RC40 Regional Writing Workshop: Southeast Asia

Beyond Adaptation: New Insights from Southeast Asia’s Agrifood Systems

Over the years, there has been increasing discontent with the concept and practice of climate change adaptation. Scholars argued that, conceptually, the dominant view of adaptation is too narrow to capture the multifaceted, nonlinear dynamics of social-ecological change (Nightingale, 2018) and yet too abstract to be translated into concrete, measurable outcomes (Orlove, 2022). As a field of practice, adaptation has produced an assemblage of identities, practices, and institutions that renders climate change as a techno-managerial problem, reinforcing regimes of power and knowledge that produced anthropogenic climate change in the first place (Newell and Paterson, 2010; Clapp, 2022).

In the agrifood sector, early adaptation research and practice gravitated towards the ‘pipeline’ model of agricultural research and development that narrowly conceived adaptation as technological change (Biggs, 2007). Recently, there has been a growing body of literature that attempts to broaden what adaptation means in the agrifood sector. Scholars begin to look at adaptation as a multi-scalar change process inseparable from broader processes of change (Darnhofer et al., 2016; Wise et al., 2014). Still, most adaptation research and programs invoke ‘transformational adaptation’ in ways that largely ignores the possibility of structural and paradigmatic change (Borras et al., 2022; Taylor et al., 2022). The first ever United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place in 2021 has made evident the deep paradigmatic tensions about ‘food systems’ and whose/which goals and values should underpin adaptation and system-wide transformations.

Southeast Asia presents a compelling case to rethink adaptation, particularly in the agrifood systems contexts. Its geographical position close to the Indian and Pacific Oceans and its sensitivity to the El Niño Southern Oscillation and monsoon have rendered the region vulnerable to various climatic hazards and their impacts, including rising sea levels, heat waves, floods, droughts, and increasingly unpredictable weather events. These climatic hazards interact with profound social, economic, and ecological transformations, including rapid urbanization, deepening of global market integration, widening inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite the declining contribution of the agriculture sector to the economies of most countries in the region, smallholder farmers are observed to persist amidst the social-ecological transformations (Rigg et al., 2016). Smallholding farming is, however, challenged by the rapid industrialization that has occurred in the 1980s, which to some extent led to what Dani Rodrik termed premature deindustrialization (Rodrik, 2016), a situation whereby middle- and low-income countries de-industrialize at income levels and developmental stage lower than what is experienced by developed countries. This phenomenon, in combination with other socio-cultural contexts, influences the type of urbanization and rural-urban linkages emerging in the twenty-first century Southeast Asia. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the climate impacts on the agrifood systems and revealed the highly inequitable distribution of income across the supply chains.

The particular ecological, social, cultural, and economic positionalities of many Southeast Asian countries offer different ways to understand, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. While dominant narratives have been brought at the international level and pushed down to government policies and climate strategies, the dynamics at the grassroot level have rendered climate adaptation to be more complex than it was expected, often leading toward maladaptation (Bertana et al., 2022; Juhola et al., 2016; Reckien et al., 2023). And while studies have documented the impact of climate change on agrifood systems in Southeast Asia, and at least teased out ways in which farmers or cities adapt to the situations (Funk et al., 2020; Kusakari et al., 2014; Shrestha et al., 2018; Sissoko et al., 2011; Thant et al., 2022), there are only a handful of studies that attempt to revisit the multiplicity of adaptation (Dagli, 2022; 2023; Dwiartama et al., 2016) and how it supports or constrains equitable, just, and sustainable transformation of agrifood systems, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia.

We, therefore, call for ideas and papers that can offer new insights into how we understand climate adaptation in the agrifood sector, preferably using empirical findings within Southeast Asian countries. We look towards new and alternative ways of framing climate adaptation, including (but not limited to) post-1.5-degree future, adaptation beyond human, non-adoption/non-adaptation, culture-based responses to losses and damages, less documented forms of transformative adaptation including structural and enabling transformations[1], adaptive transformations[2], the ethics of care in adaptation pathways, and documenting intangible aspects of adaptation.  

