GeoforumPub Date : 2025-05-07DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297
Fidèle Ebia , Rory Horner
{"title":"Colonial threads to made in China: Togo and the restructuring of African print textiles value chains","authors":"Fidèle Ebia , Rory Horner","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>From the colonial era onwards, African print textiles (APT) trade was dominated by a North-South value chain (NSVC), involving production in the Netherlands for distribution and consumption in West Africa and with Togolese ‘Nana-Benz’ traders playing a key role. Yet the dynamics of APT trade have changed in the 21st century as APT manufacturing has shifted to China as part of a South-South value chain (SSVC). Drawing on primary fieldwork in Lomé, Togo, long a hub of APT distribution in West Africa, we analyse the emergence of the SSVC and its characteristics – including the involvement of a newer group of Togolese traders known as Nanettes in a more flexible, trader-driven trade. We argue that the rise of the SSVC has disrupted the monopoly of the lead firm-governed NSVC, which has not been completely replaced, but forced to adapt. The case contributes to emerging discussions of SSVCs, which are mostly focused on opportunities for producers serving new forms of consumption, by showing how SSVCs challenge NSVCs within long-standing Southern end markets and by demonstrating the crucial and changing roles of traders in this context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104297"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143911566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-05-06DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300
Gerald E. Arhin , Pritish Behuria
{"title":"Why do countries invest in geological investigations for minerals? A comparative analysis of contrasting outcomes in Ghana and Rwanda","authors":"Gerald E. Arhin , Pritish Behuria","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Several resource-rich developing countries still have insufficient knowledge of their domestic mineral deposits and have not made sufficient investments in geological surveys. The political geography literature has highlighted how geological investigations form part of a government’s repertoire to extend three-dimensional control over territories. Yet there are few studies – particularly, of African countries – that examine why some countries may invest in geological surveys more than others. This paper adopts a political economy lens to investigate why the Rwandan government has invested more than the Ghanaian government in geological surveys. We combine insights from political settlements analysis (PSA) and the political geography literature to unpack the political economy dynamics underpinning the decisions to invest in geological mapping. Our findings suggest that Ghanaian politics has been characterised by consistent competition between political parties, which have hindered the capacity of ruling elites to maximise control over their territories through prioritising geological mapping. In contrast, Rwanda’s cohesive ruling party has prioritised investing in geological surveys because maximising control over territory is central to preserving its rule. The Rwandan case also highlights how goals of maximising control over subterranean territory, which require long-term investments, are hindered because of conflicting priorities. Instead, Rwanda’s structural vulnerabilities, as well as the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front’s material incentives and conflicting ideological goals, result in the prioritisation of trading DRC’s minerals rather than investing in its own domestic minerals sector.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104300"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-05-06DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298
Mehebub Sahana
{"title":"Hindu nationalism, climate reductionism, and the political ecology of dalits on Char Islands: Does caste matter for climate resilience in India?","authors":"Mehebub Sahana","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding the unequal impacts of climate change is essential, particularly in examining how climate reductionism intersects with subalternism in the Global South and the political ecology of Dalits in South Asia. In this article, I introduce a new perspective by questioning the validity of caste dynamics within the contemporary context of Hindu nationalism, climate reductionism, and climate resilience in India. The primary focus of this article lies in presenting a scholarly argument about the underestimation of caste issues in building climate-resilient societies and how this oversight challenges climate reductionist narratives in both Indian and global contexts. The study centres on three distinct case study locations on char islands in West Bengal, India, where Dalit communities face extreme socio-economic marginalisation, alongside issues of disaster inequalities and climate vulnerability. These dual burdens have introduced a new dimension to their struggle, encompassing issues of identity and citizenship shaped by Brahmanical Hindu nationalist supremacy. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024, I provide evidence to support my argument while advancing the theoretical framework. This article concludes that a critical reassessment of caste dynamics is essential for fostering truly climate-resilient societies in India. The rise of Hindu nationalism and the dominance of Brahmanical forces have exacerbated the marginalisation of Dalits, intensifying their vulnerabilities in the context of climate change. The political ecology of Dalits emerges as a vital area of inquiry within the contemporary climate change discourse, highlighting the profound disparities in disaster resilience and environmental justice in India.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104298"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-30DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290
Katinka Wijsman
{"title":"Accountants of adaptation? Cost benefit analysis and the politics of resilience","authors":"Katinka Wijsman","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The role of expertise in climate adaptation has been widely debated in the field of resilience. Scholars argue that resilience is either a form of technocratic expertise to dealing with complex issues through top-down managerial interventions, or that resilience marks a limit to expert knowledge due to complexity thus indicating that planning is futile; both casting resilience as depoliticizing as a result. However, these works do not adequately grapple with the fact that expertise is not only deployed but also demanded to bring about interventions in the wake of climate change, and the unsettled and unsettling nature of expert knowledge and its production. In this paper, I address the issue of expertise in the making of resilience with special attention to its role in the opening up of political possibilities through facilitating rather than short-circuiting debate and contestation about resilience. Specifically, I look at the practice of Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) in coastal resiliency projects in New York City, showing how this expert practice is used to articulate – and debate – the substantiation of resilience in specific geographical contexts. I argue that CBA gives resilience a practical reality in infrastructural interventions by framing a whole set of quintessentially political questions around scope and valuation, and that CBA is best understood as organizing resilience politics. The search for resilience can be an exercise in democracy – and a politicization of ways of living revolving around the potentiality of future environments – if instead of viewing expertise and ‘the technical’ as something to be minimized we understand it as a site of problematization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104290"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143890600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-30DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296
