Search

Ongoing debates in conservation studies stress the dire consequences of ‘fortress’ and ‘militarized’ conservation at violent frontiers. Presenting evidence from Kahuzi-Biega National Park in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this article shows how the park has become a focal point for armed insurgent groups in the region. Although fortress conservation has contributed to one major incident of violent resistance in recent years, it plays only a marginal role in defining the structures shaping the actions of armed groups. These structures — some of which are reproduced and (occasionally) reshaped by armed groups — include the legacies of poverty and insecurity, the geographical features of the park and the presence of illicit trading networks. This perspective emerges only when we zoom out from the park to place it within the context of the history and broader political economy of the DRC. On the one hand, these dynamics severely constrain the agency of conservation organizations, leaving militarized conservation as the only feasible form of enforcement. This approach at times generates violent outcomes for certain groups of people and produces a resource-rich, isolated terrain which provides a staging ground for broader conflicts to play out. On the other hand, militarized conservation could provide basic law and order at the forest's edge. Ultimately, therefore, militarized conservation plays an ambivalent role vis-à-vis security and stability.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how five different multi-level governance (MLG) models affect place branding (PB) performance in Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach In hierarchical administrative systems, central governments exert control on PB, influencing its effectiveness. While PB as such is widely studied, the effect of MLG on PB performance in centralized administrative systems remains understudied. The study is approached as a multiple case study of nine cities. Findings The study reveals that different MLG models indeed affect PB performance differently. Direct access to central leadership and resources boosts branding performance, while privatization promotes flexibility with similarly positive effects. Study findings, furthermore, show that some cities are considered too big to fail. Cities such as Riyadh and Neom are of prime importance and receive plenty of resources and leadership attention, while others are considered peripheral, are under-resourced and branding performance suffers accordingly. Emerging differences in PB performance associated with different MLG models are thus likely to deepen the gap between urban economic winners and losers. Originality/value This paper introduces five MLG models based on the actors involved in PB, their interactions and their access to resources. For each model, this paper assesses other factors which may influence the effectiveness of PB as well, such as access to the national leadership and staff capacity. This research thereby adds to the literature by identifying specific factors within MLG models influencing PB performance in hierarchical administrative systems.

In this article, I share insights from the conversations I have enjoyed with my father GC Harcourt on gender, social justice, and economic policy in the last years of his long and fruitful life. Our conversations reflected our overlapping but at times divergent responses to the disruptions caused by environmental, climate, health, economic, and political crises. The article reflects on our conversations around population, alternatives, the pervasiveness of racism in Australia, and the recurring questions of how to bring about change and how to continue despite political disappointments. The article teases out in a gentle way how my perspective, as a feminist political ecologist, diverged from GC Harcourt’s views, and what our conversations together suggest as important challenges to overcome as we confront the current crises of modern capitalism.

This article contributes to migration and livelihood scholarship by reflecting on global and political dimensions of livelihoods and experiences of illegalisation in Central America. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families and their migrant family members in Costa Rica, the article adopts a translocal livelihood perspective and uses the notion of everyday politics to explore migrants’ mobility practices and nuance the role and reach of illegalisation in relatively accessible South–South migration. In conclusion, the article reinvigorates the notion of ‘everyday politics of mobility’ to incorporate the multi-sitedness, multi-dimensionality and multi-directionality of translocalising livelihoods, offering a lens for future comparison of illegalisation within and beyond the so-called Global South.

Legal mobilization is a contested topic. There is little consensus among scholars regarding what legal mobilization is, let alone how it functions, particularly in relation to the separation or balance of powers doctrine, the latter which concerns the formal mandates of public actors and their interactions in relation to rule of law as a form of governance. We argue that the use of law by civic actors to advance social change should be distinguished from the use of law by states and other powerful actors to subvert the rule of law or to suppress critical voices. Thus, in distinguishing legal mobilization from lawfare, we argue that legal mobilization as a legitimate form of counterpower to lawfare has emerged as a viable and important component of governance. Pragmatically speaking, the illegitimate use of law by authoritarian regimes and corporations, the existence of corruption and both substantive and procedural limitations of formal rule of law mechanisms to deliver impartial justice have forced legal advocates to think creatively. In this paper, after conceptualizing legal mobilization and lawfare as opposing uses of law, we analyse the potential of legal mobilization as counterpower in relation to the trias politica doctrine, drawing on a case study of mobilizing Sinti, Roma and Traveller rights in The Netherlands to analyse how law is used to resist lawfare and pursue social justice.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Coastal sand mining for metals involves extraction of heavy mineral sands (HMS), which are sedimentary deposits of dense minerals that accumulate in coastal environments. HMS are localized concentrations of ores such as ilmenite, rutile, leucoxene, and iron, which are sources of metals such as titanium, zircon, iron, sillimanite/kyanite, staurolite, monazite, and garnet. The applications of these metals range from everyday products such as ceramics, paint, and pigments, as well as technologically advanced applications in the airline, shipbuilding, medicine, and defense industries. HMS extraction implies strip mining of coastal areas, which are often unique biodiversity ecosystems, or fragile ecosystems built up on sandy soils or dunes. The loss of such spaces has impacts such as loss of biodiversity and habitats, salt-water intrusion into agricultural lands and increased exposure to sea level rise. As a result of the serious ecological and socioeconomic transformations at such extraction frontiers, these operations cause resistance movements across the world. This article identifies and documents 24 cases of resistance against such operations. It presents the first comprehensive database and analysis of HMS related ecological distribution conflicts.

