Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Rural Capitalists and Development in Colonial Africa: A Comparative Analysis","authors":"Prince Young Aboagye,&nbsp;Ellen Hillbom,&nbsp;Sascha Klocke","doi":"10.1111/joac.70076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70076","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper explores the emergence and role of rural capitalists in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa by comparing three peasant-based economies: Bechuanaland, the Gold Coast and Tanganyika. Using social tables, we estimate the population and income shares of better earning agricultural producers and assess their impact on rural inequality and development. We find that rural capitalists in each colony adapted their economic strategies to local ecological, economic and institutional contexts, leading to varied outcomes in terms of economic development and income differentiation. In Bechuanaland, capital-intensive cattle production fuelled exclusionary growth and deepening polarization. In the Gold Coast, early inclusive gains from cocoa cultivation gave way to rising inequality. In Tanganyika, smallholder expansion in coffee production yielded more broadly shared benefits. By shifting attention from aggregate commercialization to the distributional dynamics among farmers, the paper shows how different forms of accumulation shape rural development outcomes and the limits of market-led transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70076","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Agrarian Question in the Web of Life","authors":"A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi","doi":"10.1111/joac.70088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70088","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;\u0000 &lt;span&gt;Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital&lt;/span&gt; &lt;span&gt;Jason W. Moore&lt;/span&gt; &lt;span&gt;London and New York&lt;/span&gt;: Verso. &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt; (First published in 2015). pp. 352 + xxxiii. US$39.95. ISBN 978-1804298329&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 1988, James O'Connor founded the journal &lt;i&gt;Capitalism Nature Socialism&lt;/i&gt;. Reflecting a time in which radical environmental movements were rapidly growing around the world, as typified by &lt;i&gt;Die Grünen&lt;/i&gt;, West Germany's Green Party founded in 1980, O'Connor sought to map out a way in which diverse social movements around the environment, feminism and pacificism could be brought together around a rejuvenated, ecological, Marxism. In the early 1990s, John Bellamy Foster began his project of excavating Marx's ecology, publishing his first important paper in &lt;i&gt;Capitalism Nature Socialism&lt;/i&gt; and, over the course of 35 years, establishing that Marx clearly demonstrated his rigorous attention to capitalism's ecology. This was evident even in the young Marx. In &lt;i&gt;The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;span&gt;1974&lt;/span&gt;: 328; orig. 1844), Marx wrote that ‘man is a part of nature … Man lives from nature; ie, nature is his body and he must maintain continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die’. Humans maintain their dialogue with nature through labour, which&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;With nature providing the material means of life and (some of the) tools needed to access those material needs, the production of goods and the reproduction of the species resulted in energy and materials being appropriated by humans as use-values to satisfy human needs and generating a material by-product, waste. Thus, as Marx (&lt;span&gt;1975&lt;/span&gt;; orig. 1845) wrote, ‘the first historical act’ is ‘the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself’. However, Marx is exceedingly clear that ‘labour is &lt;i&gt;not the source&lt;/i&gt; of all wealth. &lt;i&gt;Nature&lt;/i&gt; is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power’ (Marx &lt;span&gt;1970&lt;/span&gt;: 13, orig. 1875, emphasis in original). Consequently, over the course of his life, Marx was reasonably consistent that nature and social relations were not independent of each other; rather, they co-evolve: ‘the production of life … appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other hand as a social relation’ (Marx &lt;span&gt;1975&lt;/span&gt;). Thus, the ‘“unity of man with nature” has always existed … just like the “struggle” of man with nature’ (Marx &lt;span&gt;1977&lt;/span&gt;: 174). In this way, Marx's dialectical conception was that the way in which human society relates to the natural world makes life and society possible and that this is in turn shaped by the natural world itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The development of capitalism ruptures the relationship of human society to the natural world because capitalism commodif","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70088","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics by Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold, Oxford University Press, 2025. 