 46–73. Etzold, B. (2016). Migration, informal labour and (trans) local productions of urban space – the case of Dhaka’s street food vendors. Population, Space and Place, 22(2), 170–184. Gayle, D. (2019, October  4). Does extinction rebellion have a race problem? The Guardian. Gidwani, V., & Ramamurthy, P. (2018). Agrarian questions of labor in urban India: Middle migrants, translocal householding and the intersectional politics of social reproduction. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(5–6), 994–1017. Goodman, J. (2017). Social movement participation and climate change. In Oxford research encyclopedia of climate science. Retrieved April  23, 2020, from https://oxfordre.com/ climatescience/ Green, W. N. (2020). Financial landscapes of agrarian change in Cambodia. Geoforum (ahead of print). doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.001 Herod, A. (1997). From a geography of labor to a labor geography: Labor’s spatial fix and the geography of capitalism. Antipode, 29(1), 1–31. Hunter, D. (2019). Climate resistance handbook: Or, I was part of a climate action. Now what? Retrieved April 23, 2020, from https://350.org/ Johnson, E., Morehouse, H., Dalby, S., Lehman, J., Nelson, S., Rowan, R., . . . Yusoff, K. 2014. After the anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch. Progress in Human Geography, 38(3), 439–456. Kreft, S., & Eckstein, D. (2014). Global climate risk index 2014: Who suffers most from extreme weather events? Weather-related loss events in 2012 and 1993 to 2012. Bonn: Germanwatch. Kreft, S., Eckstein, D., Junghans, L., Kerestan, C., & Hagen, U. (2015). Global climate risk index 2014: Who suffers most from extreme weather events? Weather-related loss events in 2013 and 1994 to 2013. Bonn: Germanwatch. Lawreniuk, S. (2020). Intensifying political geographies of authoritarianism: Towards an anti-geopolitics of garment worker struggles in neoliberal Cambodia. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–18. Lawreniuk, S., & Parsons, L. (2018). For a few dollars more: Towards a translocal mobilities of labour activism in Cambodia. Geoforum, 92, 26–35. Lawreniuk, S., & Parsons, L. (2020). Going nowhere fast: Mobile inequality in the age of translocality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, B. S., & Patz, J. A. (2015). Climate change, human rights, and social justice. Annals of Global Health, 81(3), 310–322.

Climate change is class war  187 Lewis, A. (2019, November 24). Too white, too middle class and lacking in empathy, extinction rebellion has a race problem, critics say. CNN. Licadho. (2020). Driven out: One village’s experience with MFIS and cross-border migration. Phnom Penh: Licadho. Mech, D. (2014, September 18). Unions stage lunchtime campaign for $177 wage. Cambodia Daily. Mikulewicz, M. (2020). Disintegrating labor relations and depoliticized adaptation to climate change in rural São Tomé and Príncipe. Area (ahead of print). Ministry of Environment. (2016). A second study on understanding of public perception of climate change in Cambodia: Knowledge, attitudes and practices. Phnom Penh: MoE. Moore, J. W. (2017). The capitalocene, part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630. Moore, J. W. (2018). The capitalocene part II: Accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(2), 237–279. Natarajan, N. (2020). “After me, all this is over” – exploring shifting labour geographies in a shifting climate among tobacco-farmers in South India. Area (ahead of print). Natarajan, N., Brickell, K., & Parsons, L. (2019). Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural  – urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a “climate precarity” approach. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 899–921. Neilson, J.,  & Pritchard, B. (2010). Fairness and ethicality in their place: The regional dynamics of fair trade and ethical sourcing agendas in the plantation districts of South India. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42(8), 1833–1851. Nugent, C. (2019, November 21). Terrified of climate change? You might have eco-anxiety. Time. O’Brien, K. S., Selboe, E., & Hayward, B. M. (2018). Exploring youth activism on climate change. Ecology and Society, 23(3), 1–13, 42. Park, S. (2017). Cambodian garment workers protest corporations for “$177” monthly wages, 2014. Global Nonviolent Action Database. Retrieved April 7, 2020, from https:// nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/ Parsons, L., Lawreniuk, S., & Pilgrim, J. (2014). Wheels within wheels: Poverty, power and patronage in the Cambodian migration system. The Journal of Development Studies, 50(10), 1362–1379. Parsons, L.,  & Natarajan, N. (2020). Introduction: Geographies of labour in a changing climate. Area (ahead of print). Polanyi, K. 2001 [1944]. The great transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon. Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (2011). Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma. Global Environmental Change, 21(4), 1215–1223. Rogaly, B., & Thieme, S. (2012). Experiencing space – time: The stretched lifeworlds of migrant workers in India. Environment and Planning A, 44(9), 2086–2100. Roser-Renouf, C., Maibach, E. W., Leiserowitz, A., & Zhao, X. (2014). The genesis of climate change activism: From key beliefs to political action. Climatic Change, 125(2), 163–178. Scher, A. (2018, December 24). “Climate grief ”: The growing emotional toll of climate change. NBC News. Scoones, I., Edelman, M., Borras, S. M., Hall, R., Wolford, W., & White, B. (2018). Emancipatory rural politics: Confronting authoritarian populism. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(1), 1–20. Strauss, K. (2018). Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity? Progress in Human Geography, 42(4), 622–630.

188  Sabina Lawreniuk Swyngedouw, Erik. (2011). Whose environment?: The end of nature, climate change and the process of post-politicization.  Ambiente  & Sociedade,  14(2), 69 G. 87. doi:10.1590/ S1414-753X2011000200006 Swyngedouw, E. (2013). Apocalypse now! Fear and doomsday pleasures. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24(1), 9–18. Taylor, M., & Murray, J. (2020, February 10). “Overwhelming and terrifying”: The rise of climate anxiety. The Guardian. Thew, H., Middlemiss, L., & Paavola, J. (2020). “Youth is not a political position”: Exploring justice claims-making in the UN climate change negotiations. Global Environmental Change, 61, 1–10. Wad, P. (2013). Getting international labour rights right at a foreign controlled company in Malaysia: A global labour network perspective. Geoforum, 44, 52–61. Ware, J., & Kramer, K. (2019). Hunger strike: The climate and food vulnerability index. London: Christian Aid. Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M., Barnosky, A. D., Cearreta, A., Crutzen, P., . . . Oreskes, N. (2015). When did the anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International, 383, 196–203.