La Via Campesina has revalorized agrarian politics, transformed knowledge politics, and co-constructed the field of Critical Agrarian Studies. It has shown the important role of agrarian movements in anti-capitalist struggles and the radical reimagination and construction of a positive future. The significance of LVC is found not in the shrinking numerical size of farming populations or in agriculture’s dwindling macroeconomic contributions to national economies, in relative terms, but in the political heft of what it represents in terms of an alternative future that is so different from the current agrarian world.

Critical Agrarian Studies has three actual and aspirational interlocking features which together connect the worlds of academic research and practical politics: it is politically engaged, pluralist and internationalist. These features also defined the older generation of agrarian studies that gave birth to the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) 50 years ago, in 1973. Within a decade or so of the journal's inauguration, the agrarian world had been transformed radically amid neoliberal globalization. An altered world did not render agrarian studies less relevant; on the contrary, it has become even more so, but within a different context in which political engagement, pluralism and internationalism develop new meanings and manifest in new ways.

In my reflections of the 2004 Editorial I wrote with Smitu Kothari, I first look at what I consider to be the salient points of our original text. I then move onto underline what I think we need to be even more vigilant about today as we consider who has the ‘right’ to development.

There is an extensive literature demonstrating a positive link between export diversification and economic growth. In parallel, the resource curse thesis posits export concentration as an important mechanism curtailing growth in mineral-rich countries. Our analysis contributes to this literature by empirically investigating the interaction between oil dependence captured by the share of oil rents in GDP and export diversification and economic growth for Sudan. We do this with the help of a VAR model using annual data between 1960 and 2018. In comparison to earlier studies, our dataset covers also Sudan’s post-oil boom period, which coincided with a substantial drop in oil dependence after the 2011 secession of South Sudan. We find that oil rents appear to have a statistically significant and negative effect on export diversification, although contemporaneously rather than in the long-term. However, we find no evidence of a statistically significant impact of either oil dependence or export diversification on economic growth, as suggested by the resource curse hypothesis.

An emerging narrative on social media challenges the premise that the repertoire against immigrants is caused by xenophobia. We identify and propose the phenomenon of co-opted marginality or the claims of being victimized by dominant groups that are not conventionally at the margin. We examine how a controlled media environment in Singapore influences citizens ( n = 36) who claim co-opted marginality when expressing anti-immigrant sentiments online. We further investigate the role of the social media techno-structure in encouraging interactions with this discourse. Contrary to prior literature, we find that social media affordances, such as curation and identification, can discourage citizens from actively engaging with prejudicial and discriminatory language while facilitating the emergence and maintenance of discursive strategies such as co-opted marginality, which conform to contextual normative constraints.

While land registration may increase the sense of security amongst landholders and provide a mechanism for resolving boundary disputes, its interaction with social, political-economic and ecological dynamics can actually generate conflicts by creating new opportunities by which some actors can assert claims or expand their landholdings, often at the expense of others. Conflicts over land cannot be understood without understanding the local dynamics with which they are intertwined. Drawing from case studies in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, this paper shows that, despite land registration and certification, there are widespread conflicts within and between households and state authorities regarding the usufruct of individual and communal lands. The paper argues that conflicts over land are complex and political and are linked to and embedded in the processes of commercialization, as well as in local social processes and power relations. These, in turn, influence and are shaped by the political economy of local governance and land administration processes, particularly in relation to the implementation of land registration. The paper highlights that land conflicts are attributed to a range of issues, including not only the challenges of governance in land registration but also population growth, commercialization, urbanization, inheritance and gender inequality, all of which intersect with corrupt land administration systems.