320. $130 cloth. ISBN: 9780198887836.","authors":"Gavin Fridell","doi":"10.1111/joac.70082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70082","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The prestige and impact of trade and global supply chains have taken a hit in the era of President Donald Trump, with the United States—the world's largest economy and consumer market—launching tariff wars across the globe, including on key economic partners like Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union (EU). The growing hostility toward trade among the US right diverges from much of the international right, many of whose leaders—from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India to President Recep Tayyip Edroğan in Turkiye—have merged right-wing politics with enthusiasm for global trade and investment. It has also spurred support for ‘free trade’ among US liberals, with polls suggesting Democratic support for free trade policies reached 74% in 2025, jumping from 43% in 2024 (Kafura and Dong &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;More than just a temporary blip, North American polls generally indicate growing support among liberals &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; progressives for free trade over the past two decades, despite the central role played by the Left in the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s (Wolfe and Acquaviva &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;; Friedhoff &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). Major international liberal institutions, moreover, like the World Bank and the WTO, long ardent promoters of free trade, have continued to expound its virtues while emphasizing its role in facilitating the formation and expansion of Global Value Chains (GVCs) (or global supply chains), credited with improving efficiency, spurring technological innovation, driving growth and, ultimately, fighting poverty.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Seeking to confront and counter this trend, Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold, in their new book, &lt;i&gt;Capitalist Value Chains&lt;/i&gt;, provide a rich and detailed exploration of GVC thinking today (Bair &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;; Ponte et al. &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;). They note that much of the initial research into GVCs in the 1970s and 1980s had a critical view of value chains, often rooted in the World Systems Approach (WSA), distinct from much of today's more celebratory tone. Selwyn and Bernhold chart how original GVC analysis was highly suspicious of capitalist development, concerned with uneven economic development and the limited power of subordinate states to confront transnational capital, and critical of the idea that ‘comparative advantage’ could fight poverty, particularly when advantages were said to lie in low-waged labour, intensified resource extraction and increasing dependence on Northern markets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the years, while critically minded GVC research has continued to explore the roots of poverty and inequality, Selwyn and Bernhold argue the dominant approaches have moved away from structural understandings of how social problems emerge. Instead, they depict them as problems that can be solved if government and ‘lead firms’ (transnational corporations that govern global supply chains through their dominance of investment capital, technology, core market access, patents and intell","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70082","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trapped Under the Orient's Night: Blind-Sourced Child Labour in Contract Tobacco Farming","authors":"Umut Kuruüzüm","doi":"10.1111/joac.70084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70084","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the organisation of child labour under contract farming in Oriental tobacco production in Türkiye's Aegean region. Drawing on long-term fieldwork between July 2022 and July 2025, it argues that the post-2000 transition from state procurement to buyer-driven contracting restructured not only market coordination but also household labour regimes. Taking the household as a differentiated site of gendered and generational labour mobilisation, it demonstrates how contractual obligations are internalised within households and translated into intensified family labour, including children's night-time harvesting work. Under the current contracting scheme, children are effectively blind-sourced into labour within family-based work arrangements: Their work is neither directly contracted nor recognised, yet it is embedded in the execution of contractual demands. In doing so, the paper shows how contracts formalise the incorporation of kinship-based domestic economies into buyer-driven sourcing arrangements, shifting risk and labour costs onto households while obscuring children's labour structurally within supply chain governance and contemporary regimes of contractual accountability.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70084","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Variegated Economies By Jamie Peck, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 392 pp. £64. ISBN: 9780190076931","authors":"Ayan Meer","doi":"10.1111/joac.70083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70083","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;After over 40 years of field-defining research in economic geography, Jamie Peck has published with &lt;i&gt;Variegated Economies&lt;/i&gt; what amounts to both an intellectual memoir and an &lt;i&gt;aggiornamento&lt;/i&gt;—an authoritative update—for the discipline. Though the critical geographer would baulk at the prescriptive suggestion the latter term implies, this volume does in fact offer a roadmap for economic geography, albeit delineated by its ‘characteristically restive, eclectic and diverse theory-culture’, defined as ‘heterodox and pluralistic in spirit as well as in practice […] boldly unbounded and intellectually eccentric.’ (pp. 20–21). For a field that geographer Allen Scott qualified as ‘quarrelsome’ (&lt;span&gt;2000&lt;/span&gt;: 493), the consensus now seems to be, as Peck points out, one of ‘continuing cacophony’, ‘more live-and-let-live than […] active raking over divisions.’ (p. 33).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book is built as a collection of 10 essays, older and newer, which give an insight into Peck's foundational contributions to economic geography. It is an accessible and welcome overview revisiting some of the most discussed work of its author from the last two decades. Peck's synthesis relies on a tightrope walk around the discipline, which he situates alongside critical political economy and heterodox economic studies, presented as different denominations of the same scholarly project.