11 Conclusion Towards a reworking of climate adaptation as labour “resistance” Laurie Parsons and Nithya Natarajan

As the proliferating impacts of climate change continue to affect rural and urban livelihoods across the world, the terms of work are shifting. New global and local temperature records are being set with accelerating frequency. In much of the global South, floods and droughts have become the norm where once they were the exception, whilst environmental feedbacks to these conditions are catalysing spiralling declines in natural resources. These are not just warning signs but the new normal. “Crisis-ordinary” (Berlant, 2011; Brickell, 2020) has slowly takenover. Yet the ongoing portrayal of these climatic events as exceptional occludes their deep entanglement in the mechanics of the global political economy. Economic precarity and environmental risk are shaping one another, squeezing the livelihoods of the worst-off workers and setting in place durable new terms of engagement with the workplace. As this collection has aimed to show, though, this is a process that has not gone unchallenged. From climate change protestors in the UK to the everyday struggles of women plagued by droughts and floods in Bangladesh, a new landscape of resistance to the climate crisis is emerging in response to squeezed livelihoods and increasingly unequal terms of work. These acts of resistance are powerful, ever present, and variegated responses to the climate crisis, yet they have been obscured by a framing that tends to segregate adaptation from wider research on the livelihoods, labour, and the workers who undertake them. This book therefore seeks to bring these areas closer together, arguing that a lens attuned to how environmental impacts are forged among and through labouring communities can enable us to better understand the changing climate, and related calls to “adapt” to it, through the prism of working lives and workers’ resistance. Throughout this volume, the authors contained here draw on critical work on climate and labour to ask how the changing climate is not just adapted to but embodied, accommodated, and actively resisted. Narrated through a diverse array of empirically grounded perspectives on climate change adaptation and labour resistance, as articulated through the lives of working people, they have highlighted the active nature of struggles in the workplace, in relation to both the impacts of climate change and against the forces forging it. Contextually, these chapters have spanned commercial agriculture in Turkey,

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labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia. Yet what unites them as a collection is the focus on labour relations to pose wider questions on how “adaptation” may be more attuned to the broader context and politics of working life under a changing climate and thus articulated with processes of “resistance”, in a holistic sense (Katz, 2004), that have long been central to critical labour studies. Across its nine empirical chapters, this volume has aimed therefore to demonstrate something of the inextricable relationships binding the twin processes of climate change and labour. Yet, in doing so, it has also pursued the broader goal of challenging the absence of labour within existing framings of climate adaptation. As a collection, we have asked how the politics of resistance can enable us to better understand the drivers and impacts of climate change and, through this, policy recommendations to “adapt” to it. This is a question that spans disciplinary boundaries, speaking to work in anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, amongst others. Across the broad coalition of disciplines contained in this book, theoretical framings vary in terms of grounding and focus, ranging from Marxist political economy analysis of agrarian change and labour in Bangladesh, via a critical geography analysis of labour movements at a global scale, to a social reproduction lens on labour and migration in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, each of these accounts is united in its critical approach and rootedness in labour studies, as well as a common focus on how the experience of climate change is articulated through both individual forms of resistance and the wider labour movements that emerge from and shape it. As we argue here, adaptation to climate change should first and foremost be understood as a process of addressing social marginalisation, exploitation, and broader justice. In particular, this selection of cases has highlighted the relative absence of work and labour within climate adaptation research and policy: a field which in its technicality often fails to, or refuses to, grasp the political-economic underwiring of change in the global workplace. An overarching goal of this book, therefore, has been to integrate something of the politics of labour into the analysis of climate change, thereby challenging existing framings of adaptation, whilst also creating space for the return of agency and the power of the “hands that adapt”, as Turhan describes them in this volume.

Climate change in the global workplace: framing an agenda Conceptualising labour under climate change is a broad goal, cross-cutting a variety of literatures in its pursuit of a holistic reimagination of labour relations in a dynamic and often degrading environment. Consequently, this collection is intended primarily as a platform for departure rather than a clearly defined reframing, a forum for discussion of a hitherto undervalued dimension of the climate crisis. Nevertheless, in laying this groundwork, some key conceptual innovations cohere from the work of the interventions included here,

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presenting the opportunity for an initial inventory of contributions to a variety of literatures. First, this collection offers a novel addition to environmental studies, a broad coalition which, despite its disciplinary and thematic range, has historically remained quiet on the issue of labour. Within collections on environmental studies (i.e. Castree, Hulme, & Proctor, 2018), thematic foci on “Vulnerability”, “Political Ecology”, and “Environmental (in)justice” address labour issues tangentially, without explicitly drawing on the extensive literature on work and the working poor vis-à-vis the environment. The chapters in this book therefore offer a conceptual approach that links analysis of the environment with that of work, highlighting the value of lenses capable of capturing the cross-cutting forms of precarity. As the authors here show, it is through these highly structured, human-environmental channels that “climate change exacerbates precariousness, disrupting all work and intensifying and extending individual risk” (Newman & Humphrys, 2020, p. 557). Moreover, as the tightly knit interconnections between the world of work and the natural environment become increasingly clear, the various contributions contained here have aimed a deeper conceptual engagement with work under climate change. They draw on and expand work in the geographic literature (Castree, Coe, Ward, & Samers, 2004) to address the place-based and dynamic ways in which spaces and places of labour are re-made through climate change and its entanglement with global capitalism. In particular, an area in which the need for such a contribution is paramount lies in conceptualising the impacts of climate change within gendered processes of everyday labour, in the home and elsewhere. As Mohan described in Chapter 3, for example, the impacts of climate change result in practice from “an interplay of biophysical, socio-economic political and multi scalar power relations”. Consequently, for women coping with climate change, adapting to new conditions entails a range of complex social and economic trade-offs, many of which “can be extremely tenuous” and lead to “undesirable” or unsustainable practices in the long and short term. Indeed, as Axelby and Bulgheroni summarise more broadly in Chapter  5, “climate change produces ruptures and increases risk for livelihoods that are already precarious and peripheral”. Second, having identified and begun to address the absence of labour relations within the environmental studies literature, this collection has aimed also towards a specific contribution to the literature on adaptation. Specifically, we present a bottom-up complement to Sovacool and Linnér’s (2016) analysis and critique of existing climate adaptation projects globally: an intervention highlighting in particular the interests served by the climate adaptation industrial complex. This inversion of focus from top-down planning frameworks to everyday decision-making under climate change highlights the inseparability of adaptation from capitalist labour relations, whether viewed from above or below. As James-Wilson (this volume) put it, for example, the technical framings through which the technical processes of adaptation are articulated are “loaded

