Farhana Sultana

This critical analysis examines the geopolitics of planetary environmental injus-tice and the imperative for systems change to address the intertwined crises of climate breakdown and unsustainable economic growth. Climate breakdown has heightened attention to uneven anthropogenic use and abuse of the planet's biosphere and common pool resources. Recent arguments by climate scholars suggest that various planetary boundaries have already been breached, result-ing in dramatic and harmful socio- ecological consequences. These trends raise crucial questions of equity and justice, especially concerning responsibilities and impacts. By centring Global South perspectives, prevailing ideologies promot-ing hyperconsumption, overproduction and waste are interrogated. The incom-mensurability of socioecological justice with ongoing unsustainable extractive and exploitative economic growth paradigms, which contribute to further trans-gressions of planetary boundaries, underscore the urgency of decolonising un-derlying colonial- capitalist ideologies and practices. This entails a fundamental reformulation of paradigms to envision a more just and sustainable future, one that dismantles oppressive systems and advances justice- oriented praxis.
KEYWORDS: climate change, decolonisation, economic growth, environmental justice, planetary boundaries

Praxis is central to political ecology scholarship but replete with tensions and ambiguities. This report explores advancements in praxis across epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and political dimensions. Praxis in political ecology has benefited from detailed insights drawn from Indigenous, decolonial, postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and multi-species scholarship, among others. Attention to praxis allows for enriched research that has the potential to be useful and transformational for marginalized communities and better inform policymaking. Political ecology can remain relevant and meaningful when praxis is foregrounded and reflexively interrogated and performed for both intellectual advancements and radical socio-ecological justice.

In this intervention, we call for extending the critical lens of intersectionality to the field of climate justice. We do so by identifying the theoretical and methodological links through which intersectionality can benefit climate change studies. These include common roots in radical theory, a focus on marginalized populations, challenging dominant epistemologies and ontologies, similar strategies for pursuing social justice, de-emphasizing of positivist methodologies, while at the same time deploying similar research methods, embracing crossscalar and spatio-temporal analysis, and strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity and cross-sectoral alliances. We conclude with a number of potential questions to inform future research on these linkages and to encourage fellow scholars to consider what we see as an indispensable theoretical and methodological synergy of intersectionality and climate justice for a more equitable present and future.

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has raised alarm bells globally (IPCC, 2021). While IPCC assessments over several decades have warned how rapidly climate change has been occurring and the increasing need to halt rising global temperatures, action has been tragically slow. Given how relatively quickly institutions, states, and citizens across the globe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it became evident that drastic and rapid response to climate change is possible. While climate breakdown has been acutely experienced across several regions and communities for quite some time, a delayed but welcome global-level public consciousness to climate change has awoken as climate-related disasters have become more profound. While mainstream debates around climate change have historically been scientific and technical, and climate action has been mired in delays as well as climate denialism (Lamb et al., 2020), greater attention is increasingly given in public discourse to climate justice. Climate justice helps to reframe mainstream debates to usher in critical attention to social impacts, outcomes, and justice concerns. In general terms, climate justice scholarship demonstrates how climate change is a moral and justice issue, not just a science, techno-managerial, or finance issue (Gardiner, 2011; Shue, 2014). In other words, climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change impacts people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways. The goals are to reduce marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, and enhance equity and justice. Applying a climate justice approach is an intentional process that involves carefully analyzing who is excluded or marginalized by climate change processes as well as any adaptation or mitigation

Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven differentiations and coproductions, while offering possible alternative futures. This report engages recent scholarship wherein conjunctural analysis raises issues for how we understand socionatural processes and outcomes, lessons learned, and the exigencies of critical publics in academia and beyond. Keywords capitalism, climate change, conjuncture, COVID-19 Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

The overlapping global socio-ecological crises of climate change
and COVID-19 pandemic have simultaneously dominated discussions since 2020. The connections between them expose underbellies of structural inequities and systemic marginalizations across scales and sites. While ongoing climate change amplifies, compounds, and creates new forms of injustices and stresses, all of
which are interlinked and interconnected, the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic has also co-created new challenges, vulnerabilities, and burdens, as well as reinforcing old ones. An intersectional analysis of these overlapping but uneven global crises
demonstrates the importance of investigating and addressing
them simultaneously through a feminist lens. This allows for
a more nuanced understanding of the co-production of injustices
structurally, materially, and discursively.