This handbook provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive overview of global land and resource grabbing. Global land and resource grabbing has become an increasingly prominent topic in academic circles, among development practitioners, human rights advocates and in policy arenas. Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing sustains this intellectual momentum by advancing methodological, theoretical and empirical insights. It presents and discusses resource grabbing research in a holistic manner by addressing how the rush for land and other natural resources, including water, forests and minerals, is intertwined with agriculture, mining, tourism, energy, biodiversity conservation, climate change, carbon markets and conflict. The handbook is truly global and interdisciplinary, with case studies from the Global South and Global North, and chapter contributions from practitioners, activists and academics, with emerging and Indigenous authors featuring strongly across the chapters. The handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian studies, development studies, critical human geography, global studies and natural resource governance.

The article makes the case for a distinctive intellectual tradition of the industrial policy paradigm to examine state strategies in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it outlines three key lessons for political economy scholarship: first, it points to the need to study complementary institutions and the longer-term horizon in political cycles; second, it notes that scholars must seek innovative methodologies in examining sectoral development; and, third, it calls for a rethinking of state capacity in the new phase of globalisation, marked by strategic competition and neo-mercantilism. In so doing, the article opens a new research agenda for the next generation of scholars focussed on how industrial policy might help–or fail–to promote the creation of new comparative advantages and the advancement of internationally competitive firms and sectors, and, importantly, to deliver better quality of life for citizens in most of the Global South.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) are concentrations of urban economic activity where businesses start-up, innovate, grow, and create opportunities for other businesses. Successful cases of EE in cities in the global South call for a contextualisation of the framework to those challenging conditions. We argue that their success results from their vitality, defined by growth and reputation, density and diversity of actors, networks coordinated on trust and resilience. We operationalised the concept of vitality and the EE key factors to search for processes that generate vitality. We grounded the study on the case of Yaba in Nigeria, which figures prominently as a growing ICT EE in Africa. We found three key processes (motivation, compensation, and mobilisation) develop vitality and are intersected by informality and trust. While one single study cannot claim representativeness, attention to these processes can guide EE promotion policies in the global South to gain effectiveness.

We discuss the sanctions against Russia from three perspectives: legal, economic, and political. The sanctions fit into a trend towards recomprehensivation and the use of autonomous rather than multilateral sanctions. We highlight (a) sanction innovation and lasting changes in the EU sanctions domain, (b) the determinants and economic dynamics of sanctions that are important for an intermediate evaluation of this case, and (c) the uncertainty of the ultimate political outcome of large-scale economic sanctions. The case suggests that autonomous sanctions are and will remain a central response to serious violations of international law.

This working paper analyses the interaction between economic and political variables paying special attention to how this interaction develops over time. We use an innovative approach to sanctions that provides a dynamic, forward-looking, perspective and deals with the economic and political outcome of sanctions simultaneously. We use Impulse Response Functions to report the main results of a comprehensive set of unrestricted Vector Auto Regression models that we use to analyse how negative oil and gas shocks impact on the economy and politics in Russia and Iran in order to find out differences and agreements between those cases. In both cases we find that the limitation of energy rents can improve political conditions in the short to medium term, but also that the beneficial impact of sanctions is limited as both economic and political behaviour adjust when time passes by.

This article explores the emergence of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, highlighting its strengths but also some tensions discernible at its advent. From 1912, Economic Journal, the disciplinary gold standard, was published under Cambridge editorial control: first, by Keynes himself, then through successive long-serving panels of Cambridge heterodox economists. The first significant success of the locally enacted, externally inspired, neoclassical campaign to displace heterodox traditions in Cambridge economics was the relocation of Economic Journal to Oxford in 1976; comprehensive neoclassical domination in the Faculty was enforced in the following decades. The launch of the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1977 was a definitive marker in the survival and subsequent evolution of heterodox economics, not least because it was published from Cambridge, the undisputed original habitat of modern heterodox economics. The initiative was catalyzed by the apprehension of a prescient group of Cambridge young Turks that heterodox, left-oriented research would henceforth be excluded from Economic Journal. Notwithstanding the subsequent purges of all non-mainstream traditions from the Cambridge Faculty of Economics, the new theoretically and policy-oriented journal has flourished as an open, integrating forum linking diverse strands of post-Keynesian and heterodox economics and economists globally, but also notably within Cambridge itself.

