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.
This chapter explores the surge in global land acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa, following the 2007–2009 food commodity price and global financial crises, which contributed to the rise of a new global food security agenda. It traces the evolution of the food security paradigm from the 1990s to the present, highlighting how global strategies have shifted towards increasing global agricultural productivity in anticipation of future crises. The chapter critically evaluates the neoliberal claim that industrial agriculture offers a solution to global food insecurity, challenging the assertion that productivity must double to feed a growing population. Instead, it argues that the mentioned crises expose not only classical capitalist contradictions of production but also deeper systemic limits in the social and ecological reproduction of the global capitalist system, which are shaping new extractivist agri-food strategies and influencing their opposition.
The conclusion summarizes the key insights and findings of the book, linking them to the latest developments in the studied cases and analysed policies. Additionally, it reflects on the transformative potential of contemporary socio-ecological struggles in postcolonial contexts to respond to the crisis in more just and sustainable ways and on possible transnational alliances.
Using an ethnographic approach, this chapter explores the conflict arising from the Senhuile-Senethanol agro-industrial project in Senegal’s Ndiaël Reserve, focusing on its socio-ecological impacts and the distortion of the governance process. It shed light on the responses of pastoral communities, delving into the lived experiences and motivations of those opposing the project. The chapter reveals how corporate social responsibility enables corporations to assume roles traditionally held by the state, exacerbating inequalities, and promoting ‘private social contracts’ that divide local populations and marginalize dissent, all while perpetuating a misleading narrative of mutual benefit. By juxtaposing these dynamics with local testimonies, the chapter reveals alternative perspectives on labour, territoriality and socio-ecological transitions. These insights contribute to a decolonial understanding of socio-ecological crises, offering new perspectives on climate and environmental justice and for rethinking development models.
This chapter introduces the book’s research work based on the study of a land-grabbing process targeting pastoral lands in the Senegal delta region. It situates the analysis within ongoing social science discussions regarding the causes, consequences and solutions to the climate crisis, as well as the debate surrounding the expansion of extractivism. The chapter opens with a narrative of a colonial episode, leading into a reflection on the case studied, to motivate and emphasize the relevance of a decolonial and political ecology approach to the issues at hand. It then outlines the book’s content, details the structure of the chapters, and summarizes the key findings and arguments presented.
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?
This chapter analyses three dominant ideological narratives that drove agrarian policies in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 2000s: the need to modernize agriculture; the vision of agrofuel crops as a catalyst for development; and the portrayal of private foreign investors as key actors in promoting economic growth, energy transition and improved livelihoods. Focusing on the history of agrarian development policies in the Senegal River delta, it shows how these narratives redirected development goals from empowering smallholder farmers to further integrating Senegalese territories into global capitalist markets, thereby marginalizing local agricultural actors. The case of Italian land investors in Senegal – leaders in land acquisitions between 2007 and 2010, most of whose projects collapsed within a few years – highlights the fragility of foreign-led development schemes and the ‘agrofuels myth’: a global narrative also supported by the Italian government to advance its industries abroad. In this context, the Senhuile-Senethanol project and the analysis of its social and environmental impact assessment process further clarify the broader issues of social precarization, ecological disruption and the disconnect between top-down investment strategies and the needs of local communities.
This chapter explores the evolving dynamics of land use, environmental conservation and agrarian development policies in the Senegal River delta to retrace the historical and colonial roots of a conflict sparked by large-scale land acquisition for agrofuel crop cultivation initiated by foreign investors in 2010. It delves into the region’s environmental history, shaped by infrastructure projects and agricultural expansion, focusing in particular on the transformation of the Ndiaël Avifauna Reserve and the expulsion of Fulani pastoral communities from their traditional lands. It also illustrates the colonial approach towards pastoral practices and its continuity in postcolonial policies, highlighting the tension between current modernization efforts and the persistence of pastoral ways of life, showing how these practices continue to endure despite long-term ecological and political pressures.
This chapter analyses the gendered effects of IMF conditionality and advice surrounding social protection policies in Latin America. Leveraging a critical political economy lens, it demonstrates that negative gendered effects of conditionality from the end of the 20th century, which sought to rationalize the ideology and instruments of neoliberal capitalism and that were rife with contradictions, have concerning continuities in present day. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many IMF conditions and recommendations continue to be hindered by limited logics of gendered constraints or even worsened in said regard as they reflect a greater orientation toward neoliberalism. Moreover, the author critically analyzes the incomplete and insufficient ‘gender turn’ the IMF has made and warns with concern that this strategy by the IMF appropriates portions of feminist political economy understandings to fit within the goals of neoliberal paradigms.
This chapter offers an analysis on how the twin crises, the debt crisis and the climate change crisis, overburden women in the Global South and threaten the full exercise of their human rights. Through a study that includes how governments implement expenditure cutbacks, higher extractivism and other contractionary or orthodox economic policies, which in fact are deepened to mitigate the current debt crisis, they show how the debt crisis is intrinsically connected to the climate crisis in a cycle that is self-fed and damaging – in a disproportionate way – for women’s rights. Moreover, this chapter shows the need to advance with reforms of the global financial architecture in order to deal with the twin crises in a comprehensive, systemic and feminist way, for instance, through the cancellation of debt to move resources so as to facilitate the energy transition.
