Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

This paper takes up the proposition that institutions mediate market formation, through a comparative study of rural finance in Nepal and Vietnam. It explores how microfinance, as an iconic institution of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, articulates political-economic and cultural-political milieux—with particular emphasis given to the ways in which the Vietnamese Party-state has engaged rural finance to further the socialist transition even as it has undergone significant ‘economic renovation’. In so doing, the paper adopts a processual interpretation of institutions not as bounded structures, but as arenas of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ [Li, T.M., 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society 36 (2), 263–293] that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations. A comparative approach is pursued here to emphasize spatio-temporal contingencies in the articulation of a market-led development institution with specific national regulatory frameworks and political cultures. A critical-geographical orientation helps to deepen Polanyi’s proposition that the economy is an instituted process, to challenge the prevailing binary opposition between state- and market-led development, account for the multiple scales at which power and interest reside in the formation of markets, and highlight the variable ways in which markets are embodied and enacted in particular places.     

Risky responsibilities for rural drinking water institutions: The case of unregulated self-supply in Bangladesh

The drinking water sector is off track to reach Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 with over a quarter of the world’s population lacking safe and reliable services. Policy approaches are shifting away from provision of access towards managing the multiple risks of water supply and quality. By considering how infrastructure, information, and institutional systems evolved in Bangladesh, this article identifies the unintentional consequences of reallocating management responsibility for rural water services away from government agencies towards individuals and households.Between 2012 and 2017, we estimate up to forty-five unregulated tubewells were installed privately for every publicly funded rural waterpoint. This growth rate more than doubled total national waterpoint infrastructure since 2006. The scale of growth is reflected in the declining ratio of households per tubewell from over fifty-seven in 1982 to less than two in 2017, potentially approaching market saturation. This scale of growth aligns to an observed decrease in the real price of private market shallow tubewells by seventy percent between 1982 and 2017. In 2018, we estimate households invested up to USD253 million in tubewells, nearly sixty-five percent of the total national water and sanitation sector’s household-level finance. In effect, household investments became critical to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of improved infrastructure access, but now pose challenges for meeting targets of safely managed services. The scale of continued private investment provides an opportunity for policymakers to explore blended public finance models to meet emerging consumer preferences, while at the same time introducing regulatory and monitoring systems.     

Exploring social barriers to adaptation: Insights from Western Nepal

As the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change become increasingly apparent, the need for facilitating successful adaptation and enhancing adaptive capacity within the context of sustainable development is clear. With adaptation high on the agenda, the notion of limits and barriers to adaptation has recently received much attention within both academic and policymaking spheres. While emerging literature has been quick to depict limits and barriers in terms of natural, financial, or technologic processes, there is a clear shortfall in acknowledging social barriers to adaptation. It is against such a backdrop that this paper sets out to expose and explore some of the underlying features of social barriers to adaptation, drawing on insights from two case studies in the Western Nepal. This paper exposes the significant role of cognitive, normative and institutional factors in both influencing and prescribing adaptation. It explores how restrictive social environments can limit adaptation actions and influence adaptive capacity at the local level, particularly for the marginalised and socially excluded. The findings suggest a need for greater recognition of the diversity and complexity of social barriers, strategic planning and incorporation at national and local levels, as well as an emphasis on tackling the underlying drivers of vulnerability and social exclusion.     