Protection in the region has rapidly become a favoured durable solution to refugee situations and the hallmark of all current policies. These initiatives reflect changes in humanitarian approaches that have taken place over the past decades as the focus has shifted towards the resilience of crisis-affected communities and the need to enable their self-reliance. Despite the strong logic that this change will bring about more dignified solutions, the approach is easily instrumentalized. This instrumentalization is particularlyevident where resilience humanitarianism meets securitymigration politics. This paper focuses on the efforts of the European Union and a number of its member states to advance so-called protection in the region. The paper reviews the characteristics of these policies, highlights a number of risks and defines some known and lesser known implications of this approach.

Recent warfare in Eastern DRC, especially since 2015, is marked by violence inspired by ‘race’ narratives. Identity politics around ‘race’ is used to legitimise ‘expressive’ or reprisal-oriented violence against ‘Hamitic’ or ‘Tutsi’ minorities. The case of the Banyamulenge of South Kivu is examined in this article. Following Autesserre, we show that one-dimensional narratives – in this case of ‘race’ – tend to over-simplify the dynamics of political violence. Anti-Hamitic racism is derived from colonial ideas around race hierarchies, and has resulted in systematic killings of Banyamulenge civilians in what resembles a ‘slow genocide’. Expressive violence has, in turn, produced a lack of concern for the plight of Banyamulenge civilians among the military, humanitarians, media, scholars and NGOs. Given armed alliances between local Maimai forces, Burundian and Rwandan opposition and the DRC army, such ‘race’ narratives cruelly legitimise violence against civilians from ‘Tutsi’ communities, associated by neighbouring communities with Rwanda. Resultant displacement, starvation and killing of Banyamulenge civilians in this context amount to an on-going, slow-moving genocide. As the COVID-19 crisis unrolls, the decolonisation of identity politics in Eastern DRC, and in South Kivu in particular still seems very remote.

This paper provides an empirical classification of migration-related diversities in 166 European cities. The local turn in migration studies has shown that migration-related diversity may take varied forms in different cities. Our understanding of how and why cities differ is lagging behind the wealth of existing conceptualisations. This is partly because most studies look only at one kind of city, in particular, superdiverse global cities. This paper takes a systematic inductive approach to map the diversity of migration-related diversities in urban setting and understand the reasons behind such variations. Applying quantitative classification methods to European cities in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, we search for a new meaningful classification of the urban diversity configurations based on measures of volume, variety and spread of migration-related diversity. Five empirical clusters of cities of migration are found: superdiverse cities, migrant minority cities, new diversity cities, low-migration cities and non-diverse cities. Subsequently, we develop a better qualitative understanding of these clusters by examining typical cities, their economic positioning, migration history, their policy and political structures, as well as their social and geographical position. A thorough classification, we argue, is necessary to have a more differentiated view of the existing urban diversities and go beyond one-size-fits-all solutions for urban governance of migration-related diversity.

Throughout the world, we recognise a tendency for civic space to be limited by governments and private sector actors. A common reason is to reduce the advocacy pressure of civil society groups on their interests. But the issue seems to be more complex than just a tendency of ‘shrinking civic space’ which is undermining development. We see the influence of historical latency on civic agency and actors within socio-political processes, contributing to a renaissance of nationalisms as being a key problem. The question arises how civic agency is deployed to counteract these initiatives, and how latent civic resistance is being mobilised. A framework of civic-driven change is applied to analyse the political potential of these forces, and in this way also to ‘interrogate’ civic space. Is this really a useful tool for analysing opportunities for social resistance, or is it rather a way to depoliticise civil society discourse?

This concluding chapter summarizes the key findings of the individual chapters. It recaps the diverse conceptualizations of civic space used, as well as the restrictions and civil society responses identified. The chapter concludes with reflections on other perspectives not elaborated in this particular volume and on potential agendas for future research.

Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de-valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti-capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian-centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement-building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.

The most relevant part of a discussion is not what is discussed but what cannot be spoken of. The real taboos are those for which it is taboo to call them taboos. The status quo defines itself as non-ideological while denouncing any challenge to itself as radical. Therefore the column ‘De blinde vlek’ frames the framers, politicizes the status quo and articulates what is not heard of. In this article, we assume antisemitism as a form of discrimination and racism. Combating antisemitism requires awareness, understanding and an approach of diversity inclusion. Unfortunately, the National Coordinator for Countering Antisemitism (NCAB) in The Netherlands sees this primarily as a security problem. And that is counterproductive.

