Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities

Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities
Author: Maria Backhouse
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2021-05-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030689441

This open access book focuses on the meanings, agendas, as well as the local and global implications of bioeconomy and bioenergy policies in and across South America, Asia and Europe. It explores how a transition away from a fossil and towards a bio-based economic order alters, reinforces and challenges socio-ecological inequalities. The volume presents a historically informed and empirically rich discussion of bioeconomy developments with a particular focus on bio-based energy. A series of conceptual discussions and case studies with a multidisciplinary background in the social sciences illuminate how the deployment of biomass sources from the agricultural and forestry sectors affect societal changes concerning knowledge production, land and labour relations, political participation and international trade. How can a global perspective on socio-ecological inequalities contribute to a complex and critical understanding of bioeconomy? Who participates in the negotiation of specific bioeconomy policies and who does not? Who determines the agenda? To what extent does the bioeconomy affect existing socio-ecological inequalities in rural areas? What are the implications of the bioeconomy for existing relations of extraction and inequalities across regions? The volume is an invitation to reflect upon these questions and more, at a time when the need for an ecological and socially just transition away from a carbon intensive economy is becoming increasingly pressing.

Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities

Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities
Author: Maria Backhouse
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9783030689452

This open access book explores bioeconomy and bioenergy policies across South America, Asia and Europe. It discusses how a transition away from a fossil and towards a bio-based economic order alters, reinforces and challenges socio-ecological inequalities. A series of conceptual discussions and case studies with a multidisciplinary background in the social sciences illuminate how the deployment of biomass sources from the agricultural and forestry sectors affect societal changes concerning knowledge production, land and labour relations, political participation and international trade. How can a global perspective on socio-ecological inequalities contribute to a critical understanding of bioeconomy? Who participates in the negotiation of specific bioeconomy policies and who does not? To what extent does the bioeconomy affect existing socio-ecological inequalities in rural areas? What are the implications of the bioeconomy for existing relations of extraction and inequalities across regions? The volume is an invitation to reflect upon these questions and more, at a time when the need for an ecological and socially just transition away from a carbon intensive economy is becoming increasingly pressing. The editors, Maria Backhouse, Rosa Lehmann, Kristina Lorenzen, Malte Lühmann, Janina Puder, Fabricio Rodríguez and Anne Tittor are all social scientists and members of the Junior Research Group "Bioeconomy and Inequalities. Transnational Entanglements and Interdependencies in the Bioenergy Sector" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Global Trends 2040

Global Trends 2040
Author: National Intelligence Council
Publisher: Cosimo Reports
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2021-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781646794973

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Globalization and Its Discontents

Globalization and Its Discontents
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2003-04-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0393071073

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

Care, Power, Information

Care, Power, Information
Author: Alexander Stingl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317327640

This book is a critique and provincialization of Western social science and Global Northern academia, by the author of The Digital Coloniality of Power. It exposes shared colonial and extractive rationalities and histories of research, higher education, digitalization, and bioeconomy while proposing in the idea of BluesCollarship, a sketch for an alternative culture of worlding and commoning knowledge work and for making care matter in research and higher education. In a discourse analysis and provincialization of research and higher education, a tradition of elitist White-Collaredness in academia and in the social sciences, in particular, is criticized, and an alternative attitude towards the production, transfer, and use of knowledge – BluesCollarship – is proposed. The latter is rooted in a different idea of what "infrastructure" is, and in practices of decoloniality. Noting the current political climate of propaganda and populism, the persistence of social inequalities as well as of racism and misogyny, it is proposed that how people give warrant for knowledge claims should be reviewed under different terms. A coherent theme is that there is a genealogical root for current neo-extractive and neo-colonial rationalities in the Athenian idea of oikos, which conflates family, household, and property. In taking a distinctly writerly approach – rather than giving ready-made answers – the book aims at permanently provoking readers at every turn to think further, as well as before-and-beyond what is written, but to do so in thinking together with Others. Thus the book addresses scholars and students from across the social sciences who seek challenges to established ways of thinking in academia without simply replacing one canon for another. This book is for those who think of themselves as knowledge and culture laborers in this age of precarization, who seek to replace the university and cognitive capitalism with a pluriversity and an infrastructure built on knowledge and culture as fundamental values.

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America
Author: Ben M. McKay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2021-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000390527

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

Bioeconomy for Beginners

Bioeconomy for Beginners
Author: Joachim Pietzsch
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2020-03-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 366260390X

This book provides an interdisciplinary and comprehensible introduction to bioeconomy. It thus provides basic knowledge for understanding a transformation process that will shape the 21st century and requires the integration of many disciplines and industries that have had little to do with each other up to now. We are talking about the gradual and necessary transition from the age of fossil fuels, which began around 200 years ago, to a global economy based on renewable raw materials (and renewable energies). The success of this transition is key to coping with the challenge of climate change. This book conceives the realization of bioeconomy as a threefold task – a scientific, an economic and an ecological one. · Where does the biomass come from that we need primarily for feeding the growing world population but also for future energy and material use? How can it be processed in biorefineries and what role does biotechnology play in this regard? · Which aspects of innovation economics need to be considered, which economic aspects of value creation, competitiveness and customer acceptance are important? · What conditions must a bioeconomy fulfil in order to enable a sustainable development of life on earth? May it be regarded as a key to further economic growth or shouldn’t it rather orient itself towards the ideal of sufficiency? By dealing with these questions from the not necessarily consistent perspectives of proven experts, this book provides an interdisciplinary overview of a dynamic field of research and practice that raises more questions than answers and thus may nurture the motivation of many more people to seriously engage for the realization of a bioeconomy.

Clinical Labor

Clinical Labor
Author: Melinda Cooper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822377004

Forms of embodied labor, such as surrogacy and participation in clinical trials, are central to biomedical innovation, but they are rarely considered as labor. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby take on that project, analyzing what they call "clinical labor," and asking what such an analysis might indicate about the organization of the bioeconomy and the broader organization of labor and value today. At the same time, they reflect on the challenges that clinical labor might pose to some of the founding assumptions of classical, Marxist, and post-Fordist theories of labor. Cooper and Waldby examine the rapidly expanding transnational labor markets surrounding assisted reproduction and experimental drug trials. As they discuss, the pharmaceutical industry demands ever greater numbers of trial subjects to meet its innovation imperatives. The assisted reproductive market grows as more and more households look to third-party providers for fertility services and sectors of the biomedical industry seek reproductive tissues rich in stem cells. Cooper and Waldby trace the historical conditions, political economy, and contemporary trajectory of clinical labor. Ultimately, they reveal clinical labor to be emblematic of labor in twenty-first-century neoliberal economies.