Marcus Taylor

• PhD Sociology
• Professor (Associate) at Queen's University

Transformative adaptation requires transformation among those who fund, plan, implement and evaluate interventions. In response, we emphasise the need for donor and implementing organisations to self-reform to create the necessary space and support for adaptation projects that embrace a transformative ethos. We argue that projects can appropriately...

The adoption of innovations in rice cultivation is presumed to operate in a rational manner, wherein new technologies or practices that successfully increase productivity or resource efficiency are adopted by target farmers based on cost-benefit calculations. In contrast, this paper examines a case of a public initiative to promote the system of ri...

It is frequently argued that local or traditional farmer knowledge must play a vital role in shaping climate-resilient agricultural development in southern India. At present, however, the Indian agricultural extension system has an uncomfortable relationship with farmer knowledge. Typically, it has pursued a relatively top-down and linear technolog...

In response to the climate crisis, there has been much focus on climate-smart agriculture (CSA); namely, technologies and practices that enhance adaptation, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and contribute to food security; the so-called triple win. Success has tended to be measured in terms of the number of farmers adopting CSA with less focus give...

Overviews current debates about the intersection of ecological crisis, agricultural production and rural development. Highlights the salient contributions emerging from the field of critical agrarian studies, showing the importance of this analysis for conceptualizing the root causes of ecological crises. Provides short but clear empirical examples...

Within the field of critical development studies, climate change raises pressing analytical, ethical and practical questions. By engaging with mainstream thinking, critical approaches have sought to shift climate change debates from a narrow focus on technical issues towards broader ethical questions around the interface of climate change and devel...

This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulne...

The emergence of ‘political agronomy’ — a research agenda that interrogates the knowledge politics through which agronomic debates are constructed, shaped and contested — has added a new and important tool for the analysis of agricultural research and policy making in development contexts. This article seeks to advance the scope of political agrono...

Projects to foster climate-resilience have become a standard feature of agricultural and rural development strategies across the global South. Yet what resilience means in practice is uncertain and contested. To this end, we examine a state-led project to create a ‘climate-resilient village’ in a drought-prone region of south India. The project inv...

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualiz...

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank's Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the...

Indian policy makers have persistently argued that promoting hybrid rice varieties offers an effective means to raise yields, increase rural incomes and address food security challenges. Despite considerable public investment, however, targets for hybrid adoption have repeatedly been missed and the unfolding of this projected ‘new Green Revolution’...

The figure of the model farmer is a ubiquitous presence within networks that facilitate knowledge transfer from extension services to intended beneficiaries. The diverse political-economic and socio-cultural roles that model farmers assume as intermediaries within agricultural extension networks, however, are rarely afforded critical scrutiny. To d...

This contribution examines how and why the concept of adaptation has moved from the periphery of social science thinking to become a key concept in both academia and policy planning. It argues that, with the rise of climate change as a pivotal concern, adaptation has become a dominant means to think about the interaction between society and environ...

The system of rice intensification (SRI) has been promoted across Asia as a means to improve rice yields while decreasing water use and external inputs. It is argued to be a generalisable means by which to revalidate smallholder livelihoods and improve food security across the region. Current debates about SRI, however, remain predominantly technic...

From the rise of fully automated factories to the creation of new migrant work forces, the world of work, employment and production is rapidly changing. By reshaping the global distribution of wealth, jobs and opportunities, these processes are unleashing profound social and environmental tensions, and new political movements. As a means to address...

Review of: Labour, state and society in rural India: A class relational approach, by Jonathan Pattenden, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016

Transitioning towards ‘Climate-smart Agriculture’ (CSA) is currently promoted by key international organisations as an obligatory task to ensure food supply for an anticipated 9 billion people by 2050. Despite the rubric's newfound importance, the conceptual underpinnings of CSA are often left unclear leading to uncertainty as to practical realisat...

Conceptualizing development in terms of risk management has become a prominent feature of mainstream development discourse. This has led to a convergence between the rubrics of financial inclusion and risk management whereby improved access for poor households to private sector credit, insurance and savings products is represented as a necessary st...

This paper engages mainstream and Marxist accounts of the 'rise of the West', focusing on work in the traditions of Wallerstein and Brenner. In highlighting common problems associated with conceptualising capitalism in bounded, systemic terms, the paper poses the need to relinquish the familiar motif of a ‘transition to capitalism’. In its place, t...

95. ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-902-8 (PB). Jason Moore's eagerly awaited text offers a powerful reworking of established paradigms in both Marxist and ecological thought. Moore's ambition is nothing less than to provide a fundamentally new way of thinking about capitalism, including a reinterpretation of its dynamic tendencies and its historical limits....

Examines the discourses and practices of climate change adaptation in the context of pastoralist herders in contemporary Mongolia. Uses a historical political ecology approach to critique narratives of vulnerability and resilience that naturalise hazards on the Mongolian steppe. Examines issues of changing herd compositions, indebtedness and class...