Ariane Gienger, Melissa Nursey-Bray
{"title":"Towards co-governance: An evaluation of co-management advantages, challenges and ways forward in South Australia","authors":"Ariane Gienger, Melissa Nursey-Bray","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent decades have been marked by a transition from exclusionary to collaborative and community-based conservation. This transition has been underpinned by the aim to enhance the field’s contribution to human coexistence and environmental sustainability. Yet while the language of collaboration is now firmly entrenched in the global conservation rhetoric, collaborations too often remain restricted to community participation in pre-determined programs at local scales. Using South Australia as a case study, we illustrate this restriction and its implications in the context of co-management between the state and Aboriginal nations. Specifically, we draw on co-management legislation, agreements and reports, observations of co-management meetings of the Ngaut Ngaut and Gawler Ranges Parks co-management boards as well as interviews with co-management board and committee members, policy makers and park rangers. We illustrate that collaboration only exists within park management planning and does not extend to the design and administration of the legislative framework under which it occurs. As this restriction disproportionately affects the realisation and realisability Aboriginal nations’ aspirations, we propose a transition from co-management of protected areas to co-governance of the entire framework moving forward. We further highlight similar power and knowledge imbalances within the new conservation paradigm more broadly and make the case for an expansion of current forms of collaboration to conservation policy and practice on all scales.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104296"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143888044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-25DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104291
Guillem Rubio-Ramon
{"title":"Animals that feed nations and nations that feed animals: industrially farmed pigs as nation-building resources in Catalonia","authors":"Guillem Rubio-Ramon","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104291","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104291","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines industrially farmed pigs in Catalonia, a stateless nation within Spain and a major pig meat producer, to expand existing understandings of how animals make nations and how, in turn, nations make animals. The paper accomplishes this by bringing together two seemingly contradictory analytical perspectives on farmed animals: as resources and more than resources for the nation. In doing so, the article argues that pigs become the arena in which rural scarcity is transformed into national (animal) abundance. First, the paper analyses how industrially farmed pigs can be considered resources in the making of today’s Catalonia. This allows us to understand how (1) pigs are made <em>as</em> resources for the nation, enabling rural development strategies, and (2) how they are themselves made <em>through</em> resources for the nation, such as the soy they are fed. This further reveals critical intersections between the resource-oriented and developmental nation-making projects of countries exporting soy and those of Catalonia. As more than resources, the paper examines how pigs and their bodies are impacted and remade by state- and nation-building projects, evidenced, for instance, by increasingly more efficient feeding technologies. Ultimately, this paper contributes to understanding the often overlooked yet critical spaces that industrially farmed animals occupy within the nation, in turn advancing scholarship working towards critical and less anthropocentric conceptualisations of who or what can constitute a resource.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104291"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143874527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-25DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104293
Nicole T. Venker , Kum Jaa Lee , T. Bruce Lauber , Kathryn J. Fiorella
{"title":"Food sovereignty across borders: Fishing among Myanmar refugees in Upstate New York","authors":"Nicole T. Venker , Kum Jaa Lee , T. Bruce Lauber , Kathryn J. Fiorella","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104293","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104293","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores the role of fishing among Myanmar refugees in the United States through the lens of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty emphasizes the rights of people and communities to healthy, culturally meaningful, and ecologically sound food systems, particularly through exercising control over the production, distribution, procurement, and consumption of food (<span><span>Patel, 2009</span></span>, <span><span>Edelman et al., 2014</span></span>, <span><span>Grey and Patel, 2015</span></span>, <span><span>Sachs and Patel-Campillo, 2014</span></span>). Using semi-structured interviews and oral histories, we examine the role of fishing among ethnically diverse refugees from Myanmar residing in three cities in Upstate New York. From providing food amid war in rural Myanmar to enabling emotional healing in spaces of resettlement, our paper shows that the material and affective dimensions of food sovereign practices are shaped by the political economies through which migrants travel. We find that incorporation into neoliberal food systems upon resettlement increases reliance on formal markets and limits refugees’ time for harvesting food from the environment. However, by illustrating the continuity of fishing as a source of joy and social connection, we argue that access to public environmental resources is important for migrants’ ability to exercise meaningful, autonomous relations to food and environment. Additionally, our paper highlights key issues faced by Myanmar refugees in fishing after resettlement to the US, including communication barriers, vulnerability to complex regulations, racial profiling, and cultural differences in fishing and consumptive practices. We argue that these tensions highlight the ways that minority fishers are marginalized in Western resource management systems, which has implications for food sovereignty particularly among those from migrant, and Global South backgrounds.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104293"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143870777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-24DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104292
