In this commentary paper, the current state of research on the tightly connected and bi-directional relationships among modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change is critically assessed and reviewed. An emerging branch of research has begun to conceptualize linkages between slavery and environmental change. Responding to a gap in the extant literature, this paper synthesizes and makes sense of this emerging research base and proposes a future research agenda for exploring the slavery-environment nexus. Through an exploration of 19 key texts which explicitly examine the relationship between slavery and environmental change, spanning across diverse disciplines and spatial scales, we draw out two key arguments that can be adopted in proposing a future research agenda. Firstly, we identify the sectoral emergence of the nexus,
The literature on climate migration is increasingly concerned with linking the natural-environmental and socio-cultural dimensions of risk response. However, the epistemological disjuncture between ‘objective’ and subjective accounts of the environment is an impediment. In particular, despite clear evidence of mutual relevance, work on the emotional landscape of climate change has remained separate from more systematic analyses. Aiming to resolve this, this paper uses the case of a Cambodian beggar to show how recent developments across three fields have laid the groundwork for the structural and emotional dimensions of climate change response to be engaged with under a coherent theoretical rubric.
This article presents evidence for an adjusted and refocused systems theory of labour migration in Cambodia. Specifically, it seeks to highlight first, how migration in Cambodia may be understood as a multiscalar phenomenon characterised by pragmatism and flexibility; secondly, it emphasises the undergirding role of traditional rural norms in shaping and mediating the systematic process of labour movement; and finally, it presents evidence concerning how these structures constitute a vessel of social change, not only from urban to rural, but also from the rural to urban. In this way, a picture is presented of Cambodian migration as an adaptable, but nevertheless highly patterned process which is rapidly reordering the Kingdom's cities and villages alike.
An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural – urban divide is due to their precarity. In doing so, this article draws on a conceptualisation of precarity which recognises it as emerging from the specific political economy of Cambodia, and as something that is neither new, nor confined to conditions of labour alone. As such, in looking to precarity as a means of conceptualising the relations of power which shape impacts of climate change, we advance a ‘climate precarity’ lens as a means of understanding how adaptation to climate change is an issue of power, rooted in a specific geographical context, and mobile over the rural–urban divide.
Highlights
Reliance on microfinance for everyday survival will be deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The majority of microfinance borrowers globally are women.
Servicing microfinance loans will heighten burdens of (un)-paid work that women undertake as part of social reproduction.
Over-indebtedness leads to women’s bodily and emotional ‘depletion’.
The global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.