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with the neo-liberal and colonial rhetoric of ‘capacity-building’, ‘self-reliance’, and ‘empowerment’ that are highly reminiscent of the textual and continental mythscapes of the Development Decades”. The lexicon of such framings speaks to a wider, multi-scalar set of power relations, whose influence is felt in both adapting environments and the policy set out to shape them. Indeed, as Turhan outlined in Chapter 5, “powerful groups create, manage and deal with vulnerability to climate change”, making it important to frame questions over adaptation in such a way as to expose “the uneven power relations and exploitative politics behind the scenes” (Turhan, this volume). As such, there is also a wider issue at hand in terms of the moral standpoint from which issues of climate change adaptation are explored. Speaking to the environmental justice framing advocated by Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker (2018), amongst others, our collection therefore explores how environmental justice may be refracted through workers’ experiences to explore how environmental change articulates with already-adverse incorporation into broader circuits of growth, thus compelling workers to engage in systems that undermine their own security. As Schultz (this volume) indicates in the case of Indigenous communities in northern Canada: The state’s support for the mining sector further leaves Indigenous communities in northern Canada with a complex decision, where the key means of adapting to the impacts of climate change on their livelihoods also represents a weakening of historical processes of resistance against the forces causing it. Addressing the hitherto underexplored dimension of labour within environmental justice framings, we aim to shift discourse on this topic towards a more labour-centred approach to notions of “justice”, inviting a focus on the complexities of labour’s constrained agency and how this shapes labour rights as a complement to pre-existing categories on “Social Movements” and “Environmental Human Rights”. As Axelby and Bulgheroni put it here, for example, adaptation “is possible in the sense of reducing vulnerability to climate change, but it comes at the cost of integration into commercial and labour relations on terms that are highly unequal”. What is consequently necessary is “a recognition of the wider polit­ ical and economic context [which] demonstrates the limits of adaptation and the ways in which power relations shape agency and economic mobility to its interests”. Thus, by reconceptualising adaptation as underscored by relational power structures, through which both climate change and the broader networks of extraction and exploitation are mediated, labour emerges as a constrained agent in processes of resistance and degradation. Indeed, this call to refocus the study of adaptation not only on labour, in an atomistic or mono-scalar sense, but rather on the structures and institutions of labour constitutes our third specific contribution. In particular, having highlighted the relevance of labour relations to the study of environmentalism,

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opportunities abound to engage with the ontological, epistemological, and theoretical boundaries that shape nature-society relations within and beyond the workplace. Building on previous interventions as such as Hampton’s (2015) and Räthzel and Uzzell’s (2012), which explicitly set out an agenda for “environmental labour studies”, we argue that labour unions need to develop a more holistic approach to labour organising along the lines of environmental issues, as climate change has a profound impact on workers across different parts of the economy and stems from wider processes which also erode labour conditions. In doing so, the perspectives we bring together here adopt a much broader conception of labour than previously articulated in relation to the environment. Specifically, whilst much previous work remains rooted in organised labour as a space for locating and understanding how environmental change articulates with labour processes, our collection goes beyond this focus to look at a broader range of working relations that lie outside the purview of traditional organised labour. From this standpoint, moreover, we advocate not only that organised labour should expand its focus to look beyond traditional spaces of labour unionism but that scholars too should actively explore how labour organising might achieve a more concerted role in environmental policy and politics. There is therefore ample scope for a more fundamental, mutually engaged and even activist engagement between unionism and environmentalism. Recent examples of the importance of this framing have seen the UK labour movement incorporate this viewpoint into mainstream political policy between 2015 and 2019, as part of a wider (though now halted) shift towards a climate justice framing in environmental policy. Nevertheless, labour movements have traditionally tended to view nature as a leisure space for workers, the value of which lies either as a public utility or conversely as an occupational health issue with regard to water or air pollution. As Goodfellow and Natarajan argued in Chapter 8, this has prevented a deeper engagement with how the exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature are articulated in the logics of productivist capitalism, and therefore how nature is not external to humans, but rather that man and nature are materially, substantively unified, if possessing different properties. The fourth and final contribution of our collection relates to the conceptual dualisms that undergird not only adaptation policy specifically but the core conceptualisations of the environment that guide our understanding of the changing climate. Following Taylor (2015), and Mann and Wainwright (2018), we reject the Cartesian dualism of human and nature inherent within climate adaptation literature and policy-making. Arguing that this obscures the core role of capital in shaping the minutiae of environmental change, we advocate instead a perspective capable of interpreting the uneven ways in which humans are incorporated into socio-ecological power relations. As our collection aims to communicate, therefore, “now, as in the past, they are only able to do so by taking paths that reinforce their marginality and precarity and that leave them exposed to further changes in the physical and political environment” (Axelby

