The challenge of locating land-based climate change mitigation and adaptation politics within a social justice perspective: towards an idea of agrarian climate justice

Abstract

The global land rush and mainstream climate change narratives have broadened the ranks of state and social actors concerned about land issues, while strengthening those opposed to social justice-oriented land policies.This emerging configuration of social forces makes the need for deep social reforms through redistribution, recognition, restitution, regeneration and resistance -book-ended by the twin principles of 'maximum land size' ('size ceiling') and a 'guaranteed minimum land access' ('size floor') -both more compelling and urgent, and, at the same time, more difficult than ever before.The five deep social reforms of socially just land policy are necessarily intertwined.But the global land rush amidst deepening climate change calls attention to the linkages, especially between the pursuit of agrarian justice on the one hand and climate justice on the other.Here, the relationship is not without contradictions, and warrants increased attention as both unit of analysis and object of political action.Understanding and deepening agrarian justice imperatives in climate politics, and understanding and deepening climate justice imperatives in agrarian politics, is needed more than ever in the ongoing pursuit of alternatives. Convergence of diverse issues, conversion of land politicsClimate Smart Agriculture (CSA) as constructed and promoted by the World Bank and FAO and in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been gaining in popularity and momentum since the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris in 2015.Their version of CSA is constructed out of recycled building blocks from the new institutional economics tradition obsessed with the pursuit of economic efficiency in the allocation and use of scare resources, like land, and the win-win management of carbon emissions.Both aspects have been brought together under CSA.More than just a flashy new term, CSA constitutes an important ideological milestone where the notion of ecological sustainability is conjured as urgent and strategic alongside the neoliberal notion of economic

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