Bruce Muirhead

Philip McMichael

Hilde Bj›rkhaug

In this volume, an interdisciplinary and internationally- situated group of experts consider the ways in which culture creates and transforms discourses and practices in decisions on agricultural land.

The Role of Cultures, Values, and Ethics in Land Use Negotiations

Finance or Food?

Food Regimes re-examines the agrarian question historically and its present-day implications, introducing regional interpretations of the food regime, incorporating gender, labour, financial, ecological and nutritional dimensions into the analysis.

Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions

At a time when the development promise is increasingly in question, with dwindling social gains, the vision of modernity is losing its legitimacy and coherence. This moment is observable through the lens of critical struggles of those who experience disempowerment, displacement and development contradictions. In this book, case studies serve as an effective means of teaching key concepts and theories in the sociology of development. This collection of cases, all original, never previously published and with framing essays by Phillip McMichael, has been written with this purpose in mind. An important additional feature is that the book as a whole reveals the limiting assumptions of development and suggests alternate conditions of possibility for social existence in the world today. In that sense, the book pushes the boundaries of "thinking about development" and makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature.

Critical Struggles for Social Change

Contesting Development

In this new Sixth Edition of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, author Philip McMichael describes a world undergoing profound social, political, and economic transformations, from the post-World War II era through the present. He tells a story of development in four parts—colonialism, developmentalism, globalization, and sustainability—that shows how the global development “project” has taken different forms from one historical period to the next. Throughout the text, the underlying conceptual framework is that development is a political construct, created by dominant actors (states, multilateral institutions, corporations and economic coalitions) and based on unequal power arrangements. While rooted in ideas about progress and prosperity, development also produces crises that threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, and sparks organized resistance to its goals and policies. Frequent case studies make the intricacies of globalization concrete, meaningful, and clear. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective challenges us to see ourselves as global citizens even as we are global consumers.

A Global Perspective

Development and Social Change

Ian Scoones

Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

This book addresses key questions on biofuels within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. Contributions are based on fresh empirical materials from different parts of the world. The book starts with four key questions in agrarian political economy: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with the surplus wealth? It also addresses the emergent social and political relations in the biofuel complex and, given the impacts on natural resources and sustainability, engages with questions about people-environment interactions. At the same time, the book is concerned with the politics of representation, that is, what are the discursive frames through which biofuels are promoted and/or opposed? The book analyses the institutional structures, and cultures of energy consumption on which a biofuels complex depends, and the alternative political and ecological visions emerging that call the biofuels complex into question. Across sixteen chapters presenting material from five regions across the North-South divide and focusing on fourteen countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India, USA and Germany, these topics are addressed within the following themes: global (re)configurations; agro-ecological visions; conflicts, resistances and diverse outcomes; state, capital and society relations; mobilising opposition, creating alternatives; and change and continuity. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The Politics of Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change

Regimi alimentari e questioni agrarie estende la formulazione originaria del regime alimentare, formulata da Harriet Friedmann e Philip McMichael, dettagliando nuove dimensioni nella successione dei regimi alimentari, imperiale, intensivo e delle corporations. Sviluppando i contributi metodologici dell’analisi dei regimi alimentari, McMichael riesamina storicamente la questione agraria e le sue implicazioni attuali, presenta un’analisi dei regimi alimentari su scala regionale e incorpora le dimensioni del genere, del lavoro, finanziarie, ecologiche e nutritive all’interno della sua elaborazione teorica. L’autore esplora inoltre le relazioni tra le attuali crisi, alimentare, energetica, climatica e finanziaria, e la ristrutturazione del regime alimentare, che include la diffusione degli agrocarburanti, i processi di land grabbing, la bioeconomia, il mercantilismo dell’agrosicurezza e le lotte dei movimenti per la sovranità alimentare.

Regimi alimentari e questioni agrarie

Heloise Weber

Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective explains how development thinking and practice have shaped our world. It introduces students to four interconnected projects, and how their dynamics, contradictions and controversies have influenced development trajectories: colonialism, the development era, the neoliberal globalization project, and sustainable development. Authors Philip McMichael and Heloise Weber use case studies and examples to help describe a complex world in transition. Students are encouraged to see global development as a contested historical project. By showing how development stems from unequal power relationships between and among peoples and states, often with planet-threatening environmental outcomes, it enables readers to reflect on the possibilities for more just social, ecological and political relations.

Philip McMichael

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