194  Laurie Parsons and Nithya Natarajan

and Bulgheroni, this volume). Rather than adapting to the environment, we therefore need to focus on how we can produce ourselves better through the environment. In doing so, our collection paves the way also for a broader foregrounding of power and relational vulnerability in analysing impacts of and responses to climate change. By engaging explicitly with labour studies, we create a space for a fine-grained approach to understanding and addressing how climate change will affect the world’s most vulnerable workers. Thus, whilst it draws on the arguments set out by Taylor (2015) and Mann and Wainwright (2018) regarding the current trajectory of action on climate change, it also grounds this in a contextual analysis of how workers themselves are being affected. In regrounding labour under climate change in this way, we have ultimately sought to create a platform based not only on workers themselves but also on the social, cultural, and political-economic context through which their agency is expressed and constrained in resisting environmental change. Above all, this means recognising the interweaving of local and global institutions within wider struggles against the inequities of climate change. In the global South, in particular, this means recognising how discursive interactions between local and international networks of capital shape the conditions within which resistance takes place. As Botazzi et al. argue in Chapter 3, for example, although mobilisations against the impacts of climate change “are gradually creating synergies among the involved actors, they remain dependent on NGOs or research organisations funded by European donors, even when they are nominally carried out by peasant organizations”. Rather than presenting an endogenous case for change, therefore, “these mobilizations must meet the interests of foreign donors”, encouraging a technocratic formulation of objectives and “the suppression of more polemical and politically engaging objectives”. Overarchingly, we therefore seek a reorientation of adaptation from its technocratic origins towards an approach drawn out of the detail and context of working life. Indeed, as Lawreniuk argues here, “despite the ‘combined and uneven’ (Swyngedouw, 2013, p. 11) march of planetary catastrophe, those stationed at the current frontline of climate breakdown often cut a startlingly quiet figure in such analysis”. In reintroducing them, we must seek also to oppose the “conspicuous absence of Southern voices  – and the rural poor, in particular”, in order to reframe the concept of climate resistance from the ‘deliberately noisy, headline- and attention-grabbing activities of urban, Northern elites’ towards the indirect, the innocuous, and the economically embedded. Just as climate change operates through pre-existing structures, precarities, and inequalities, so too do adaptation and resistance reflect those same channels. Indeed, taken as a whole, it is this point that the accounts in this collection have sought, above all, to elucidate. Despite their globe-spanning contextual diversity, what unites each of these interventions is their commitment to constructing an approach to “adaptation” that is coherently rooted in the agency and above all resistance of labour. Adaptation, we argue, is a contested and

Conclusion  195

power-laden struggle: first and foremost a process of addressing social marginalisation, exploitation, and broader justice. Future work must reflect this contestation, situating its accounts within the agency of those who drive it.

References Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brickell, K. (forthcoming). Home SOS: Gender, violence and survival in crisis ordinary Cambodia. London: RGS-IBG. Castree, N., Coe, N. M., Ward, K., & Samers, M. (2004). Spaces of work: Global capitalism and geographies of labour. London: Sage. Castree, N., Hulme, M., & Proctor, J. D. (Eds.). (2018). Companion to environmental studies. London: Routledge. Hampton, P. (2015). Workers and trade unions for climate solidarity: Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world. London: Routledge. Holifield, R., Chakraborty, J., & Walker, G. (Eds.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of environmental justice. London: Routledge. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Newman, F.,  & Humphrys, E. (2020). Construction workers in a climate precarious world. Critical Sociology, 46(4–5), 557–572. Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (Eds.). (2012). Trade unions in the green economy: Working for the environment. London: Routledge. Sovacool, B. K.,  & Linnér, B. O. (2016). The political economy of climate change adaptation. London: Springer. Swyngedouw, E. (2013). The non-political politics of climate change. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 12(1), 1–8. Taylor, M. (2015). The political ecology of climate change adaptation: Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. London: Routledge. Mann, G., & Wainwright, J. (2018). Climate Leviathan: A political theory of our planetary future. New York: Verso.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by “n” indicate a note. 3AO see Alliance for Agroecology in West Africa (3AO) Abele, F. 157, 164 active theory 106 activism: climate concern and 149; climate justice 147; implanting climate 174; labour 178 – 179; labour movement and 9; protest and 9; thinking and 6; translocal experiences of work and 182; see also extractivism Adana Agricultural Workers’ Convention 121 adaptive possibilities 73 – 74, 79 – 80 ad hoc advocacy platforms 41 – 42 Africa 153 AFSA see Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) agency 96 – 98; adaptation 194; adaptive 80; autonomy of Indigenous communities and 156; climate 10, 172 – 173, 179 – 184, 185; farmworkers/farmers 34, 36, 40; financial 165; horizontal 179; human 105; labour 175 – 176, 178, 192; labour geography 123; migrants 112; resilience 50; translocal 179; vertical 179 agrarian: change 190; commercialisation 3; distress and vulnerability 73; industrial transformation 133; investing in 181; liberalisation 42; neoliberalism 51; policies 35, 42; social structures 34; transformation 3, 35, 133; vulnerability and adaptation in 116 Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP) 117 agriculture: adaptive possibilities 85; capital 25; capitalist 111; climate-smart 32 – 34; commercialisation/commercial 60,

77, 81, 86, 117, 189; construction and 19; development 44; feminisation of subsistence 95 – 96; impact of heat stress on 19; investment 21; labour households 55, 67n4; labour-intensive 111, 113, 115 – 116, 120; local economy dependent on 51; marginalised communities 63; market-oriented 110; mechanisation 67n11; Mediterranean 115; organic 33, 40; policies in Senegal 34 – 35; produced for use 161; production 34, 40, 74, 77, 114, 118, 120, 181; rain-fed smallholder 21; restructuring 113; shepherding and 76, 85; small-scale 74, 89; subsistence 73 – 74, 80, 93, 95 – 96; sustainable 32 – 34, 37; transhumant pastoralism and 79; Turkish 116 – 122 agroecology: climate change adaptation 32 – 34; “contributive justice” 32; farming 33, 35 – 40; principles of 39; revolution 32; scaling up 40 – 42; transition in Senegal 34 – 44 agro-migration system 110 Alliance for Agroecology in West Africa (3AO) 41 Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) 36 Altın, T. B. 118 analytical practice 106 Anthropocene 6, 172 – 173, 185n1 APWLD see Asia Pacific Women, Law and Development Network (APWLD) Arat, Y. 117 ARIP see Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP) ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 101

