This book examines a diverse range of community food initiatives in light of their everyday practices, innovations, and contestations.While community food initiatives aim to tackle issues like food security, food waste, or food poverty, it is a cause for concern for many when they are framed as the next big "solution" to the problems of the current industrialised food system. They have been critiqued for being too neoliberal, elitist, and localist; for not challenging structural in...

This collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse econ...

The message of Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development is clear: livelihoods approaches are an essential lens on questions of rural development, but these need to be situated in a better understanding of political economy. The book looks at the role of social institutions and the politics of policy, as well as issues of identity, gender and generation. The relationships between sustainability and livelihoods are examined, and the book situates livelihoods analysis within a wider poli...

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement.As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cu...

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma.In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African Ame...

New Third Edition!If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical-the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it.This Third Edition features:• Updated key references, data, resources, and examples, from global warming, Obama's election, and gay marriage to transgender/cisgender and the Occupy Movemen...

International development interventions often fail because development experts assume that our world is linear and straightforward when in reality it is complex, highly dynamic and unpredictable. Things rarely happen in the way that they were planned. The dominance of logical planning models in international development therefore needs to be challenged and replaced by a complexity-based understanding of how change happens. Navigating Complexity in International Development describes three ...

We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is important: it must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make among competing priorities.Even when the language of efficiency is used carefully, that language alone is not enough. Unilingualism will not...

Co-production and co-creation occur when citizens participate actively in delivering and designing the services they receive. It has come increasingly onto the agenda of policymakers, as interest in citizen participation has more generally soared. Expectations are high and it is regarded as a possible solution to the public sector’s decreased legitimacy and dwindling resources, by accessing more of society’s capacities. In addition, it is seen as part of a more general drive to reinvigorat...

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.In this book, leading writers suc...

This unique and insightful text offers an exploration of the origins and subsequent development of the concept of just sustainability.Introducing Just Sustainabilities discusses key topics, such as food justice, sovereignty and urban agriculture; community, space, place(making) and spatial justice; the democratization of our streets and public spaces; how to create culturally inclusive spaces; intercultural cities and social inclusion; green-collar jobs and the just transition; and...

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban the...