Objectives: To aid the design of nutrition interventions in low- and middle-income countries undergoing a nutrition transition, this study examined behavioural and environmental risk factors associated with childhood overweight and obesity in urban Indonesia. Design: Body height and weight of children were measured to determine BMI-for-age Z-scores and childhood overweight and obesity status. A self-administered parental survey measured socio-economic background, children’s diet, physical activity, screen time and parental practices. Logistic and quantile regression models were used to assess the association between risk factors and the BMI-for-age Z-score distribution. Setting: Public primary schools in Central Jakarta, sampled at random. Participants: Children (n 1674) aged 6–13 years from 18 public primary schools. Results: Among the children, 31·0 % were overweight or obese. The prevalence of obesity was higher in boys (21·0 %) than in girls (12·0 %). Male sex and height (aOR = 1·67; 95 % CI 1·30, 2·14 and aOR = 1·16; 95 % CI 1·14, 1·18, respectively) increased the odds of being overweight or obese, while the odds reduced with every year of age (aOR = 0·43; 95 % CI 0·37, 0·50). Maternal education was positively associated with children’s BMI at the median of the Z-score distribution (P = 0·026). Dietary and physical activity risk scores were not associated with children’s BMI at any quantile. The obesogenic home food environment score was significantly and positively associated with the BMI-for-age Z-score at the 75th and 90th percentiles (P = 0·022 and 0·023, respectively). Conclusions: This study illustrated the demographic, behavioural and environmental risk factors for overweight and obesity among primary schoolchildren in a middle-income country. To foster healthy behaviours in primary schoolchildren, parents need to ensure a positive home food environment. Future sex-responsive interventions should involve both parents and children, promote healthy diets and physical activity and improve food environments in homes and schools.

This working paper deals with the comparatively low levels of trade in the MENA region with a focus on the impact of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The methodological focus is on the application of the gravity model for international trade. We provide an innovative systematic review that does not only use the standard approach (search engine search) but also identifies primary studies by means of expert interviews. We identify 118 studies of potential relevance. We identify best practices and review estimates on trade potential. In terms of citations reported in Google Scholar a study by Arnon, Spivak and Weinblatt (published in World Economy 1996) is the most influential paper on this topic. The last year for which a trade potential estimate according to our systematic review is available is 1999. This paper fills this gap by providing estimates for the year 2019. We first replicate, extend, and update the study Arnon, Spivak and Weinblatt taking best practices as identified by the systematic review into account. Based on the best practice identified in the systematic review we estimate a panel PPML gravity model for 76 countries and the years 1991-2019 inclusive. Next, we use two alternative approaches to estimate the intra MENA trade potential that could be reaped as a consequence of a geopolitically more stable and open Middle East. In the year 2019 this ‘pot of gold’ in percent of intra MENA trade amounts to 10% to 54% (import based) and 21% to 48% (export based), respectively. These estimates are lower than those reported in the earlier literature. The conclusion is that an economically significant trade potential still exists.

In recent years, a great interest in the social dynamics of access to land and livelihoods across Africa, especially that of youth, has emerged in the context of increased competing demands for land and youth employment challenges. Research on land issues in Ethiopia tends to focus on documenting how small and fragmented landholdings have become or on how rural people adapt to these land constraints, often focusing on the application of other agricultural inputs. As a result, studies have rarely focused on the evolving dynamics of access to land. Based on fieldwork in Ethiopia, this paper explores whether and how land is accessed, especially by the rural youth, under the prevailing context of narrowing access to land and the implications of this for rural migration. The paper demonstrates that young people are less likely than their parents’ generation to be able to access land independently, suggesting generational patterns of differentiation around land access and livelihood trajectory. It demonstrates that currently there are very limited opportunities for the rural youth to gain access to land except through land inheritance and gifts from their parents. But even these long-standing land distribution practices appear unsustainable. As the prospect of gaining access to land has become more challenging, young people are increasingly engaging in labour migration to find work elsewhere. Employment opportunities are, however, limited and unevenly distributed. In light of this, key issues that policymakers should be concerned with include improving rural youth's access to farmland and employment opportunities. This point is important vis à vis the government's recent drive to facilitate the acquisition of large expanses of farmland in various areas of the country by large investors and local elites in the form of long-term leases to establish plantations, thus reducing the amount of land which the rural youth can potentially access.

