Converging Social Justice Issues and Movements

Tsegaye Moreda, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Zoe W. Brent, Tsegaye Moreda, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Zoe W. Brent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Converging Social Justice Issues and Movements argues that multiple contemporary converging crises have significantly altered the context for and object of political contestations around agrarian, climate, environmental and food justice issues.

This shift affects alliances, collaboration and conflict among and between state and social forces, as well as within and between social movements. The actual implications and mechanisms by which these changes are happening are, to a large extent, empirical questions that need careful investigation. The majority of the discussions in this volume are dedicated to the issue of responses to the crises both by capitalist forces and those adversely affected by the crises, and the implications of these for academic research and political activist work.

Interdisciplinary in nature, Converging Social Justice Issues and Movements will be of great use to scholars of agrarian politics, as well as climate and environmental justice studies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in Third World Quarterly.

Converging social justice issues and movements: implications for political actions and research

Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Tsegaye Moreda, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas and Zoe W. Brent

ABSTRACT

We argue that the multiple contemporary converging crises have significantly altered the context for and object of political contestations around agrarian, climate, environmental and food justice issues. These shifts affect alliances, collaboration and conflict among and between state and social forces, as well as within and between movements and societies. The actual implications and mechanisms by which these changes are happening are empirical questions that need careful investigation. The bulk of our discussion is dedicated to the issue of responses to the crises both by capitalist forces and those adversely affected by the crises, and the implications of these for academic research and political activist work. More specifically, we explore four thematic clusters, namely (1) class and intersectionality; (2) sectoral and multisectoral issues and concerns; (3) importance of immediate, tactical and concrete issues of working people; and (4) links between national and global institutional spaces and political processes. We know only a little about the questions we framed here, but it is just enough to give us the confidence to argue that these questions are areas of inquiry that deserve closer attention in terms of both academic research and political debates and actions.

Introduction

Agrarian, food and environmental issues across the rural/urban and Global North/South divides have always been intertwined since they are all in part and to varying extents shaped by global capitalism. But the realities of contemporary capitalism have pushed such entanglement to new thresholds, as responses to the multiple and convergent crises especially since 2007/2008 fail to move beyond the logic that caused them in the first place. Two of the defining features of the contemporary conjuncture are a proliferation of natural resource enclosures and climate change politics. These two dynamics are inherently interlinked, but exactly how and with what implications are pressing questions facing scholars and activists today. Hence, this collection brings together some of the initial outcomes of at least three overlapping research initiatives, which have been grappling with such questions, each from different angles.

First is the initiative around rethinking critical agrarian studies in the era of climate change. This was born out of a need to make sense of rapidly changing dynamics of access and control of natural resources conditioned by climate politics. For example, the contemporary global land rush has been fuelled in many cases by the expansion of particular kinds of crops which are increasingly transacted not just in a single commodity chain but in an increasingly expanding and more complex commodity web, a chain of chains, involving what Borras et al.¹ call ‘flex crops’: crops and commodities with multiple and flexible commercial uses. These are crops that are flexibly used for food, animal feed, energy, liquid fuels and other commercial and industrial purposes. Such flexibility allows for production to respond nimbly to shifting market opportunities as well as demands that emerge in response to climate change, ie biofuels, depending on political and economic calculations in the spheres of processing, circulation and consumption.

The focus of this initiative is on the implications, for both academic research and political action, of the convergence of multiple social justice issues around agrarian, food, labour, environmental and climate justice themes. This is partly linked to a large research project tracking the convergence of climate change mitigation and adaptation narratives and how these intersect with land/resource grabbing, with a particular focus on Myanmar and Cambodia in 2014–2018, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).² Later a spin-off action research initiative in Mali and Nigeria in 2018–2020 was funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) with coordination by Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN-International). One of the objectives of these research initiatives is to have a better understanding of the implications of how various social justice movements, including transnational agrarian movements,³ analyse and frame their demands in the era of the global resource rush and climate change politics.

Second, development and policy discourses are increasingly overlapping across agrarian, food, environmental and climate politics. Take for instance the notion of and current programme on Climate-Smart Agriculture as formulated by the World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).⁴ It can be approached as an agrarian, or food, or environmental, or climate policy agenda or research theme, and each one is correct – but only partially. In fact, it is precisely the entanglement of these various sectoral issues that defines a generic ‘climate-smart agriculture’. Because of the far-reaching implications of such policy discourses, international governance instruments related to land, water and forest tenure in the context of the global resource rush have become sites of contestation and highly politicised intervention by social justice movements. One process that has generated a lot of political interest, debate and initiatives on the ground among social movements working on resource politics has been the United Nations Committee for Food Security and Nutrition (CFS) Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs, more popularly known as VGGT) passed in 2012. The authors of contributions to this collection have been engaged in academic and action research around this theme, and some of them have also been deeply engaged in the CFS process itself. There are two important research initiatives from which initial outputs are included here. On the one hand is a large research project funded by IDRC on the Tenure Guidelines and other governance and accountability instruments related to resource politics, with country-level work in Uganda, South Africa, Mali and Nigeria in 2014–2017. This is the basis of the contribution by Franco and Monsalve⁵ in this collection. On the other hand is a research initiative by some of the authors in collaboration with FAO on how the Tenure Guidelines are being thought about amidst initial implementation in Latin America in general, together with two specific country cases: – Guatemala and Colombia – in 2015–2016. This is the basis of the contribution by Brent et al.⁶ in this collection looking at Latin America as a region.⁷

Third, responding to the crises and contradictions of contemporary capitalism, political advocacy campaigns by activist groups and social movements have also been reframing their issues, refocusing their principal targets, recalibrating their demands, readjusting their spaces for political contestation, and dynamically changing the configuration of their coalitions. Even so, the expulsion or displacement of local communities affected by the contemporary global land rush, or their adverse incorporation into whatever emerging capitalist enterprises or neoliberal big nature conservation have come to replace their productive undertaking in those spaces, has radically decreased the level of autonomy and ability of both rural and urban working people to construct or defend their livelihoods. Often they combine multiple sources of income or strategies for self-provisioning in circumstances that are increasingly determined not just by agrarian processes in rural settings, but more broadly.⁸ In this context, the framing of ‘class versus identity politics’ that fuelled vibrant debates in the 1980s and 1990s seems to be outdated and irrelevant for these contemporary movements that appear to be operating within the politics of...