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The reference to religion here, albeit in jest, does however correspond to an important prerogative of Peck's book—its ecumenism. While drawing out tensions and engaging critically with different theoretical and methodological approaches, Peck constantly attempts to build bridges, to pursue a meso-approach, beyond some of the aporiae of the field's debates. &lt;i&gt;Variegated Economies&lt;/i&gt; deploys this programme around two main interconnected topics of theory and method: variegation and conjuncture.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In dealing with variegation, Peck extends a long-standing project in critical economic geography: theorizing capitalism as an inherently uneven and spatially dynamic system. Variegation is central to this endeavour, as a term he uses to analytically grasp the systemic, patterned and politically charged nature of capitalist diversity across space and time. In Peck's formulation, outlined in Chapter 5, variegation refers to the structured heterogeneity of capitalist forms, the way in which different economic models, institutional arrangements and regulatory systems emerge and persist within and because of the broader architecture of global capitalism. Capitalism requires, governs and is reproduced through difference, far from the uniformizing tendencies inherited from stagist modernisation theories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The adjective ‘variegated’ to describe capitalism emerged as a lexical pushback to the popular turn-of-the-century ‘varieties of capitalism’ (VoC hereafter) approach in political economy. Although Peck employed ‘variegation’ for the first time in his writing as ‘a bundle of com","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70083","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism by Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian, Stanford University Press, 2023. 248 pp. $100 (hbk); $25 (pbk/e-book). ISBN: 9781503636316; ISBN: 9781503636903; ISBN: 9781503636910","authors":"Barbara Harriss-White","doi":"10.1111/joac.70087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70087","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;This extraordinary book links global financial capitalism with the life-worlds of poor, rural, Dalit women (formerly untouchable castes) in South India, asking the question if increasing debt emancipates them. The answer is a complex argument, which generates important theoretical and substantive insights by putting that economic question into a social and emotional context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Accelerating from the 1980s, penetrating throughout the world, finance capital has been allowed to transform economies through markets, institutions and motives. Financialisation takes root when profit is increasingly made through finance rather than production or trade. In India, however, financialisation does not replicate market-driven western processes but instead is shaped in different ways by the state. Corporate capital milks access to state-controlled banks, whose lending risks are managed and underwritten politically. This permits valuations by the stock market and rating agencies—also actively managed by the state—to be inflated. These valuations feed back symbiotically into corporate leverage, transforming companies into tradeable financial assets (Bhatia &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;). Gender is missing from this account of state-backed financialisation: By implication, it is a male world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In ‘The Indebted Woman’, Isabelle Guerin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian (henceforth ISV after their first name references in both field and book) explain ‘financialisation with Indian characteristics’ radically differently from the macro perspective outlined above. In large measure, this is due to their innovative method. First, their contribution to the study of financialisation results from a unique two decades of dedicated microlevel village field research in South Arcot district in Tamil Nadu.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Second, ISV push frontiers of cross-disciplinary epistemological perspectives drawing, respectively, on economics, fitness sciences, anthropology and psychology. Third, they enrich inadequate and misleading official data with evidence from the wider literature, field surveys, interviews, intimate ethnography and a small set of precious financial diaries, all of which they treat in a refreshingly self-critical way. Fourth, they focus on women. The book covers and reflects on ‘intimacies and measurement’, ‘kinship debt’, ‘the sexual division of debt’, ‘debt work’, ‘bodily collateral’, ‘debt and love’, ‘human debt’ and the future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book elaborates on increasing financial indebtedness in a context of rocketing costs of living, stagnating real incomes, the commercialisation of microcredit and an increasing tendency for Dalit women to be withdrawn from field-labouring, brick kiln work and rural public works. Spending more hours at home, semisecluded and subject to patriarchal control, their time is increasingly devoted to raising their children: their costly schooling and later caste-embedded marriage alliances where bride price is being replaced by dowry.