This article explores the factors and mechanisms that underpin aspirations to stay in situations where migration could be beneficial. To do so, this article proposes a spatial–temporal comparative framework and explains aspirations to stay through the notion of relative endowment, which reveals a positive assessment of what people have, despite the awareness of social inequalities. Empirically, the article focuses on a rural town in northern Brazil that has experienced a stagnating economy since the 1990s, where young adults express aspirations to stay. Non-economic factors such as closeness to nature, family, and friends not only encourage staying, but make young people feel endowed in relation to a perceived stressful work-centered urban life. The proposed framework reveals that the overall negative perspectives on the town’s present are congruous with aspirations to stay because of young people’s positive feelings about the town’s past and future. In fact, hope plays an important role in shaping aspirations to stay. This article shows the value of considering people’s perceptions of past, present, and future and how they influence aspirations to stay, and migrate.

This paper examines the challenges and opportunities faced by critical agrarian scholars in and from the Global South. We argue that despite the historical and structural limitations, the critical juncture of convergence of crises and renewed interest in agrarian political economies offers an opportunity for fostering a diverse research agenda that opens space for critical perspectives about, from and by the Global South, which is mostly absent in mainstream scholarship dominated by the Global North. We also propose doing so by enhancing solidarity to transform injustices within academia and other spaces of knowledge production and dissemination. To develop the argument, first, we reflect on the multiplicity of crises in rural areas and the changing character of social struggles, as well as the interlinkages between environmental crises and the re-emergence of critical agrarian studies that are reshaping the agrarian question. Then, we discuss the implications and conditions of the political agenda carried out by a scholar-activist movement working on agrarian studies from the Global South. Drawing on our experience as the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS), we conclude by proposing three ways forward for enhancing solidarity through networks of scholar-activists: knowledge accessibility, cooperative organization, and co-production of knowledge.

Mobile scholarship has highlighted the embeddedness of mobile media practices within power hierarchies and sociostructural conditions. We enrich the critical approach by examining how trust, as a future-oriented disposition that deals with uncertainty and social vulnerability, conditions mobile practices and vice versa. We interviewed 29 Syrian refugees residing in the Netherlands, examining how different levels of vulnerability and uncertainty in refugees’ experiences shape mobile use and non-use. We found that low vulnerability–low uncertainty situations were associated with habitual, everyday use; low vulnerability–high uncertainty corresponded to anxiety-expunging non-use; high vulnerability–low uncertainty influenced harm-mitigating mobile practices that sometimes acquiesced to hierarchies; and high vulnerability–high uncertainty circumstances incited radical forms of dependence and collaboration between mobile users. We posit that this framework is not limited to refugee contexts, but mobile-mediated relationships in general. We underscore the importance of mobile scholarship in understanding and offering solutions to contemporary global crises of distrust.

There has been a proliferation of readmission agreements and voluntary return programmes between the EU, its members and third countries, in which non-state actors play an increasing role. Based on the case of return to Nigeria, this article develops a discursive account of human security conditions in Nigeria to identify the changes and continuities over time in the diverse representations of what constitutes conditions suitable for a safe, dignified return. Our study shows that discourses in favour of return to Nigeria, despite nuances and shifts over time, have remained predominantly and persistently focused on economic, political, individual and community security and entirely overlook the growing challenges of food and environmental (in)security—hence failing to fully consider conditions constituting ‘safe return’ or nonrefoulement. Our findings challenge what is discursively constructed as ‘safe’ in return policies and practices and suggest that durable policy solutions require paying attention to multidimensional human security conditions.

Due to rapid urbanisation, food systems in sub-Saharan African cities are increasingly under pressure. Through the lens of a foodshed, this paper quantitatively analyses the spatial extent of the food provisioning area for consumers of different socio-economic status in Kampala (Uganda). Based on a primary dataset of surveys with households and food vendors, we map the foodshed by registering where consumers obtain their food, and the origin of where it is grown. We show that 50% of the food consumed in the city originates from within a 120 km proximity to Kampala, including 10% from within the city itself. At present, urban agricultural activities are twice as important as international imports for the urban food provision. Established, high-income urban dwellers have a more local foodshed due to their broad participation in urban agriculture, while low-income newcomers rely heavily on retailers who source food from rural Uganda. ispartof: npj Urban Sustainability vol:3 issue:1 ispartof: location:England status: published

While community vitality is of increasing importance, it remains understudied. This study explores community vitality in informal settlements by turning to the concept of frugal practices, defined as activities to develop and implement low-cost robust solutions that address communities' needs within resource-constrained contexts. Based on literature and case study analysis in Nairobi, we define community vitality as dynamic relationships between residents and other local actors to cope with uncertainty and to meet community goals. The study finds that community vitality in informal settlements is indicated by strong bonding among community actors searching for affordable practices to overcome resource constraints. The study introduces three types of community vitality. Poverty-driven community vitality plays a crucial role in survival but is likely to offer low levels of community control and poor-quality services. Robust community vitality offers informal settlers more control, but opportunities remain isolated within the confines of informality. Dynamic community vitality enables the improvement of living and working conditions in strong and open partnerships. We recommend upgrading practitioners to acknowledge and support robust and dynamic community vitality. The challenge lies in dealing with poverty-driven community vitality, which requires addressing power abuse and poor-quality services while maintaining frugal functionalities.