Some epistemologies remain marginalized in political ecology. Here I demonstrate why it is important to learn from various relational margins to further advance the field. Insights and critiques from feminisms and decolonial theories have enriched and expanded political ecology in nuanced ways, yet they continue to remain relegated to the margins. I contend that it is vital to engage and advance different forms of inter-sectional, interdisciplinary, and international feminist inquiries to address ongoing socioecological crises at the current conjuncture. Different epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and praxis insights show-case how and why representation matters if we are to pursue decolonial futures and solidarities.

In light of ongoing racist incidences and protests in the USA and elsewhere, there have been growing resistance movements and conversations of systemic and structural racism in society. In solidarity with #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia, #Strike4BlackLives and #BlackInIvory in early June 2020, we started pondering easy ways for people to think about systemic racism and how to combat it in academia and STEM fields. This started as a Twitter discussion that quickly morphed into a collaboration. We came up with Bingo Cards that succinctly capture ideas and thoughts that have been thoroughly researched, documented, and extensively discussed in detail by anti-racist, feminist, and social justice scholars and activists (see resources at end). These Bingo Cards can start off conversations that are necessary, encourage reflection and accountability, and foster ongoing discussions for transformative justice.

This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural
resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday
social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars confront
fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and corporeally. The collection has two key
objectives. First, it expands our understanding of extractive industry by bringing together work
on resources conventionally understood as extractive (e.g. oil and minerals) alongside resourceintensive
industries not typically examined through an extractive lens, for instance fisheries,
agricultural monocultures, water, and tourism. As such, it considers the historical and current
conditions that facilitate the extraction of resources in parallel, cyclical, and reproducing forms.
Second, the collection examines scholarly positionalities, methodologies, and dilemmas that arise
when studying nature-intensive industries, including the extractive dimensions associated with
social research itself. Together, the pieces argue that research concerning extractive industries
entails multiple scholarly positions—positions problematically inflected with colonialism and
always shaped by power relations. Contributors to the section draw largely from feminist,
postcolonial, anti-racist, and historical materialist insights to frame and problematize the corporeal
and representational concerns arising from their scholarship on nature-intensive industries,
including personal dilemmas that they have encountered in their work. Overall, the collection is
driven by the realization that research, and the analyses it entails, may serve as a tool for
emancipatory intervention yet also reproduce inequality. The futures of the people and ecosystems
at the center of our studies impel constant reflection so that our work, and that of the next
generation of scholars, may offer critical analysis that contributes to transforming—rather than
reinforcing—oppressive relations associated with extractive sectors and industries.

Decolonization has become a popular discourse in academia recently and there are many debates on what it could mean within various disciplines as well as more broadly across academia itself. The field of international development has seen sustained gestures towards decolonization for several years in theory and practice, but hegemonic notions of development continue to dominate. Development is a contested set of ideas and practices that are under critique in and outside of academia, yet the reproduction of colonial power structures and Eurocentric logics continues whereby the realities of the global majority are determined by few powerful institutions and a global elite. To decolonize development's material and discursive powers, scholars have argued for decolonizing development education towards one that is ideologically and epistemologically different from dominant narratives of development. I add to these conversations and posit that decolonized ideologies and epistemologies have to be accompanied by decolonized pedagogies and considerations of decolonization of institutions of higher education. I discuss the institutional and critical pedagogical dilemmas and challenges that exist, since epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical decolonizations are influenced by institutional politics of higher education that are simultaneously local and global. The paper engages with the concept of critical hope in the pursuit of social justice to explore possibilities of decolonizing development praxis and offers suggestions on possible pathways forward.

The scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways. Through highly productive sets of conversations, both discourses and struggles around the right to water have: opened new perspectives and possibilities in water governance; fostered new collective and moral claims for water justice; and effected changes in politics, laws, policies, and institutions around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, changes have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues within the majority of countries globally. The novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia point to the enduring appeal and material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address water crises and water insecurities. There is thus an urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as new mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book therefore broadens existing scholarship on the right to water globally in order to critically shed light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving lofty global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.

