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This book explores the political ecology of agrofuels as an encompassing socio-spatial transformation process consisting of a series of changing contexts, political reconfigurations, and the restructuring of social and labour relations. It includes conceptual chapters as well as case studies from different world regions (North America, Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia) and levels (local, national, transnational).
The Political Ecology of Agrofuels advances a conceptualisation of agrofuels that helps to fill existing research gaps. It covers global food regimes and agrarian politics as well as political arenas such as energy, climate, transport and trade. It reflects on the biophysical materiality of agrofuels, new forms of nature appropriation, struggles, discursive framings, the building of hegemony, shifting geopolitical constellations, socio-spatial configurations of power, the construction of territory, the agency of social movements and the different ways in which agrofuels are politicized at different scales.
This book asks how patterns of mobility, emissions regulation, food and energy production and consumption, and social relations (e.g. labour, class and gender relations) are shaped and re-shaped by the materiality and representations of agrofuels in both the Global South and North. The book provides tools for thinking about the diversity of the conflicts, struggles and spatial, socio-ecological and politico-economic reconfigurations and perpetuations engendered by current production and consumption patterns in the agrofuel sector.
List of contents
1. An introduction to the political ecology of agrofuels 2. The political ecology of agrofuels 3. Territory, scale and networks 4. The gendered political ecology of agrofuels expansion 5. Bridging the gap with agrofuels 6. Agrofuels and the Food Regime 7. Agrofuels and land rights in Africa 8. The discursive and material flexibility of Jatropha curcas
9. Social-environmental conflicts and agrofuel crops 10. Green grabbing 11. Transnational Space and workers struggles 12. Agrofuel networks 13. US agrofuels in times of crisis 14. Immunization by neoliberalization
About the author
Kristina Dietz is post-doc research fellow at the International Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America, Berlin, Germany.
Bettina Engels is deputy assistant professor for Development Politics and Politics of Africa at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Oliver Pye teaches Southeast Asian studies at Bonn University, Germany.
Achim Brunnengräber is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