Index  197 Asia-Pacific 16, 19 Asia Pacific Women, Law and Development Network (APWLD) 104 Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) 148 Atasoy, Y. 117 Atölyesi, K. 117 Attri, S. D. 78 Australia 153, 163, 182 ‘baby boomer’ 100 Baez, J. 17 Baldwin, A. 113, 116 bandhok/bandhoki 60; see also farmers Bangladesh 54; agrarian change and labour 190; climate disaster 49; droughts and floods 189; Global Climate Risk Index (2020) ranks 49; liberalisation of markets 59; Musahars 49, 54; pro-growth/ development interventions 50; rural female labour force participation rate 58; strawberry pickers in Manolada, Greece 113 Barak, B. 118 Barca, S. 132, 134, 140, 143, 147 Baret, P. V. 46 Barsi, R. 164 Battisti, D. 112 Bengali Muslims 54, 67n6 Berger, J. T. 159 Bethel, J. W. 112 Bihar, India 54, 88 Blair, T. 136 Blood Bricks 16 boat kilns (lor touk) 23, 28n1 bonded/tied labour 20, 61 – 62, 181 Breman, J. 3 Brickell, K. 98 brick industry, Cambodia 16, 20, 25, 27 brick kilns: Cambodia 20, 24, 28n1, 190; family’s struggles with heat 22; migration 21; owners 22; workers 22, 25 brick worker 21; abandonment of farmlands 28; Cambodia 16, 22; as debtbonded labourers 20; families 26; hyperprecarity 24; illness 23; remittances 25 British Overseas Territories 153 British Raj 54 British trade unions 133 – 134, 133 – 136, 149n1 Britt, A. F. 112 Broecker, W. 15 Burke, S. 112 business unionism 142, 147 Butlin, R. 153

Cadre national de concertation des ruraux du Sénégal (CNCR) 35 Caine, K. 163 Cambodia: boat kilns (lor touk) 28n1; brick industry 16, 20, 25, 27; brick kilns 20, 24, 28n1, 190; brick worker 16, 22; debt-bonded labourers 20; droughts 19; garment industry 173; migration 20; thermal inequality 19 – 22 Cambodian National Rescue Party 180 Cameron, D. 136 Cameron, E. 158 Canada 95, 113; Indigenous communities 152 – 153, 161, 192; Indigenous livelihoods in Northern Canada 155 – 157; Inuit communities in 161; landmass 159; northern communities 159 – 160; settler-colonialism in 153 – 155 Canadian Industrial Park 179, 182 capacity-building 41, 100, 192 capitalism: in climate change 176; colonialism and racial 99; creation of wealth 2; full employment 3; global 102, 123, 191; Indigenous dispossession/ colonialism/racial 105; Indigenous participation 164; neoliberal 74, 177; productivist 147, 193; progressive reform 135; systematic discrimination 112 Capitalocene 172 – 185; conceptualising climate agency in 174 – 177; global labour’s challenge 184 – 185; labour resistance 179 – 184; livelihoods 177 – 179 care work 94 – 95, 97, 99 – 100 Caruso, G. 17 case studies 80 – 89; Nichla village in Lower Chamba 85 – 89; Upala village in Upper Chamba 80 – 84 Cash for Work scheme 59 caste 50, 53 – 55, 58, 62, 91n8, 115 Central America 96 Chakraborty, J. 192 challenge: agroecology 44; climate change 36; distributive justice paradigms 101; to equity 53, 63; Gaddis 89; gendering 98; global labour’s 184 – 185; Indigenous and northern communities 162; national policies 43; social and environmental 164; social reproductive resistance 93; see also Capitalocene Chamba District, Himachal Pradesh 73, 76, 77 Chamba Rajas 80 Chamba Valley 77 Christianity 54 class differentiation 3, 98

198 Index climate: adaptation 1, 6 – 8; agency 10, 172 – 173, 179 – 184, 185; breakdown 10, 15, 74, 172 – 173, 184, 194; crisis 15, 123, 131 – 132, 143, 173, 177, 184 – 185, 189 – 190; gendered/gendering labour migration 94, 97 – 99, 102, 105 – 106; justice 6, 8, 104, 147, 193; labour migration 97; precarity 21, 177; climate resistance 2, 8 – 10, 174; smart agriculture 32 – 34; see also labour; social reproductive resistance climate change: capital and 2; Indigenous community 157 – 162; labour resistance 190 – 195; labour under 3 – 6; migration and 20; thermal inequality 19 – 22 climate change adaptation 32 – 45; agricultural policies in Senegal 34 – 35; agroecological farming 35 – 40; agroecological transition in Senegal 34 – 44; agroecology 32 – 34, 40 – 42; mobilisations 40 – 42; multi-stakeholder platforms 40 – 42; organic farming 35 – 40; peasant organisations in Senegal 34 – 35; seasonal labour migration 111 – 114 CNCR see Cadre national de concertation des ruraux du Sénégal (CNCR) Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community 183 Coastal GasLink 158 colonialism: defined 153; racial capitalism 99; settler-colonialism in Canada 153 – 155 commercialisation: agrarian 3; of agriculture 60, 77, 177; FENAB 41; of organic products 43; of products on local and national markets 37; support 35, 37 community-based disaster preparedness (CBDP) 100 community-supported agriculture (CSA) 33, 38 – 39, 43, 46 construction, impact of heat stress on 19 Convention (C189) 105 Coordination Action Research on AIDS 104 coping mechanisms 63 Corntassel, J. 164 Corrado, A. 120 cost-shifting 115 Council of the European Union 124n1 Courchene, T. 164 Covid-19: bailout packages 2; crisis 1; pandemic 122 “crisis of labour” 5, 51; see also labour crop: diversification 35, 87; yield 86, 96

Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada 162 daisudi 60, 67n12 debt-bonded labourers 20; see also labour decent work 16, 18, 27 demographic change 81, 89 Dhanda, P. 138, 142 dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) 161 Dinajpur, north-west Bangladesh 51, 53, 53 – 54, 67n3 distributional deficits (domination) 94, 98 distributive justice 100 – 101 Doherty, B. 105 double movement 175 Doyle, T. 105 dual labour market theory 99 Dufty-Jones, R. 112 Dumont, A. M. 46 durable embodiment of heat impacts 22 – 24 Duruiz, D. 122 Dynamic on Agroecological Transition in Senegal (DyTAES) 42 East Africa 96 eco-anxiety 172 economic mobility 56, 90, 192 eedurer dhaan (rat rice) 55 Elias, P. 156 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 19 embodied politics of scale 99 – 100 empowerment 44 – 45, 98, 100, 192 ENDA-PRONAT 36, 41 environmental degradation/destruction 7, 37, 83, 95, 132, 142, 144, 146 environmental hazards 74 environmentalism: labour 131 – 132, 135; unionism and 193; Unite (trade union) 133 – 136, 144 – 149 environmental justice: claims for 100; dimension of labour within 192; discourse 98; gendering and 98; Indonesian and the Filipino movements 101; see also social reproductive resistance environmental risk 73, 189 Europe 33, 39 European Court of Human Rights 124n2 export processing zones (EPZs) 56 – 57 Extinction Rebellion (XR) 172, 174 extractivism 153, 156, 159 – 160, 164; see also activism FAO Farmer Field School 35 farmers: adoption of organic farming and subjective well-being 33; agroecological

Index  199 42; autonomy of 32, 34, 43; contributive justice 32; conversion to agroecology 32; financial autonomy 40; income 57; mobilisations 35 – 36; organic 37, 43 – 44; self-determination 43; self-exploitation 33; skills, knowledge, and capabilities 32; subsistence 27, 96; union initiative 37 – 38 Fédération des organisations nongouvernmentales du Sénégal (FONGS) 35 Félix, G. F. 32 feminisation: of care work 94 – 95; of subsistence agriculture 95 – 96 FENAB see National Federation of Organic Agriculture (FENAB) Fidler, C. 164 financial agency 165; see also agency First Nations 155, 159, 166n1 First World 99 First World War 133 Fisher, D. 163 – 164 flexibilisation 3 fly-in communities 155, 166n2 focus group discussions (FGDs) 52, 53 food: insecurity 34, 96; shortages 54 – 55; sovereignty 32, 39; system, Great Britain 111 food security 49 – 63; land as a means for survival 59 – 61; methods 51 – 53; overview 49 – 51; paradigm of 35; precarity of work for rural female labour 61 – 63; survival strategies of the marginalised 58 – 59; vulnerabilities 53 – 63 French Research Institute for Development (IRD) 41 full employment capitalism 3; see also capitalism GABRIELA National Alliance of Women 102 – 103 Gaddern 77 – 78, 80, 84 Gaddi: agro-pastoralism 73; Gaddi flocks 75; shepherds 75, 76, 84, 89 Gaddi Scheduled Tribe 73 Garnett, S. T. 17 gauntlet 89 – 90 gender 96 – 98; caste and 53, 58; climatelabour migration 93 – 94; gaps 33; impacts of climate change 147; rights 104; violence 103 gendering 96 – 98, 105; challenges 98; labour-climate migration 103; migrants 99 Geographies of Empire: European empires and colonies c. 1880–1960 (Butlin) 153

Gertel, J. 113 Gibson, G. 163 Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women 104 Global Challenges Research Fund project (2016–2018) 51 Global Climate Risk Index (2020) 49, 180 global heating/warming 15 – 16, 161 global labour, challenge of 184 – 185 global North 3, 9, 94, 97 – 99, 102, 132, 134, 147, 185 global South 3 – 4, 10, 18, 24, 27, 33, 94, 99, 135, 146, 173 – 174, 177, 184, 189, 194 GND see Green New Deal (GND) Goodman, J. 10, 172 – 173 Gore, A. 146 goth (stopping points) 82 Greece 113 Green New Deal (GND) 131, 148, 175 Group for Reflection on Land in Senegal (CRAFS) 41 – 43 Groups of Economic Interests (Groupe d’Intérêt Economique GIE) 37, 45n3 Gualinga, H. 174 Guardian, The 15, 18, 174 Haley, S. 164 Hampton, P. 148, 193 HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) 122 health 16; decent work and 27; heat and 17, 27; idiosyncratic problems 23; insurance 118; occupational 112, 147 – 148, 193; public 112, 119; unsafe conditions 120; working capacity 23 heat: durable embodiment of 22 – 24; health and 17, 27; impact on agriculture 19; impact on construction 19; impact on decent work 18; inequality 25; research 17; sectoral mobility 19 Heathrow Airport in London 131 – 149 heat stress: Asia-Pacific 16, 19; exposure of migrants to 24; vulnerability to 19 heterogeneity, informal labour markets 4 high-resilience groups (HRGs) 51, 53, 56, 57 high yield variety (HYV) 78 Himachal Pradesh 73 Himalayas (India) 73 – 90; adaptive possibilities 73 – 74, 79 – 80; case studies 80 – 89; climate threats 73 – 74; impacts possibilities 79 – 80; resilience possibilities 79 – 80; Western Himalayas 74 – 79 Hinduism 91n8 Holifield, R. 192

200 Index Holocene 172 horizontal agency 179; see also agency HP Tenancy and Land Reform Act of 1972 85 HRGs see high-resilience groups (HRGs) human-induced warming 147 human migration 17, 93, 96 Humphrys, E. 24 hunger 44, 51 hyper-precarity 24, 120 IBAs see Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) identity intersectionality 96 – 98 IFOAM 41 ILO see International Labour Organisation (ILO) Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) 162 – 164 impacts possibilities 79 – 80 India 153 Indian Himalayas see Himalayas (India) Indigenous community 152 – 166, 166n1; climate change 157 – 162; dilemma facing 162 – 165; Indigenous livelihoods 155, 155 – 158; Northern Canada 155, 155 – 157; oil, gas, and mineral development 158 – 162; settlercolonialism in Canada 153 – 155 Indonesia 93 – 94 Indonesian National Commission on Violence Against Women 104 induced immiseration 113, 118 industrialisation 35 informal labour markets 4 informal landscape of work 3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1, 3 International Domestic Worker’s Federation (IDWF) 105 – 106 International Geological Congress 172 International Labour Organisation (ILO) 18 – 19, 105 International Monetary Fund 3 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) 50 Inuit 166n1 IPES-Food 41 Iqaluit 160 Ishfaq, S. 17 İslamoğlu, H. 117 Italy 113 Jakarta Process 104 Jammu & Kashmir 84 Jaswal, A. K. 78

