Imagined transitions: agrarian capitalism and climate change adaptation in Colombia

Abstract

Climate change has significantly affected rural lives around the world. Adaptation, as a political response to this situation, interacts with longer trajectories of agrarian capitalism and peasant’s expectations for the future. Through the concept of imagined transitions, this article explores how peasants of northern Colombia manufacture and project their own transition to an agrarian capitalist future in the aftermath of climate-related floods and in the midst of adaptation interventions. Peasants use adaptation to imagine a future in which they are no longer peasants but have instead become rural entrepreneurs who play a proactive role in the development of capitalism.

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