Explaining the ‘hungry farmer paradox’: Smallholders and fair trade cooperatives navigate seasonality and change in Nicaragua's corn and coffee markets

Latin American smallholder coffee farmers linked with fair trade and organic markets are frequently cited as models for sustainable food systems. Yet many experience seasonal hunger, which is a very common, but understudied, form of food insecurity. Northern Nicaragua's highlands include well-organized cooperatives, high rural poverty rates, and rain dependent farms, offering a compelling study area to understand what factors are associated with seasonal hunger. This participatory mixed methods study combines data from observations, interviews and focus groups with results from a survey of 244 cooperative members. It finds that seasonal hunger is influenced by multiple factors, including: (1) annual cycles of precipitation and rising maize prices during the lean months; (2) inter annual droughts and periodic storms; and (3) the long-term inability of coffee harvests and prices to provide sufficient income. Sampled households experienced an average of about 3 months of seasonal hunger in 2009. A series of five least squares regression models find the expected significant impacts of corn harvest quantity, farm area, improved grain storage, and household incomes, all inversely correlated with lean months. Unanticipated results include the finding that households with more fruit trees reported fewer lean months, while the predominant environmentally friendly farming practices had no discernable impacts. The presence of hunger among producers challenges sustainable coffee marketing claims. We describe one example of a partnership-based response that integrates agroecological farm management with the use of fair trade cooperative institutions to re-localize the corn distribution system. Increased investments and integrated strategies will be needed to reduce threats to food security, livelihoods, and biodiversity associated with the rapid spread of coffee leaf rust and falling commodity prices.     

Modern disturbances to a long-lasting community-based resource management system: The Taos Valley acequias

Long-lasting community-based resource management systems have offered scholars important lessons in the study of human-environment relations. The examination of such systems has suffered from a sampling bias, however, in that it has focused disproportionately on successful systems. There are fewer studies that have explored the deterioration of such systems, particularly with an interdisciplinary approach. This shortfall is problematic given the increasing social and biophysical disturbances that communities are facing as they become more integrated into, and affected by, larger-scale processes.This study addresses this gap by analyzing the modern condition of a long-lasting community-based irrigation system known as the acequias in northern New Mexico. Using a mix of interview, survey, remote sensing, and census data, I examine the extent to which important indicators for the acequias have shifted in the last several decades and explore reasons for these changes. A mix of statistical and qualitative comparative techniques is used to conduct the analysis.By examining longitudinal data we find that the acequias are producing less than they have in the past and have mostly lost their common-property-based livestock pasturing system. While some of these changes can be attributed to similar declines in water availability, much of the change results from social drivers including demographic changes, regional-to-global market forces, and public policies. Overall the shift of the acequias to their current state is a result of their integration into a much larger-scale set of social and economic forces than they have experienced in the past. This shift will be very difficult to reverse, meaning the acequia farmers must adapt to the current condition. It is likely that these themes are common across many community-based resource management systems in many locations. In the future, further progress should be made in synthetically comparing such cases in ways that have already been done for long-lasting successful systems.     

Elite capture risk and mitigation in decentralized forest governance regimes

Recent scholarship focuses on elite capture as a driver of social inequality and a source of policy failure across a wide range of governance initiatives. In the context of environmental governance, concerns center on perceived links between elite capture and decentralization, particularly in developing countries where decentralized natural resource governance has been widely implemented. But, there is limited empirical knowledge regarding if, and the conditions under which, decentralization might promote elite capture, or whether institutional design factors can militate against it. We examine how local institutional arrangements under forest sector decentralization affect the risk of elite capture of forest benefits, as well as the potential for a key institutional design factor (linkages to external organizations as an accountability-building mechanism) to mitigate this risk. We analyze forest product harvesting data as well as social, ecological, and institutional data from pre- and post-decentralization across 56 forests and 174 community groups in four countries. We employ hierarchical linear modeling to test the extent to which decentralization is associated with inequities in the distribution of forest harvest benefits within communities, and to characterize the institutional arrangements that affect elite capture outcomes. We find not only strong evidence for increased local rule-making under decentralization, but also significantly higher risk of elite capture of forest harvest benefits. This risk increases with increasing time since decentralization, but it is also substantially moderated in cases where an external organization was involved in organizing the local forest institution. Our findings highlight ways in which decentralization reforms are filtered by institutional arrangements to produce different outcomes, and generate new knowledge on micro-institutional factors that can reduce the risk of elite capture in decentralized environmental governance regimes.     