We invite you to share your abstract with us and engage in an online regional writing workshop organized under the auspice of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Agriculture and Food (RC-40). After the writing workshop, we will then invite you to develop a full paper and submit it collectively to a Special Issue in a selected reputable journal, preferably the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food (IJSAF; Q2). The timeline for this writing workshop is as follows:

            Call for Abstracts (deadline)              : 30 June 2024

            RC40 Regional Writing Workshop    : 31 July 2024

            Submission of full papers                   : 15 December 2024

            Peer-review process                            : December 2024 – June 2025

Please send us your abstract before 30 June 2024 to Dr. Winifredo Dagli (wbdagli1@up.edu.ph).

We look forward to collaborating with you in the future!

Winifredo Dagli (University of the Philippines at Los Baños)

Angga Dwiartama (Institut Teknologi Bandung)

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Footnotes:

[1]Structural transformation entails fundamental redesign of the agrifood systems, including production and consumption patterns, system goals and intended outcomes with attention to politics and power dynamics that produce unsustainable outcomes, while enabling transformation requires change processes that “emerge from below through networks of civic movements and grassroots activity that together, in often unruly ways, construct wider change” in the agrifood systems and in society as a whole (Scoones et al., 2020 p.66).

[2]Adaptive transformation refers to ongoing social-ecological changes in the deep leverage points of a complex system—divorced from the ideological underpinnings of adaptation—that constitute equitable, just, and sustainable community and societal responses to and the outcomes of the intertwined climatic and non-climatic drivers of change (Dagli, 2023). 

REFERENCES

Biggs, S. (2007). Building on the positive: an actor innovation systems approach to finding and  promoting pro poor natural resources institutional and technical innovations. Int. J. Agric. Resour, 6(2), 144-164.

Borras Jr, S. M., Scoones, I., Baviskar, A., Edelman, M., Peluso, N. L., & Wolford, W. (2022).  Climate change and agrarian struggles: an invitation to contribute to a JPS Forum. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(1), 1-28

Clapp, J. 2022. Concentration and crises: exploring the deep roots of vulnerability in the global industrial food system, J Peasant Stud., DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.212901

Dagli, W. (2022). “Central” and “peripheral” adaptation pathways of entangled agrifood systems transformations. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 6 (2022), 445. 01-20. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.984276 

Dagli, W. (2023). Transformational Adaptation: Agrifood Systems Analysis from the Philippines (PhD Thesis, University of Guelph, Canada) https://hdl.handle.net/10214/27663

Darnhofer, I., Lamine, C., Strauss, A., Navarrete, M., 2016. The resilience of family farms: towards a relational approach. J. Rural Stud. 44, 111–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.01.013

Dwiartama, A., Rosin, C., Campbell, H. (2016). Understanding agrifood systems as assemblages: the worlds of rice in Indonesia. In Biological Economies: experimentation and the politics of agri-food frontiers (Eds: R. Le Heron, H. Campbell, N. Lewis, M. Carolan). Routledge Publishing.

Nightingale, A. J. (2018). The socioenvironmental state: Political authority, subjects, and transformative socionatural change in an uncertain world. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(4), 688–711. doi:10. 1177/2514848618816467

Newell, P., & Paterson, M. (2010). Climate capitalism: global warming and the transformation of the global economy. Cambridge University Press

Orlove, B. (2022). The Concept of Adaptation. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 47, 535-581. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112320-095719

Rigg, J., Salamanca, A., & Thompson, E. C. (2016). The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia's persistent smallholder. Journal of Rural Studies, 43, 118-133

Scoones, I., Stirling, A., Abrol, D., Atela, J., Charli-Joseph, L., Eakin, H., ... & Yang, L. 2020. Transformations to sustainability: combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.12.00

Taylor, M., Eriksen, S., Vincent, K., Brooks, N., Scoville-Simonds, M., Schipper, L. (2022). Putting ‘vulnerable groups’ at the centre of adaptation interventions by promoting transformative adaptation as a learning process.  Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation

Wise, R.M., Fazey, I., Stafford Smith, M., Park, S.E., Eakin, H.C., Archer van Garderen, E.R.M., Campbell, B. (2014). Reconceptualising adaptation to climate change as part of pathways of change and response. Glob Environ Change, 28, 325-336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.12.002