Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 1 - 5 of 5 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Environmental and Ecological economics x
- Access: All content x
This book examines ‘land grabbing’ – its colonial roots and the fraught relationship between capital and nature amidst the current ecological crisis.
Through ethnographic and archival research, Maura Benegiamo investigates an Italian company’s acquisition of 20,000 hectares in Senegal’s River Delta for agrofuel production and delves into the struggles of pastoral communities affected by the project. Through this landmark case, the book shows how European energy and global food security policies are reshaping rural spaces, expanding agrarian extractivism in sub-Saharan Africa.
By shedding light on how contemporary capital–nature relationships perpetuate socio-ecological crises and colonial models, the book highlights the enduring forms of opposition to these processes. At the heart of these struggles lies a crucial question: how can we understand today’s crises while reclaiming alternative ways of living, producing, and inhabiting the land?
Generation Z has grown up with a global financial crisis, a pandemic, the climate emergency, growing autocracy and wars. Survival, not just equity, is at stake.
As debate rages about how to ensure a fairer and sustainable society, this book challenges short-sighted economic policies, asking where we want to be in 20 years’ time and how we might get there.
Offering fresh, and sometimes counter intuitive, thinking on a range of economic issues including monetary policy, housing and university funding, it argues in favour of policy guardrails to protect the future, higher interest rates, and a burst of inflation. Robots and AI should be seen as positive replacements for population growth.
This is an original, readable and entertaining take on how we can change course before it is too late.
Sixty years ago an upsurge of social movements protested the ecological harms of industrial capitalism. In subsequent decades, environmentalism consolidated into forms of management and business strategy that aimed to tackle ecological degradation while enabling development to continue. However, the increasing focus on spaces and species to be protected saw questions of human work and histories of colonialism pushed out of view.
This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements. Many of these movements did not consider themselves ‘environmental,’ and yet they offer vital ways forward in the face of escalating ecological damage and social injustice.
Political elites have been evading the causes of climate change through deceptive fixes. Their market-type instruments such as carbon trading aim to incentivise technological innovation which will supposedly decarbonize or replace dominant high-carbon systems. In practice this techno-market framework has perpetuated climate change and social injustices, thus provoking public controversy. Using this opportunity, social movements have counterposed low-carbon, resource-light, socially just alternatives. Such transformative mobilisations can fulfil the popular slogan, ‘System Change Not Climate Change’.
This book develops key critical concepts through case studies such as GM crops, biofuels, waste incineration and Green New Deal agendas.
Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, this book describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices.
The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems.
