How is Climate Change Changing Agrarian Studies?

Abstract

A range of compelling recent literature highlights how climate change is rewriting the intertwined social and environmental processes that comprise agrarian landscapes. Mainstream reaction has been to double down on technical intensification strategies supplemented by a resolute faith in scientific advancement to reduce vulnerabilities. For critical agrarian studies, however, climate change raises new conceptual and methodological challenges. Has climate change reinforced or undermined existing concepts and frameworks that explain core dynamics of agrarian change? Does agrarian studies as a field of engaged research need to change alongside the climate? In this exchange our contributors consider how anthropocentric climate change requires the field to rethink core analytical categories within agrarian studies. Key questions that the forum addresses include: How does climate change validate and/or challenge the conceptual armoury and normative orientations inherited largely from Marxist-influenced political economy? What new concepts and theoretical influences will prove helpful in orientating agrarian studies within a changing climate? How do we synthesise these with existing frameworks and concerns? And how does this reformulation change our understanding of the forms and content of resistance within agrarian environments?