Hope Steadman
{"title":"Resigned reductionism: Reconceptualising digital imaginaries of automated natural capital","authors":"Hope Steadman","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104292","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104292","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Natural capital accounting is widely adopted in the UK as a means of supporting environmental measurement and management, with digital automation technologies increasingly shaping its practice. Natural capital approaches have been critiqued by geographers for being ontologically reductive and for over-privileging certain technocratic knowledges. Nevertheless, this analysis can overlook environmental practitioners’ awareness of and attempts to address these critiques. This paper therefore makes two interventions. It first analyses what it terms the Automated Natural Capital (ANC) imaginary, exploring how stakeholders involved in the development of an ANC tool articulate, experience and envision it. It finds that such tools are indeed founded upon functional relations with nature, failing to acknowledge alternative knowledges, whilst also black boxing the socio-political logics behind the choice of reductionist valuations. Secondly, however, it identifies how and why stakeholders working at a Scottish rewilding site resign themselves to ANC, deemed as necessary to channel attention and support to nature recovery. It conceptualises this as “resigned reductionism”, understood as affectively co-constituting the ANC imaginary. The paper ends by suggesting that resignation is bound up in promises of the future digital optimisation of ANC, which risks displacing transformational alternatives to an unrealised future. It therefore argues for the wider significance of this concept in contemporary environmental governance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104292"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143870775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-18DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104287
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli
{"title":"Eating like a local: Digital foodscapes, touristification, and gentrification in Paris’s Peer-to-Peer economy","authors":"Pascale Joassart-Marcelli","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104287","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104287","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Enabled by the spread of digital platforms, the so-called “sharing” economy has been transforming urban tourism by promoting peer-to-peer provision of a growing range of hospitality services, going beyond housing accommodations and transportation to include “experiences,” such as neighborhood walks, guided bike rides, cooking classes, food tours, and bar hopping. Many of these services center food as a conduit for meaningful cultural encounters, appealing to tourists hoping to get “off-the-beaten-track” and “eat like locals.” These commodified experiences and their widely circulated digital narratives may contribute to the transformation of everyday urban places, leading to physical, social, and cultural changes that are often uncritically described as gentrification.</div><div>I build upon recent work on <em>touristification</em> and <em>gastrodevelopment</em> to investigate how digital platforms providing touristic food experiences focus on specific neighborhoods and contribute to processes of digital placemaking that may unsettle the everyday life of long-term residents differently. I question the applicability and usefulness of the concept of gentrification to describe such transformations, particularly in sites of mass-tourism and previous gentrification, where typical class-based displacements may not be occurring. Using mixed methods, I analyze the locations and qualitative descriptions of eating and drinking activities promoted by Airbnb Experiences and Viator – the two largest online platforms for booking travel experiences – and distinguish between classic, nostalgic and cosmopolitan digital placemaking narratives, which I map and relate to neighborhood socio-economic characteristics to generate a better understanding of their links to gentrification and other processes of urban change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104287"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143845036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2025-04-18DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104289
Samantha Nelson, Shuji Hisano
{"title":"Othered food spaces in the Anglophone Caribbean","authors":"Samantha Nelson, Shuji Hisano","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104289","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104289","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study aims to contribute to the agri-food discourses on the alterity of food provisioning systems by introducing the concept of <em>othered food spaces</em>. These food spaces serve as coping mechanisms for food provisioning and consumption, developed by marginalised groups either voluntarily or involuntarily in response to systemic discrimination. Utilising qualitative research methods, this study explores othered food spaces in Jamaica through archival research and an ethnographic case study. The data reveal historically rooted othered food spaces, including provision grounds and Maroon food networks, which emerged within the plantation system under British colonial rule. Additionally, the study examines a contemporary example, the House of Dread in Kingston, a food space established by followers of the Rastafarian movement. These food spaces represent alternative food geographies assuming diverse forms with varying rationales under past and present regimes of the global capitalist food system. The findings of this study support critical agri-food scholarship that highlights the diversity and fluidity of alternative food provisioning systems. This research builds upon critical discourses on alternative food geographies by providing evidence of food spaces that depart from normative understandings of what constitutes an alternative food system. In doing so, it expands the discussion to include other stories of alterity beyond the prevailing narratives which centre alternative food geographies primarily as a response to the crises fomented by the industrialisation of food and agriculture in Western food spatialities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104289"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143845035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}