Development and Social Change explores the historical, socio-political, and ecological aspects of development. The Eighth Edition critically engages with the concept of development, tracing its roots and examining its implications in the contemporary world. 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 histori...

Exploring the ways in which culture, systems of value, and ethics impact agriculture, this volume addresses contemporary land questions and conditions for agricultural land management. Throughout, the editors and contributors consider a range of issues, including pressure on farmland, international and global trade relations, moral and ethical questions, and implications for governance.The focus of Finance or Food? is land use in Australia, Canada, and Norway, chosen for t...

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 re...

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 prev...

Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions extends the original conception of the food regime, formulated by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, detailing new dimensions of the succession of imperial, intensive and corporate food regimes. Developing the methodological contributions of food regime analysis, McMichael re-examines the agrarian question historically and its present-day implications. He introduces regional interpretations of the food regime, incorporating gender, labour, financial...

International institutions (United Nations, World Bank) and multinational companies have voiced concern over the adverse impact of resource extraction activities on the livelihood of indigenous communities. This volume examines mega resource extraction projects in Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, India, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines.

On January 20, 1949 US President Harry S. Truman officially opened the era of development. On that day, over one half of the people of the world were defined as "underdeveloped" and they have stayed that way ever since. This book explains the origins of development and underdevelopment and shows how poorly we understand these two terms. It offers a new vision for development, demystifying the statistics that international organizations use to measure development and introducing the alterna...

More than half of the world's farmers are women. They are the majority of the poor, the uneducated and are the first to suffer from drought and famine. Yet their subordination is reinforced by well-meaning development policies that perpetuate social inequalities. During the 1975-85 United Nations Decade for the Advancement of Women their position actually worsened.This book analyses three decades of policies towards Third World women. Focusing on global economic and political crise...

The Women, Gender and Development Reader is the definitive volume of literature dedicated to women in the development process. Now in a fully revised second edition, the editors expertly present the impacts of social, political and economic change by reviewing such topical issues as migration, persistent structural discrimination, the global recession, and climate change. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, the theoretical debates are vividly illustrated by an array o...

Valuable reading for anyone concerned with contemporary dynamics of social change. â• International AffairsMargaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances i...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, and ongoing savage government cuts across the world, Garry Leech addresses a pressing and necessary topic: the nature of contemporary capitalism, and how it inherently generates inequality and structural violence.Drawing on a number of fascinating case studies from across the world - including the forced displacement of farmers in Mexico, farmer suicides in India, and deaths from preventable and treatable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, a...

Over the past two decades, sales of fair trade coffee have grown significantly and the fair trade network has emerged as an important international development project. Activists and commentators have been quick to celebrate this sales growth, which has allowed socially just trade, labour, and environmental standards and practices to be extended to hundreds of thousands of small farmers and poor rural workers throughout the Global South. While recent assessments of the fair trade network h...