Geographers should engage with development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by utilizing not only the theoretical and methodological tools from our various subfields but also through advocacy, expanding the role of public intellectuals and holding institutions and people to account. If we want emancipatory politics and transformations in development, we need to challenge and improve what is done in the name of SDGs, keeping central the issues of social justice and ethical engagement. This is perhaps the most critical thing geographers can undertake going forward in order to dismantle the master's current house.

While much attention has been paid to controversies over free speech and academic freedom related to university campus debates, events, and activities, I demonstrate that higher education is also under threat by the undermining of academic publishing ethics, integrity and standards, as well as what counts as scholarly rigor. The rise of problematic rhetoric and overtures as well as the circumvention of academic publishing standards pose threats to academia writ large, whereby academia is threatened from not just from outside but also from within the academy when some academics themselves participate in the erosion of academic integrity. At a time when there are concerted efforts to decolonize academia, there is a concurrent rise of colonial nostalgia and white supremacy among some academics, who are supported by and end up lending support to the escalating far-right movements globally, which misuse notions of free speech and academic freedom to further their agendas and attack higher education. Critical scholars thus need to hold accountable fellow academics, academic publishers, and universities in order to protect academic integrity and scholarship. The stakes are high at the current conjuncture and require greater introspection and intervention within academia to counter the dangerous

Climate change is exacerbating existing water insecurity globally, with significant gender consequences. Changes in water availability, access, scarcity and security play critical roles in shaping the ways that individuals, communities and countries are tackling existing and predicted climate change. Although climate change is already increasing vulnerabilities, marginalisation, and sufferings of many across the world, impacts are unevenly felt across social strata. Intersectionalities of social difference, especially along gender and class lines, differentiate the ways in which impacts of climate change are experienced and responded to. This is particularly evident in water-related productive and reproductive tasks, as climate change is expected to exacerbate both ecological degradation (e.g., water shortages) and water-related natural hazards (e.g., floods, cyclones), thereby transforming gender–water geographies. As such, it becomes imperative to undertake multi-scalar, critical and intersectional analyses to better inform both academic debates and policymaking. Heeding gendered implications of climate change is particularly important as patriarchal norms, inequities, and inequalities often place women and men in differentiated positions in their abilities to respond to and cope with dramatic changes in socioecological relations and changing waterscapes, as well as foregrounds the complex ways in which social power relations operate in communal responses to adaptation strategies that are increasingly proliferating globally. This chapter explores the nexus of gender-water-climate change to demonstrate how different groups of people understand, respond to, and cope with variability and uncertainties in a changing climate to reveal the challenges and prospects that exist.

This introduction to a series of essays on the global challenges of food and water security, commissioned as part of the International Year of Global Understanding, provides a definition of key terms and an historical context to these contemporary issues. It discusses the human right to adequate food and water, outlining some of the political struggles that have arisen over accessing these vital resources. Patterns of ‘under-’ and ‘over-consumption’ are discussed and analyzed, measured against the targets set in the Millennium Development and Sustainable Development Goals. The essays share a common approach, linking global challenges to the realities of everyday life and emphasizing the connections between biophysical and socio-cultural processes. The essays also address a number of cross-cutting themes including gender, ethnic and religious diversity, and the emotional and affective dimensions of life, going beyond questions of survival to incorporate the more qualitative dimensions of human well-being and quality of life

This paper undertakes a gendered analysis of India's river-linking project in order to shed light on the multifaceted impacts that are often overlooked in discussing the project. The paper argues that lessons from a gendered analysis of the Farakka Barrage provide key ...

