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The agrarian question of the twenty-first century is the agrarian question of climate change. The classical agrarian question asked how capitalist development was reshaping fin de siècle agriculture and with what consequences. The answers often contradicted predictions, and thereby teleological notions of development. Today, we must ask how climate change adaptation and mitigation, alongside and through other ongoing processes of capitalist development, are reshaping agrarian lives, livelihoods, landscapes, and politics, and with what consequences. We argue that attention to the agrarian question is essential to understanding social, political, and economic transformation broadly in the time of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipatory ruination is a mode of prefigurative governance in anticipation of the real and perceived threats of climate change. The concept draws our attention to the ways in which climate crisis is not inevitable, but is produced historically and through contemporary relations of power. In this brief piece, I examine the concept in relation to recent trends in critical agrarian studies that examine how narratives about climate crisis shape contemporary responses and their impacts in ways that entrench and reconfigure inequalities in the agrarian world. I conclude with a discussion of visions for agrarian climate justice as alternatives to the telos of anticipatory ruination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the political imaginaries contained within representations of urban climate futures? What silent but corollary rural dispossessions accompany them? I investigate these questions through the experience of migrants from rural coastal Bangladesh to peri-urban Kolkata. The threats posed to their villages by a variety of ecological disruptions (both loosely and intimately linked with climate change) drive their migration in search of new livelihoods. Their experiences suggest that the demise of rural futures is entangled with the celebration of urban climate futures. However, social movements in this region resisting agrarian dispossession point to alternative political imaginaries that resist teleologies of urbanization at the expense of agrarian livelihoods. Current work in both agrarian studies and urban studies theorizes these linked dynamics of rural–urban transition, seeking to understand them in relation to broader political economies. I bring these debates into conversation with one another to highlight the importance of attention to counter-hegemonic agrarian political imaginaries, particularly in the face of predictions of the death of the peasantry in a climate-changed world. It won't be possible to identify or pursue just climate futures without them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer a manifesto for a progressive twenty-first century land-grant mission in an era of rising authoritarian populism in the United States. We explore the historical context of this mode of political engagement, argue that scholars based at land-grant universities are uniquely positioned to address this political moment, and offer examples of land-grant scholars who have embraced this political obligation directly. In the midst of the U.S. Civil War, the federal government provided grants of land to one college in every state to establish universities especially with extension-oriented missions committed to agricultural research and training; today, there are seventy-six land-grant universities. Just as the constitution of these universities at a significant moment in the country's history served a political purpose, the current political climate demands a robust political response from contemporary land-grant scholars. Given the mandate for land-grant universities to serve their communities, how can a critical land-grant mission respond to the current political moment of emergent authoritarian populism in the United States and internationally? What responsibilities are entailed in the land-grant mission? We consider some strategies that land-grant scholars are employing to engage with communities grappling most directly with economic stagnation, climate change, and agrarian dispossession. We also suggest that, amid the dramatically shifting political climate in the United States, all scholars regardless of land-grant affiliation should be concerned with land-grant institutions' capacities to engage with the country's most disenfranchised populations as a means to pushing back against authoritarian populism. Key Words: authoritarian populism, higher education, land-grant institutions, public geographies, United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the shaping of Bangladesh's southern coastal region, often framed as the most climate vulnerable place in the world, as a zone of climate crisis. As rising waters threaten communities inhabiting the low‐lying coastal islands scattered across the deltaic plain, many within the government and donor community have identified shrimp aquaculture as a principal adaptation strategy. Shrimp aquaculture is integral to the dynamics of what I call anticipatory ruination, a discursive and material process of social and ecological destruction in anticipation of real or perceived threats. I elaborate anticipatory ruination as a process that both responds to and produces Bangladesh's climate crisis. I use this concept to explore not only the dynamics taking place in Bangladesh's delta region, but also the ways in which climate crisis is constituted more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development in Bangladesh is increasingly defined by and through an adaptation regime, a socially and historically specific configuration of power that governs the landscape of possible intervention in the face of climate change. It includes institutions of development, research, media, and science, as well as various state actors both nationally and internationally. The adaptation regime operates through three interrelated processes: imagination, experimentation, and dispossession. Each of these processes is produced and manifested both materially and epistemically. The adaptation regime is built on a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable. For the rural poor, this entails dispossession from agrarian livelihoods and outmigration. As this shift contributes to the expansion of production of export commodities such as garments and frozen shrimp, the threat of climate change and its associated migrations is reframed as an opportunity for development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategies for climate change adaptation are contingent on normative analyses of ideal development outcomes and possible futures. Competing visions for the future thus result in adaptation programmes that benefit some while disadvantaging others. In coastal Bangladesh, shrimp aquaculture provides an example of one such adaptation strategy with contested unequal outcomes. Focusing on the impacts of adaptation on the poorest and most vulnerable reduces the risk of negative impacts on the most structural disadvantaged. Attention to power imbalances, as opposed to technical solutions, can help ensure more equitable outcomes of adaptation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes a methodological and political intervention in debates over microcredit. It explores outcomes of microcredit interventions in the lives of residents of Arampur, a village in rural northern Bangladesh. Using a community-based research and engagement strategy, we explore recipients' own critiques and experiences of microcredit. These experiences suggest that the cultural and economic template that many microfinance institutions (mfis) superimpose on communities not only fails to map to lived realities, but often reinforces the very problems that mfis claim to address. Microcredit and other 'self-help' development strategies operate through idealised notions of poverty and rural life. We ask how restoring the voices of recipients to debates that seek to shape their futures could transform such interventions. In conclusion, we explore the ongoing debate over microcredit in Arampur and reflect on how re-rooting debates over development in specific places might move such debates from questions of 'self-help' to grounded and historicised projects of self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]