This chapter situates the production of vulnerability within agrarian Pakistan by historicising climate change as part of a longer trajectory of producing agrarian environments. It does so by situating contemporary shifts within the context of agrarian transformations that have unfolded over the past century and a half. Two key points are made. Fir...

Intro and first three chapters of The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation.

Chapter one of my book, The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation. Synthesises streams from political ecology to build a critique of climate change adaptation as a framework for understanding society-climate interactions.

This book provides the first systematic critique of the concept of climate change adaptation within the field of international development. Drawing on a reworked political ecology framework, it argues that climate is not something ‘out there’ that we adapt to. Instead, it is part of the social and biophysical forces through which our lived environm...

With reference to agrarian environments in southern India, this article argues that insights from political ecology provide an important way to move forward on debates on human security and climate change adaptation. While current human security perspectives helpfully situate the pursuit of climate change adaption within questions of social justice...

This paper uses an approach grounded in political ecology and political economy to explain the social and ecological foundations of groundwater overexploitation and agrarian distress within semi-arid Andhra Pradesh It emphasises how relations of credit/debt have become intertwined with the tenuous social and ecological foundations of smallholder pr...

The concept of ‘financial inclusion’ has become a central trope that legitimates a wide range of contemporary development practices. By constructing a new object of development – the ‘financially excluded’ – it facilitates the expansion of an increasingly corporatized microfinance technocracy. The present paper problematizes the underlying binaries...

Within neoliberal development discourse, the poor are represented as entrepreneurial subjects for whom integration into formalized financial systems can facilitate their escape from poverty. This paper examines how the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh reveals significant fault lines that underlie this narrative. It argues that the crisis...

This article emphasises how labour codes of conduct mediate a series of complex and evolving power relations that span the politics of consumption through to the politics of production. It argues that codes of conduct not only reflect an uneven division of labour – in which firms are stratified in size, productivity and labour conditions – but acti...

Through the lens of the new institutional economics development is represented as a process of cultural and institutional transformation in which informal social institutions that hinder the operation of market forces are dismantled and replaced with formalised, liberal institutional frameworks to facilitate rational economic activity. The World Ba...

This contribution argues that competition state theory unduly marginalises the political dimensions of state reform. Institutional reform is not simply political in the sense that policies are contested, but because reform reshapes the very nature, process and possibilities of politics itself. I argue that the competition state project has sought t...

This introductory article to the special issue surveys the field of international labour studies and examines the key areas of growth over the past decade. It locates three core areas of the new literature: 1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of worke...

The current triple crisis of food, oil and credit has accentuated social instability across global capitalism, with the most severe effects displaced onto the urban and rural poor who, in the face of escalating prices for staple goods, face deepening immiseration. Mounting social unrest has led the international institutions of global governance to...

The editors of this volume have posed the challenging question of whether Latin America is moving into a “post-neoliberal” era. Without doubt, the rise of populist socialism in Venezuela and Bolivia, the uncertain politics of post-crisis Argentina, and the continentwide rise of anti-neoliberal social movements have thrown a stern rebuttal to the of...

This paper argues that reconceptualising the relationship between production and uneven development is an important step towards overcoming what the editors of this volume term 'anachronistic approaches' in contemporary development theory. Notwithstanding the centrality of production within global capitalism, its status within critical development...

Nation-building projects involve a wider array of social processes than is often emphasised in the mainstream literature. To perpetuate the nation-state requires a firm material basis and is therefore predicated on the relationships and institutions through which goods are produced, distributed and consumed. This article analyses the material under...

In approaching the debates over globalization, neoliberal hegemony and the ‘competition state’, the case of Chile is particularly instructive not least because far-reaching neoliberal reform long precedes the recent academic interest in globalization. Following the profound restructuring drive initiated under the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinoc...

This paper examines the recent process of transformation within the World Bank as a series of reactive mediations to the crisis-laden course of capitalist development on a global scale over the last two decades. Two aspects of the Bank's attempt to construct a new development agenda as a response to contradictions emergent within neoliberal-style s...

This article subjects the much-heralded Chilean `model' of social policy reform to a critical analysis. It places the Chilean reforms within the political—economic conjuncture from which they emerged and relates the trends towards privatization and decentralization to the larger neoliberal movement towards societal restructuring. Through an examina...

This article subjects the much-heralded Chilean 'model' of social policy reform to a critical analysis. It places the Chilean reforms within the political-economic conjuncture from which they emerged and relates the trends towards privatization and decentralization to the larger neoliberal movement towards societal restructuring. Through an examina...

This article examines the paradigm of labour flexibilization by first scrutinizing the analytical principles upon which various normative positions rest and second by providing an appraisal of the Chilean experience which will concretise these theoretical concerns. It begins by engaging in a brief deconstruction of neoclassical theories of the labo...

The potential for sovereign default in Latin America has become a very real possibility. This was driven home by Argentina's recent sovereign debt crisis, which represented the largest default in history. The Argentine case sug-gests that the current market-based approach of sovereign debt management is not conducive to dealing effec-tively with th...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Warwick, 2003.