&lt;s","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70087","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148325036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agricultural Producer Training and Class Differentiation in China","authors":"Qi Zhou,&nbsp;Qifan Ding","doi":"10.1111/joac.70077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70077","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study adopts Marxist class analysis and techno-political perspective as its core framework, drawing on deskilling/reskilling theories to examine four government-led/enterprise-led farmer training programmes and their impact on rural class differentiation amid agricultural capitalization. Historically, the mass-oriented training during the Mao era pursued universal skill empowerment and mitigated rural stratification. In contrast, the shift toward a professional elite-focused model since the reform era has replicated the capitalist division of labour between ‘concept’ and ‘execution’ in agricultural production. Governments implement a classified training strategy, using targeted programmes to shape specialized households into production managers and smallholder households into skilled labourers. Meanwhile, enterprise-led training erodes smallholders' inherent production experience through deskilling by fostering consumers and raw material suppliers that align with capitalist demands, and it develops standardized labourers through targeted reskilling. This process essentially constitutes capital's covert domination through skill restructuring: Skills are fragmented and transformed into tools for capital accumulation and instruments of labour control. With training centred on capital's needs and the inequitable distribution of skills shaped by capital logic, rural class relations have undergone profound reshaping.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70077","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Waves of Sugarcane Commercialisation: Unequal Forms of Exchange in a North Indian Village","authors":"Kunal Munjal,&nbsp;Madhura Swaminathan","doi":"10.1111/joac.70086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70086","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Uttar Pradesh, the largest producer of sugarcane in India, the crop is grown on family farms and marketed under an outgrower model with state regulation. Higher productivity and production from a new ‘wonder’ variety, an expansion of private mills and modernisation of infrastructure has led to a new wave of commercialisation. This paper examines implications for agrarian structure and agrarian relations in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, drawing on secondary sources of data, two rounds of village-level quantitative surveys (2006 and 2023) and insights from qualitative fieldwork (2022–2024). Three findings are of note. First, contrary to the received literature, the sugar boom has not led to a further concentration of landownership. Secondly, while corporate control over mills has grown, it has not led to corporatisation of production. Thirdly, even as absolute incomes rose, returns per hectare varied systematically across socio-economic groups with the highest returns among landowning dominant-caste households. These differences, we argue, arise out of unequal forms of exchange linked to tenancy arrangements and interlinked transactions.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70086","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scale Challenges in Ecological Transitions: Smallholders, State and Enterprises in Southeast China's Tea Sector","authors":"Ziwei Zhang","doi":"10.1111/joac.70040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70040","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Smallholders are commonly viewed as key supporters of ecological agriculture. Paradoxically, in a tea-producing county in Southeast China, local policies aimed at promoting ecological practices failed to engage smallholders and instead ended up favouring large producers. Using Anxi County's pesticide crisis as a case study, this paper analyses barriers to smallholder participation in ecological transitions through a scale framework examining three interrelated sectors: smallholders, agroecosystems, and governance systems. First, smallholder practices are constrained by cross-scale interactions including market forces, landholding patterns and urbanization. Second, scale mismatches between ecological processes and land institutions undermine collective management of shared ecological resources. Third, governing China's multiscale agricultural production system, with its vast number of diverse producers, poses significant challenges in balancing competing interests across different scales. Anxi's case highlights the difficulties of advancing ecological transitions in a smallholder-dominated context.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70040","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Balancing Biodiversity Conservation and Rural Development: Contested Spaces of Regulating Bamboo Shoots in China's Giant Panda National Park","authors":"Fan Li","doi":"10.1111/joac.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article investigates how China's nascent national-park regime reshapes property relations and rural livelihoods through the contested regulation of bamboo-shoot harvesting in Rivercross County's portion of the Giant Panda National Park. Participant observation, in-depth interviews and an analysis of conservation statutes and local archival materials trace different phases of resource governance, from subsistence gathering to market-driven auctions and today's zoning-based bans. Ambiguous boundaries, discretionary enforcement and a state-backed ‘cultivation’ program do not simply dispossess villagers; they carve out a legally grey zone where officials and residents co-produce flexible property arrangements that both meet conservation metrics and keep livelihoods precariously viable. By foregrounding everyday performances of compliance, the study refines green-grabbing debates and shows that China's conservation project advances not through total enclosure but through the productive ambiguity of law and space.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148324466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}