From One River to Another is a collection of video messages from people defending the Indrayani River in India, the Magdalena River in Colombia, and the Berkel River in Germany. Conceived as open letters, the messages share what people have witnessed along their rivers and ask how movements in different places might learn from one another and build solidarity.

The videos could be found in Spanish and English here: https://movingrivers.org/

Abstract: This study examines how overlapping territorial regimes, specifically state conservation zoning, industrial plantation frontiers, and customary tenure, generate divergent socio-ecological pathways and human–orangutan relations in two Dayak Iban communities in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Utilizing a retroductive research design grounded in comparative ethnographic fieldwork and environmental history, the analysis traces how national forest classifications and corporate expansions intersect with everyday forest practices. Despite a shared Iban identity and comparable ecologies, the two landscapes have diverged significantly, materializing as contrasting spatial arrangements, shifting relations with state authority, and uneven ecocultural continuity. This study positions human–orangutan dynamics as a vital empirical entry point to show how uniform state frameworks fracture on the ground. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that the uneven impacts of green frontiers are experienced not merely as administrative friction, but as a deeply shared, multispecies experience of environmental precarity, thereby offering a diagnostic framework for reimagining conservation futures.

Read her full text here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25148486261491610

Abstract: Why does fire suppression remain central to forest governance globally, despite the increasing recognition of fire’s ecological and livelihood significance? This study examines the persistence of fire suppression in India, arguing that it continues not for ecological reasons but as a political technology of state territorial control. Drawing on archival research and interviews, we trace how colonial era legal and institutional frameworks criminalising community fire use have been carried across successive policy shifts, from timber extraction to biodiversity conservation to carbon sequestration, centralising authority over forest landscapes and reordering ecologies to serve external interests over local populations. Political forests, however, are not only state projects. Forest-dwelling communities sustain relational lifeworlds through fire practices that exceed the logics of state and capital. Recognising fire suppression as a political tool demands reckoning with the colonial legal frameworks that sustain it and opens the possibility for more just and ecologically grounded fire futures.

Read their full text here: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70192

Abstract: This article focuses on rural women’s agency and innovation in the context of the global acceleration of climate change-induced extreme heat. Specifically, it considers the intersecting challenges encountered in relation to livelihoods, water, and energy, as well as the coping strategies adopted by diverse rural women. While currently there is an upsurge of studies focusing on extreme heat, they are mostly generic in terms of gender and largely framed within the broader context of climate change not specifically on extreme heat. We use the intersectional ecofeminist perspective to analyze how different women are disproportionately affected by extreme heat. We also examine how ‘better-off’ rural women, in their relative capacities, capitalize on the heat crisis in the absence of institutional assistance. We argue that the most vulnerable rural women bear the brunt of climate change-induced crises, yet their subjective experiences remain under-represented in climate change discourse and policies. This qualitative research is based on data drawn from key informant interviews, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions conducted in Beitbridge district, southern Zimbabwe. The paper recommends policy makers and other stakeholders to complement extreme heat responces and innovations by vulnerable populations while noting the spatial and gendered dimensions of the climate crisis.

Read their full text here: https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2026.2711460

Abstract: The global shift towards low-carbon energy systems has heightened demand for copper, cobalt, and lithium, driving investment in African mineral projects. However, developmental outcomes are shaped not only by extraction and processing but also by the financial structures underpinning these projects. This article distinguishes between developmental de-risking, in which public support is linked to shared infrastructure, domestic capability building, public value capture, and accountable participation; and green financial extractivism, in which capital supporting transition-mineral supply chains is protected while fiscal, environmental, or social risks are transferred to host states and communities. Through a structured documentary comparison of Sicomines–Busanga and Kamoa–Kakula in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Arcadia Lithium and Bikita Minerals in Zimbabwe, the analysis evaluates financing instruments, risk allocation, infrastructure, ownership, value capture, and ESG outcomes. These cases predominantly utilise resource-backed lending, shareholder and commercial debt, offtake advances, corporate equity, and fiscal or regulatory support, rather than climate-labelled finance. Sicomines – Busanga is predominantly green financial-extractivist; Kamoa–Kakula is a hybrid case leaning towards developmental de-risking; Arcadia combines state-facilitated corporate de-risking with externally controlled intermediate beneficiation; and Bikita remains predominantly green-extractivist despite partial developmental upgrading. The findings indicate that critical-mineral finance should be assessed based on risk allocation, infrastructure control, and value capture, rather than solely on green narratives.

Read their paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2026.106035

The webinar will be on October 15, 3:00 PM (France and Germany, CEST) | 10:00 AM (Chile and Argentina) | 9:00 AM (US Eastern Time, EDT).

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdF9jV0wpphIKyuac-epZ5Qr7h6FOpmnPOgmOT3oJU0BX3x9A/viewform

Abstract: This chapter examines how rural-agrarian social movements in the Global South have responded to the growing prevalence of contract farming (CF) arrangements. While the dominant understanding is that social movements tend to see CF unfavorably, this chapter takes a closer look at these movements to provide a more nuanced perspective. It first examines how the transnational food sovereignty movement, particularly La Via Campesina (LVC), presents a strong political critique of CF, built around a notion of small farmer autonomy. It then examines the 2020–2021 Indian Farmers’ Protest Movement as an illuminating case study to reveal the complex and contradictory approaches to CF within a social movement. This chapter outlines four important ways in which the movement’s relationship to CF was ambiguous: (i) ideological tensions and conflicts within the movement regarding CF, (ii) contradictions within different classes of farmers in their opposition to the CF law, (iii) the movement’s limited ability or unwillingness to tackle caste-based oppression and exploitation of Dalit agricultural workers and other oppressed groups and, lastly, (iv) the movement’s inability to take an anti-capitalist stance, restricting itself to a strategic negotiation over the terms of market integration and state protection within an already-capitalist agricultural framework.

Read the chapter here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003513674-33/contract-farming-social-movements-gaurav-bansal-mark-vicol

Abstract: This article analyzes land grabbing and deforestation in the Colombian Amazon from a political economy perspective, focusing on the changes that occurred after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC-EP. The reconfiguration of the FARC-EP, which had exercised extensive territorial control in the region, coincided with an increase in deforestation, land grabbing, and processes associated with rent-seeking through cattle ranching and coca cultivation. However, we argue that the primary interest of actors involved in deforestation lies not only in the acquisition of land, but also in the appropriation of other common natural resources, and is manifested through capital investment and the use of peasant labor to clear the forest. These elements are intertwined, generating new processes of land grabbing that do not always result in the direct dispossession of peasant communities.

Read their article in Spanish here: https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2026.2676937

Abstract: Rural sustainability policies often fail in territories shaped by ecological variability and mobile livelihoods, as they assume stability, fixed land use, and technical control. This article examines transhumant goat pastoralism in Malargu¨e, Argentine Andes, as a situated response to uncertainty and a source of insights for sustainability governance. Based on seven years of ethnographic research, we analyze how pastoralist families sustain livelihoods, manage common resources, and reproduce territorial relations through seasonal mobility, collective care, and vernacular commoning. Rather than treating mobility as a constraint, we show how transhumant practices constitute a decentralized form of ecological governance aligning production and resource management with environmental variability. Transhumant pastoralism operates as a sufficiency-oriented socioecological economy capable of inhabiting uncertainty without enclosure or stabilization. By foregrounding commoning and mobility as governance practices, the article contributes to sustainability transitions debates and offers transferable lessons for designing policies better suited to uncertain, climate-sensitive rural territories.

Check his paper here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02461-4