This paper investigates how a multinational enterprise (MNE) engages in frugal business model innovation to find the optimal balance between value creation and value capture in resource-constrained contexts in sub-Saharan Africa. Using qualitative content analysis, we analyse the case of Community Life Centres (CLC), a primary healthcare innovation developed by Royal Philips N.V., a multinational technology organisation headquartered in The Netherlands. Our findings show that an MNE can innovate by developing multiple iterations of the same business model—customising it to different geographical markets. Some aspects of the business model remain static, while others are dynamic. In this regard, the innovation process in a resource-constrained service sector is pegged on the financing model, and target markets are adjusted based on financial opportunities available, while the value proposition and costing mechanisms remain relatively static. This paper contributes new insights to the frugal innovation and business model innovation literature.

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbates the existing insecurities of sex workers. This paper asks: What are sex workers’ everyday experiences of (in)security? And: How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced these? Methods We engage with these questions through collaborative research based on semi-structured interviews carried out in 2019 and 2020 with sex workers in The Hague, the Netherlands. Results Revealing a stark mismatch between the insecurities that sex workers’ experience and the concerns enshrined in regulation, our analysis shows that sex workers’ everyday insecurities involve diverse concerns regarding their occupational safety and health, highlighting that work insecurity is more multi-faceted than sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Widespread employment and income insecurities for sex workers are exacerbated for transwomen and male sex workers. Their legal liminality is enabled not only by the opaque legal status of sex work in the Netherlands, but also by the gendering of official regulation. The COVID-19 pandemic made visible how the sexual and gender norms that informally govern sex workers’ working conditions intersect with hierarchies of citizenship, complicating access to COVID-19 support, particularly for migrant sex workers. Conclusions Sex work regulation in the Netherlands leaves workers in a limbo—not without obligations and surveillance, yet, without the full guarantee of their labour rights. Policy Implications To effectively address sex workers’ insecurities, a shift in regulation from its current biopolitical focus to a labour approach is necessary. Besides, public policy and civil society actors alike need to address the sex industry’s harmful social regulation through hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race.

The editors set out what the book seeks to trouble and what we are troubled by when speaking about feminist methodologies. We highlight the commonalities and differences across the book showcasing the many methodologies feminism has inspired and shaped. We delve into the patterns we saw woven across the chapters and the major themes that emerge in the book. We reflect on what we learned, what surprised, and what delighted us, as well as the ways in which the creative tensions and the inevitable silences invited us to reflect on what we could not do, the queer art of failure that is also part of our feminist method.

Recent studies of the liberal international order have tended to use a crisis-laden vocabulary to analyse US withdrawal from multilateral institutions and Chinese initiatives to create new institutions. In these analyses, the consequences of such a crisis for developing countries are largely overlooked because of the greater emphasis that is placed on the role of great powers in the international system. We argue that more attention should be paid to the position of developing countries in the liberal international order and that the effects of the presumed crisis for those countries should be studied. The articles in this thematic issue focus on a variety of topics related to the places occupied by developing countries in the international order.

Amid growing concerns regarding how the COVID-19 crisis is derailing the important gains made in advancing gender equality and women empowerment over the years, calls to integrate gender perspectives in ‘building back better’ from the pandemic have been heightened (Azcona et al., 2021; OHCHR, 2021). These calls are not new but have been a staple of discourses around recovery and reconstruction across different contexts marked by disaster, conflict and other forms of crises. Popularised by former US President Bill Clinton in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, ‘build back better’ has since been a normative principle adopted by the international humanitarian community (Clinton, 2006). It denotes creating a new state of normalcy: that is, rebuilding is no longer thought of as bouncing back but bouncing forward to a new and improved state. What a ‘better’ transformation looks like is of course a matter of interpretation and is highly contentious. In this article, I focus on how gender figures in imaginations of building a ‘better’ post-pandemic future. To do so, I draw on insights from previous research on women’s experiences of post-disaster reconstruction in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan and highlight opportunities and challenges in achieving the transformation desired in attempts to rebuild from the pandemic, focussing on the notion of care.