A nature–society geography approach to health and well-being demonstrates that socioecological parameters, in addition to economic and political factors, are critical to explaining outcomes of health crises. In expounding on this multifaceted understanding of health and well-being in the context of development, I draw on research on chronic arsenic poisoning and water contamination in rural Bangladesh. A public health crisis has arisen from naturally-occurring arsenic poisoning millions of people who drink, cook, and irrigate with arsenic-laced groundwater pumped up by tubewells, where the very sources that were promoted to bring health are now bringing illness, hardship, and death. In examining the interlinked ways that arsenic and water come to influence well-being and illness, I pay particular attention to social stigma and the production of contaminated citizens. By engaging the insights from nature–society geographies of health and feminist geographies of well-being in contributing to scholarship in geographies of health, the article highlights that the experiences of health and well-being are complex and evolving in instances where slow poisoning is simultaneously an outcome of development endeavors and environmental factors. Abordar el tema de la salud y el bienestar con el enfoque geográfico expresivo de la relación naturaleza–sociedad demuestra que los parámetros socioecológicos, además de los factores económicos y políticos, son cruciales para explicar lo que sobreviene de las crisis de la salud. Para una mayor elaboración de esta manera multifacética de entender la salud y el bienestar en el contexto del desarrollo, me baso en investigaciones sobre envenenamiento crónico con arsénico y aguas contaminadas en el espacio rural de Bangladesh. Ha surgido una crisis sanitaria por el envenenamiento de origen natural entre millones de personas que beben, cocinan y riegan con agua cargada de arsénico, la cual es bombeada a la superficie a través de pozos entubados, donde las propias fuentes que se abrieron para traer salud están ahora aportando enfermedad, sufrimiento y muerte. Al examinar los entrelazamientos por medio de los cuales el arsénico y el agua llegan a influir bienestar y enfermedad, pongo particular atención al estigma social y a la producción de ciudadanos contaminados. Al buscar las luces de las geografías de la salud inspiradas en la relación naturaleza-sociedad y las geografías feministas del bienestar para contribuir de manera académica específica a las geografías de la salud, el artículo destaca que las experiencias de salud y bienestar son complejas y evolucionan en instancias en las que el envenenamiento lento puede ser simultáneamente un resultado de propósitos de desarrollo y de factores ambientales.

Community and participation have become popular in development discourse and practice, particularly in the global South and in relation to water resources management. Greater involvement of people in decisionmaking, implementation and evaluation of water management practices is expected to increase efficiency and equity in water projects. However, scholars have pointed out that such discourses are often problematically used and idealised, leading to the exacerbation of gender, class and other social differentiations. Drawing from a case study of drinking water contamination by arsenic in Bangladesh, this article examines the mobilisation and outcomes of participation and community in water provision and arsenic mitigation. Water hardship, conflicts and marginalisations are found to be products of social processes (that are gendered, classed and spatialised) as well as natural processes (local geohydrology, depth of arsenic sediments), in addition to the very ways that community and participation are conceptualised and practised. Nature/water comes to play a critical role in the ways that development interventions play out, thereby complicating the general debates around community and participation. This article seeks to problematise the ways that considerations of both the roles of nature and gender power relations can be more critically and productively engaged in development geography. As such, the article brings together debates in nature–society geography and development geography to argue that scholars studying community and participation need to pay greater attention not only to gender and spatial power relations, but also to the importance of geographical locations and the agency of heterogeneous nature in the ways water management and development interventions fail and succeed, and are thereby critiqued. More adaptive, reflexive and inclusive development realities that are simultaneously embedded in society and nature may then be envisioned, and more nuanced understandings of nature-in-development enabled.

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.

The 2010 United Nations resolution on the human right to water urged the global com munity to accept and implement equitable access to safe clean water for all. In addition, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the development targets for the global com munity between 2016 and 2030, articulated the importance of two interconnected and im portant SGDs: the connections between gender equity (SDG5) and access to water (SDG6). Given these global policy imperatives, countries face normative goals of achiev ing difficult and complex sets of rights and justices regarding water and gender equity. As a result, how policy prescriptions and ambitions are materialized on the ground require closer attention to the ways that gender-water relations are co-constitutive of broader is sues of development and social justice in any given context. More significant action is thus needed to address the socioecological issues that affect access to, control over, and rights to water, which have intersectional gendered implications and impact the lived re alities of water justice and injustice on the ground. The chapter investigates the compara tive politics around the human right to water and the increasing commodification of wa ter through a gendered lens to interrogate broader sustainable development goals. The author argues that implementing the human right to water can help achieve broader is sues of gender equity and gender justice when carried out with better intersectional un derstanding of gender.

Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.

The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance, as well as the human right to water and sanitation.

This book addresses the global challenges of food and water security in a rapidly changing and complex world. The essays highlight the links between bio-physical and socio-cultural processes, making connections between local and global scales, and focusing on the everyday practices of eating and drinking, essential for human survival. Written by international experts, each contribution is research-based but accessible to the general public.