Jharkhand 88 job creation 4, 139 Kangra 80 Karataş 117 – 118, 120, 122 Katz, C. 9 Kavak, S. 120 Kavanagh, P. 138, 144 Kenya 33 khaas (government) 55 khaikhalashi 60, 67n12 Khansama, Dinajpur (North-Western Bangladesh) 49 – 50, 52, 53, 54 Klein, N. 162 KOMNAS Perempuan 104 krishanis 61; see also bonded/tied labour Krishi card 60, 67n13 Krogman, N. 163 Kshatriya (upper caste) 54 – 55 Kulchyski, P. 165 Kyoto Protocol 146 labour: absorption 4; activism 178 – 179; agency 175 – 176, 178, 192; control 34; environmentalism 131; -intensive agriculture 111, 113, 115 – 116, 120; migration 4; resistance 179 – 184, 189 – 195; tying 63; wage 22, 49, 51, 56, 58, 87, 89, 155 – 156, 160, 166 Labour Party 131 land: as means for survival 59 – 61; grabbing 55, 67n6; holdings 75, 177 landless (bhoomiheen) 33, 44, 55, 57, 60, 117 landowners 8, 38, 55, 60, 63, 77, 111, 113, 115, 117 – 118 Latin America 32 Lauderdale, P. 164 Lévesque, F. 165 Levy, G. 148 Li, T. M. 114, 158 liberalisation 42, 59, 67n11, 102 low-resilience groups (LRGs) 51, 53, 56, 57, 61 Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan 148 macroeconomic policies 50 Malatya 120 Malawi 33 Malm, A. 7 Manimahesh Glacier 90n5 Mann, G. 193 – 194 Manolada, Greece 113 marabout 39 – 40 marginalised communities 49 – 51, 54, 59 – 60, 63; see also food insecurity

Index  201 Mason, M. 148 McAlevey, J. 132, 147 – 148 McCluskey, L. 131, 137 – 138, 142 McMichael, P. 115 mechanisation of agriculture 67n11; see also agriculture Mediterranean agriculture 115; see also agriculture Mediterranean agro-migration 110 Mediterranean Basin 110 Mendes, M. S. 110 Métis 166n1 MGNREGA scheme 82, 87 Microfinance Institution (MFI) 60 – 61 Migrante International 102 – 103 migrants: durable embodiment of heat impacts 22; family members 26; female climate-labour 93 – 94, 97; gendering 99; heat stress 24; low-skilled 94; seasonal agricultural labour 111; undocumented or irregular 94; urban 178 migration 16; Cambodia 20; climate change and 20; human 17; rural-urban 17 Mitchell, D. 112 mobilisation, climate change adaptation 40 – 42 mobility, thermal inequality 19 – 22 Mobility Asia 104 Monga 51, 56, 63 Moore, J. W. 176 – 177 Morter, N. 148 Mueller, V. 17 multi-stakeholder platforms 40 – 42 Multi-Stakeholder Task Force for the Promotion of Agroecology in Senegal (TAFAE) 41 Munck, R. 3 Musahar Para 53 Musahars (minority Dalit community) 50, 54 – 55 Nakate, V. 174 National Aboriginal Health Organisation 166 National Action Plan for Addressing Climate Change and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation 100 National Federation of Organic Agriculture (FENAB) 38, 40 – 41 nationalism 143, 145 natural disasters 17, 50, 56, 93, 100 neocolonialism 154; see also colonialism neoliberalism 5, 51, 88 Network of Peasant Organisations and Agricultural Producers in West Africa (ROPPA) 41

New Agricultural Policy 35 Newhouse, D. 164 Newman, F. 24 New Zealand 153 NGOs see non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Nichla village in Lower Chamba 78, 85 – 89, 90n1; see also Upala village in Upper Chamba Nightingale, A. J. 116, 122 Nijera Kori (national NGO) 67n3, 67n8 Niu, C. 17 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 33, 36 – 37, 50 Northern Canada 155, 155 – 157 Noticias Telemundo 15 Nunavut 160 ocean acidification 161 O’Faircheallaigh, C. 163 O’Grady, F. 148 Okhrabari 53 organic agriculture 33; see also agriculture organic farmers 37, 43 – 44; see also farmers organic farming 35 – 40 Orlove, B. 79 Pamuk, Ş. 117 paradigm: in agriculture development 44; “care deficit” 97; distributive justice 101; of food security 35; forced migration economic development 97 Paris Climate Agreement 136 Parsons, G. 164 participatory guarantee systems (PGS) 41, 43 peasants: farming 33, 116 – 117; organisations in Senegal 34 – 35 Pelek, D. 117 – 118 Pelling, M. 115 Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) 161 PGS see participatory guarantee systems (PGS) Philippines 93 – 94 Phnom Penh 182 – 183 physical landscapes, Western Himalayas 74 – 79 Platform of European NGOs in Senegal (PFONGUE) 41 Polanyi, K. 175 political ecology 123 political globalisation 104 political landscapes, Western Himalayas 74 – 79 politics of scale 99 – 100