Unfree labour has been central to the Indian tea industry’s ‘business model’ since its establishment under British colonial rule. In this paper, we investigate forms of unfree labour in south Indian tea plantations based on a mixed methods study. Conceptualizing unfree labour in a multi-dimensional way our analysis brings to the fore how economic and social coercions that work on tea workers’ desire to guarantee their household’s daily and generational reproduction enable companies to control workers’ time, that way facilitating profit making in the global tea industry. Gender ideologies and hierarchies normalize these coercions for women workers. They translate into gendered obstacles to exit plantation employment and lead to long working hours for low pay. At the same time, we show that the desire of women and men to secure their families’ present and future livelihood also triggers and fuels unfree workers’ resistance.

For more than a century, tobacco has been a key source of export revenues for both Zimbabwe and Malawi, and, in the past 30 years, production has expanded to parts of Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. The crop continues to be the main livelihood option for millions of citizens in southern Africa, an important source of income and rural employment and one of the few industries in which the region commands a large share of the global market. Combined, exports are almost equivalent to those of Brazil, the world’s largest tobacco exporter. Despite this sizeable footprint, tobacco has been relatively neglected in the literature on development trajectories and the political economy of the region.

How trade affects environmental emissions has generated heterogeneous results over the years. This is due to empirical ambiguities that are endemic in the literature. In order to evaluate and explain the discrepancy in the literature, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 88 empirical studies published until 2018. Our results show that trade contributes to environmental emissions after controlling for publication bias and heterogeneity. In explaining the heterogeneous results across the primary studies, our findings largely suggest the estimated elasticities depend systematically on the estimation characteristics, the choice of pollutants and the publication characteristics of the primary studies. Accounting for heterogeneity, the result remains robust only for CO2 emissions compared to SO2. Overall, the trade elasticity of emissions effect remains robust when we decompose the analyses for different groups of countries, however, the emissions-content of trade is more pronounced for developed compared to developing countries.

In the period after the orthodox neoclassical group took control of the Faculty and the Department of Applied Economics, the teaching (and teachers) and research (and researchers) on radical development economics and development studies steadily moved out to other institutional locations in the university. By the mid-1990s, this process of exile to the periphery had been completed. This effectively undermined the existence of a branch of the subject that had been prominent in Cambridge at the university and later at faculty levels since its inception in the 1920s. The engagement with “development” over the past century can be roughly divided into three distinct, though overlapping historical eras: first, the Colonial-Imperial, 1920s–1940s; second, Decolonisation, Third World National Development, 1950s–1970s; and third, Neoliberal Globalisation, 1980s onwards. Each era had its distinctive features which reflect changing political and intellectual imaginations, programme objectives and substantive academic orientation, cultural ethos and institutional dimensions within which the demand and supply sides of development teaching were handled. Having negotiated and survived the vicissitudes of the late period of empire and then of the confused imperial hangover, teaching on development made a recovery from the turbulence of the era of decolonisation, though there was a continual reassessment by the ODA of the utility of such training in the context of rapidly changing economic and political relations between the UK and the ex-colonies; and on the part of the university concerned about standards and profiling and the push towards academic professionalisation in place of the old style ‘training’ mission increasingly characterised as anachronistic. This led the university to accept the initiative of younger academic staff, of launching a new M.Phil in Development Studies in the mid-1970s, with funding not from the ODA but the SSRC, with the longstanding Diploma in Development Studies running in parallel. The period from the early 1970s till the mid-1980s witnessed a remarkable upswing in the demand for development teaching, in the diploma, the M.Phil and the PhD programmes in the Faculty—but then the climate first turned unfriendly and then hostile in the Faculty of Economics, and the phase ended with the closure, in 1995, of the M.Phil programme started in the Faculty in 1977; development studies was moved out and relocated in the Department of Land Economy till 2012, when, in view of the sustained strength of development teaching and research, the now flourishing Centre of Development Studies was established with its own M.Phil and PhD programmes. A bizarre paradox emerges from the narrative: the accumulated and accomplished heterodox and multidisciplinary teaching and research capacities in Development Studies/Economics are virtually eliminated from the Faculty by the orthodox group, and the time frame over which this expulsion takes place, roughly 1980–1995, is precisely the period where development issues dramatically come to occupy the foreground in global economic policy discourse, matched by a huge expansion in the demand for taught and research degrees in development, inducing a matching supply response in most major universities, including the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London; in contrast, the Faculty of Economics in Cambridge decided to go the opposite way, thus highlighting the ideological basis of this expulsion.