Observed adaptation to climate change: UK evidence of transition to a well-adapting society

This paper investigates whether and to what extent a wide range of actors in the UK are adapting to climate change, and whether this is evidence of a social transition. We document evidence of over 300 examples of early adopters of adaptation practice to climate change in the UK. These examples span a range of activities from small adjustments (or coping), to building adaptive capacity, to implementing actions and to creating deeper systemic change in public and private organisations in a range of sectors. We find that adaptation in the UK has been dominated by government initiatives and has principally occurred in the form of research into climate change impacts. These government initiatives have stimulated a further set of actions at other scales in public agencies, regulatory agencies and regional government (and the devolved administrations), though with little real evidence of climate change adaptation initiatives trickling down to local government level. The sectors requiring significant investment in large scale infrastructure have invested more heavily than those that do not in identifying potential impacts and adaptations. Thus we find a higher level of adaptation activity by the water supply and flood defence sectors. Sectors that are not dependent on large scale infrastructure appear to be investing far less effort and resources in preparing for climate change. We conclude that the UK government-driven top-down targeted adaptation approach has generated anticipatory action at low cost in some areas. We also conclude that these actions may have created enough niche activities to allow for diffusion of new adaptation practices in response to real or perceived climate change. These results have significant implications for how climate policy can be developed to support autonomous adaptors in the UK and other countries.     

Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: lessons from resilience thinking

Vulnerability is registered not by exposure to hazards alone; it also resides in the resilience of the system experiencing the hazard. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances, such as natural disasters, so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks) is important for the discussion of vulnerability for three reasons: (1) it helps evaluate hazards holistically in coupled human–environment systems, (2) it puts the emphasis on the ability of a system to deal with a hazard, absorbing the disturbance or adapting to it, and (3) it is forward-looking and helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and future change. Building resilience into human–environment systems is an effective way to cope with change characterized by surprises and unknowable risks. There seem to be four clusters of factors relevant to building resilience: (1) learning to live with change and uncertainty, (2) nurturing various types of ecological, social and political diversity for increasing options and reducing risks, (3) increasing the range of knowledge for learning and problem-solving, and (4) creating opportunities for␣self-organization, including strengthening of local institutions and building cross-scale linkages and problem-solving networks.     

‘Earth system governance’ as a crosscutting theme of global change research

In 2001, the four global change research programmes ‘urgently’ called for ‘an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management’. Yet this notion of ‘earth system management’ remains vaguely defined: It is too elusive for natural scientists, and too ambitious or too normative for social scientists. In this article, I develop an alternative concept that is better grounded in social science theory: ‘earth system governance’. I introduce, first, the concept of earth system governance as a new social phenomenon, a political programme and a crosscutting theme of research in the field of global environmental change. I then sketch the five key problem structures that complicate earth system governance, and derive from these four overarching principles for earth system governance as political practice, namely credibility, stability, adaptiveness, and inclusiveness. In the last part of the article, I identify five research and governance challenges that lie at the core of earth system governance as a crosscutting theme in global change research. These are the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and of their accountability and legitimacy, and of the modes of allocation in earth system governance—in short, the five A's of earth system governance research.     

The ‘hidden’ geographies of energy poverty in post-socialism: Between institutions and households

One of the consequences of the post-socialist transformation of Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union is the emergence of energy poverty, a condition where households are living in inadequately heated homes. This paper examines the institutional and demographic underpinnings of energy poverty in Macedonia and the Czech Republic, two post-socialist states with divergent development paths. It has been established that more than 50% of Macedonian households may be suffering from domestic energy deprivation, while the same figure is less than 10% in the Czech case. The notion of a ‘hidden’ geography of poverty encapsulates the character of domestic energy deprivation among these populations. The problem has been invisible to decision-makers to date, due to its private character and non-conformity to conventional poverty-amelioration methods.