202 Index post-colonialism 154 Pov, S. 182 poverty 51; cyclical 56; engendering 2; inequality and 6; intergenerational 155; reduction 44; unemployment and 166; vulnerability 114; working 18 Prno, J. 164 Programme d’Accélération de la Cadence de l’Agriculture Sénégalaise (PRACAS) 35, 45n2 PSE-vert 35, 42, 44 public distribution system 86 public finance 3 Public Food Distribution System (PFDS) 59 public utilities 3 Punjab 80 racialisation: of men 94; of women 95 Rathore, L. S. 78 Räthzel, N. 147, 193 reforestation 35 remittances 17, 25, 26, 100, 178, 181 reproductive resistance see social reproductive resistance resilience 58, 100 – 101; possibilities 79 – 80; ranking survey 51 responsibilisation 45 Ribot, J. 74 Richardson, O. 142 – 143 Richerzhagen, C. 17 Rishi (lower caste) 55 Rodon, T. 157, 165 Rogaly, B. 112 Rone, J. 110 rural female labour, precarity of work for 61 – 63; see also labour Rural Maintenance Program 59 rural poor 3; see also poverty rural-urban dyad 177 – 179 rural-urban migration 17; see also migration Saeed, F. 17 Salik, K. M. 17 Sall, M. 35 Scheduled Tribe 77 Scoones, I. 177 Scott, S. 111 Seafarers Union 148 seasonal agricultural workers 116 – 122; see also farmers seasonal labour migration 110 – 123; climate change adaptation 111 – 114; seasonal agricultural workers 116 – 122; transforming adaptation 114 – 116; Turkish agriculture 116 – 122

sectoral mobility due to heat 19 Seidle, L. 164 “self-exploitation” 33; see also farmers self-reliance 100, 192 self-sufficiency 35, 55, 59 semi-formalised networks 41 Senegal: agricultural policies in 34 – 35; agroecological transition in 34 – 44; peasant organisations in 34 – 35; see also climate change adaptation Senegal River Valley 35 settler-colonialism, in Canada 153 – 155 sharecropping 60 shared benefits (resistance) 98 Sharman, H. 163 shepherds 75 Shiva, V. 174 short-term labour-tying 61; see also labour Silvey, R. 99 Sioux Indigenous Americans 146 Sippel, S. R. 113 Smith, A. 98 social globalisation 104 social inequality 32 social mobility 56 social movement organisation (SMO) 147 social reproductive resistance 93 – 106; active theory 106; adaptation 100 – 101; agency 96 – 98; analytical practice 106; distributive justice 100 – 101; embodied politics of scale 99 – 100; environmental justice 98; feminisation of care work 94 – 95; feminisation of subsistence agriculture 95 – 96; gender 96 – 98; gendered climate-labour migration 94; gendering 96 – 98; identity intersectionality 96 – 98; politics of scale 99 – 100; resilience 100 – 101; Southeast Asian subjects of procedural justice 101 – 106; transnational politics of scale 99 – 100; vulnerability 96 – 98 social reproductive work see care work social safety 3 – 4 social stigmatisation 54 social support 4 social welfare programmes 94 socio-ecological cost-shifting acts 115 Solidaritas Perempuan 104 South Asia 96 Southeast Asia 101 – 106, 190 Spain 114 spatio-temporalities 111 Spector, J. 112 spiritual brotherhood 39, 44 Standing Rock 146

Index  203 Stenning, A. 98 St-Hilaire, F. 164 Structural Adjustment Programme 3, 60 structure-based organising 147 subsistence agriculture 73 – 74, 80, 93, 95 – 96; see also agriculture subsistence farmers 27, 96; see also farmers survival strategies, of marginalised 58 – 59 sustainable agriculture 32 – 34, 33 – 34, 37; see also agriculture sustainable environment 143 – 144 Swyngedouw, E. 174 – 175 Syngenta 60 systems map 67n14 Taylor, M. 1 – 2, 6, 50, 193 – 194 thermal inequality 15 – 28; Cambodia 19 – 22; climate change 19 – 22; conceptualising 17 – 19; durable embodiment of heat impacts 22 – 24; mobility 19 – 22; overview 15 – 17; translocal 24 – 27 Third World 93, 99 This Changes Everything (Klein) 162 Thunberg, G. 145, 172, 184 tied labourers 61; see also labour Tigchelaar, M. 112 Tilly, C. 16, 24 Timmermann, C. 32 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 137, 148 trade unions 135; see also British trade unions transformation 100; adaptation 114 – 116; agrarian 3, 35, 133; socio-ecological unevenness 101 transhumant pastoralism 75, 79 translocal agency 179; see also agency translocal labour 174, 177 – 179 translocal solidarities 179 – 184 translocal thermal inequality 24 – 27 transnational politics of scale 99 – 100 Trump, D. 15 T’Seleie, F. 159 Turkey 110 Turkish agriculture 116 – 122 umbrella organisations 40 – 41 unionism 134 – 134, 142, 147 – 148, 193 UNISON 148 Unite (trade union) 131 – 149; actively fighting for positive change 141 – 142; British trade unions 133 – 134, 133 – 136;

environmentalism 133 – 136, 144 – 149; environmentally “sustainable” 143 – 144; good for the country 142 – 143; support for Heathrow expansion 136 – 144 United Nations 102 United Nations Development Programme (2020) 3 United States 15, 33, 39, 112, 114, 153, 182 United Students Against Sweatshops 182 Upala village in Upper Chamba 78, 80 – 84, 90n1 urbanisation 43, 84 urban-rural remittances 26 Urry, J. 88 Usher, P. J. 156 Uzzell, D. 147, 193 Vaishya (upper caste) 54 – 55 van der Linden, M. 3 vertical agency 179; see also agency Virdee, S. 132, 134 – 135, 143 – 144, 147 vulnerability(ies) 96 – 98; adaptation 116, 158; climate change 79; durable 2; environmental 73; food security 53 – 63; heat stress 5, 19, 27; human 15; marginalised communities 49 Wade, A. 35 wage labour 22, 49, 51, 56, 58, 87, 89, 155 – 156, 160, 166; see also labour Wainwright, J. 193 – 194 Walker, G. 192 Watt-Cloutier, S. 160 – 161 Weisskircher, M. 110 Western Europe 3 Western Himalayas: physical landscapes 74 – 79; political landscapes 74 – 79 Wet’suwet’en Nation in British Columbia 158 Wolfe, P. 154 Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts 104 Women’s Movement for the Protection of Migrant Workers 104 working poor 3 – 4, 8, 131, 148, 191 World Bank 49, 117 world systems theory 99 XR see Extinction Rebellion (XR) Zalasiewicz, J. 172 Zander, K. K. 17, 24