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Elderly women in depopulating and aging rural Japan confront their everyday challenges collectively through business practices based on kokorozashi – altruistic entrepreneurial practices through which they generate livelihoods and improve collective well-being. Drastic demographic changes and intensified economic globalization in the 1980s provoked precarity in rural livelihoods that depend on natural resource management. These changes simultaneously have opened up opportunities for women to start businesses assisted by state policies for rural revitalization and women’s empowerment. Previous studies have examined different contributions and pathways that rural women’s businesses have made to collective well-being. These studies rarely investigate how ethics come into play in collective natural resource management and its constitutive relationships among commons, subjectivities, and more-than-human elements. Drawing on a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’s approach to commoning, we investigate power dynamics and intersecting affective processes, including those related to gender, aging bodies, rurality, and more-than-human elements and demonstrate how ethical subjectivities and more-than-human communities are emerging in aging and depopulating rural Japan.

International audience

This book explores the impact of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Japan and Australia, where it has heralded change in the rights of Indigenous Peoples to have their histories, cultures, and lifeways taught in culturally appropriate and respectful ways in mainstream education systems. The book examines the impact of imposed education on Indigenous Peoples’ pre-existing education values and systems, considers emergent approaches towards Indigenous education in the post-imperial context of migration, and critiques certain professional development, assessment, pedagogical approaches, and curriculum developments. This book will be of great interest to researchers and lecturers of education specialising in Indigenous Education, as well as postgraduate students of education and teachers specialising in Indigenous Education.

Goats are renowned for their resilience in harsh environments and their relatively low investment for maintenance. Goat husbandry is thought to be a tool for poverty alleviation. Empirical evidence of this is scant. This research analysed the role of goat husbandry in supporting the livelihoods of smallholders from the Bajío region in Michoacán, Mexico. The Bajío is renowned for the good cropping potential of the land; smallholder goat husbandry is present too but largely unstudied by scholars and ignored by policy makers. The smallholders in the study area deploy a range of assets, natural, physical, social, human and financial, in goat husbandry. Their goat husbandry is dairy-oriented; it is a source of weekly income and insurance and therefore an alternative to out-migration. Farmers’ relatively high social capital allows them to access cheap crop residues and take turns herding flocks. The goat dairy market is controlled by a powerful caramel industry. In turn, the margins smallholders obtain are rather limited. The nutritional value of goat milk is not exploited in their households as it is seen as a ‘fever’ cause, related to brucellosis. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies are based on the sustainable livelihoods approach linked to actor-oriented approaches. The study revealed smallholders’ agency by engaging in goat husbandry to deal with a complex institutional and political context dominated by economic liberalization intertwined with local realities such as the agroecology. We emphasize the importance of these findings in development strategies for small-scale goat husbandry systems.

Feminist scholars are deeply involved in current global debates surrounding natural resource management. Looking at feminists’ engagement through the entry point of the commons and commoning, feminists’ voices are diverse. Somewhat separate from feminist discussions on the commons and commoning, scholars of postcapitalist community economies have recently linked their scholarship to the study of the commons and commoning. This essay expands feminist political ecology’s approaches to the study of the commons and commoning by integrating some insights from existing eco- and autonomist Marxist feminisms as well as postcapitalist community economies. We first discuss a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’s perspective. After introducing our site and methods, we explore the productivity of this framework through an examination of the case of a women-led cooperative that has been producing agave syrup in rural Mexico for the last two decades. To conclude, we discuss several insights this approach may offer for transformative politics.

Feminist scholars are deeply involved in current global debates surrounding natural resource management. Looking at feminists’ engagement through the entry point of the commons and commoning, feminists’ voices are diverse. Somewhat separate from feminist discussions on commons and commoning, scholars of postcapitalist community economies have recently linked their scholarship to the study of commoning. This essay expands feminist political ecology’s approaches to the study of the commons and commoning by integrating some insights from existing eco- and autonomist Marxist feminims as well as postcapitalist community economies. We first discuss a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ perspective. After introducing our site and methods, we explore the productivity of this framework through examination of the case of a women-led cooperative that has been producing agave syrup in rural Mexico for the last two decades. To conclude, we discuss several insights this approach may offer for transformative politics.

Over the past two decades postdevelopment critics, who often draw on the analysis of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, have challenged developmentalism by making visible mechanisms of power within the apparatus of development. While these analyses have opened certain fields of the possible, the continued strength of developmentalism suggests that we must extend the postdevelopment project. This essay draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism to illuminate one set of possibilities not visible within the existing postdevelopment analytic. Working with Development as a social fantasy, this paper examines the formation of the subject and the role of enjoyment in stabilizing modern and postmodern society. The last section of this paper tentatively maps a few directions in which this approach may extend the postdevelopment project.

What kinds of development become imaginable if we reject 'the national economy' as a legitimate object of experts' understanding and control? Drawing on a combination of antiessentialist Marxian theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory, Bergeron examines the mechanisms by which 'the nation' is produced as a manageable economic entity within both mainstream and critical narratives concerned with the question of development. By exposing the multitude of sometimes contradictory knowledges and practices that exist within and outside dominant approaches to the study of development economics, this book resignifies 'the nation' in a manner whose contradictory and heterogeneous effects cascade through and destabilize the interlocking web of signifiers for which it serves as a nodal point. With this text, Bergeron is opening up a space from which we may imagine alternatives that are not visible on terms legitimate within the current apparatus of development.

Over the past two decades postdevelopment critics, who often draw on the analysis of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, have challenged developmentalism by making visible mechanisms of power within the apparatus of development. While these analyses have opened certain fields of the possible, the continued strength of developmentalism suggests that we must extend the postdevelopment project. This essay draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis & Marxism to illuminate one set of possibilities not visible within the existing postdevelopment analytic. Working with Development as a social fantasy, this paper examines the formation of the subject & the role of enjoyment in stabilizing modern & postmodern society. The last section of this paper tentatively maps a few directions in which this approach may extend the postdevelopment project. References. Adapted from the source document.

Development bureaucrats are the human instruments of the policies that mobilise funds, create organisations and underwrite interventions. For their home audiences development organisations need to present bureaucrats who are reliable instruments. In the field these same organisations need staff who can do what makes sense. This arrangement works until what makes sense in head office does not work in the field. At that point staff have to 'marry off' these two worlds. How these staff are understood shapes both how they can be approached by locals and how they should be supported by their organisations. This paper draws on research done in a donor organisation headquarters, in a military unit tasked with conducting development activities and at a field-level donor mission in a failed state. It explores the relevance, methods to research, the plausibility and the productivity of understanding the development bureaucrats who do this 'marrying off' as non-unitary subjects.