The contributors to this book represent a wide breadth of scholarly approaches, including law, social and environmental science, and engineering, as well as from the arts and humanities. The chapters explore what environmental violence is and does, and the variety of ways in which it affects different communities. The authors draw on empirical data from countries and regions around the globe, including Ukraine, French Polynesia, Latin America, and the Arctic. The variety of responses to environmental violence by different communities, whether through active resistance or the creative arts, is also discussed, providing the foundation on which to build alternatives to the potentially damaging trajectory on which humans currently find themselves. This book is indispensable for researchers and policymakers in environmental policy and peacebuilding. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Creating options is an exciting and fun part of making decisions. It’s what changes “I have to do this” (reluctantly solving a problem) to “I get to do this” (enthusiastically creating an opportunity). People often excuse their decisions by saying, “I didn’t have a choice – it’s just something I had to do.” But that’s rarely true. Decision options are almost always available.

If one young person is about to make a decision, helping them construct options is relatively straightforward. Once they are clear about which values might be affected, they can generate different options likely to satisfy these qualities.

Social work has always existed in a society with opposing values and ideologies, but in the years of liberal consensus (up to the 1990s or early 2000s) it was possible for social workers to have a legitimacy, as the values of human rights and social justice, of caring for others, received tokenistic attention from political leaders and were seen by populations as important. Much has changed in the globalised world: in the 2020s even strong social democracies, exemplified by those in Scandinavia, are experiencing both the pressures of neoliberal globalisation and the threats of right-wing populism. In this chapter, we confront political contexts and discuss social work resistance to neoliberal, patriarchal structures and alternatives for progressive change.

The war on drug users developed in tandem with neoliberalism. By examining the way that society polices and treat people who use drugs, Lenhard and Meng offer a perspective on how neoliberal governance individualizes responsibility and abstains from any kind of collective support. Lenhard and Meng make use of narratives drawn from their fieldwork to illustrate both what criminalized drug use looks like, and how people’s lives change when criminalization goes away. The chapter shows that it’s not necessarily the drugs that make people’s lives difficult and painful but rather the approach that is taken to their behavior. In one model of treatment – exemplified by the war on drugs and the use of methadone programs – a responsibility to change lies solely with the individual, and drug users are criminalized, surveilled, and disciplined primarily by law enforcement. Lenhard and Meng contrast this model with one where society is conceived as collectively responsible to provide support for whomever requires it (e.g., in the form of safe injection facilities) and addiction is understood as something to be managed both medically and holistically. What is interesting in the first model is the way that individual autonomy and responsibility is taken for granted as a preexisting, self-standing capacity that needs only to surveilled, incentivized, and disciplined from the side of the authorities. In the second model, on the contrary, autonomy and responsibility are conceived as capacities that needs to be nourished and cultivated within collective structures of trust and support.

One thoroughgoing assumption of both classical liberal and neoliberal thinking has to do with the supreme importance of property rights. Accompanying most liberal notions of property ownership is the ability to exclude all others from using your property should you wish to. This has led to a curious phenomenon – the absentee landlord. The absentee landlord owns property, controls its use, and profits from it despite not being physically present or practically using the property. In this chapter, Goel looks at how a group of holy, third-gender people in India, hijras, think about property ownership and use. Due to a century or two of colonial degradation, hijras have been stripped of many of their rights to property and its use, and occupy a marginal place in Indian society today. As a result, they maintain an elaborate system of communally maintained use-rights in the cities they live in, apportioning the ability to walk mendicant rounds and grant blessings. This chapter, more than just offering a strict dichotomous set of cases, invites the reader to think about what possession of land or space looks like when we abandon contractual exclusive ownership and instead embrace rights that come from use. The chapter thereby moves beyond the neoliberal tradition and takes the reader right to the edge of the classical liberal tradition of thought, with its emphasis on property rights as an intrinsic component of individual liberty.

Sustainability has become the privileged way businesses, NGOs, and governments think about actions they might take to remediate environmental problems and be good actors vis-à-vis natural resources and our shared climate. In turn, the way that sustainable actions are accounted for is in the language of “impacts” in which various accounting schemes seek to tabulate and communicate the degree to which some sustainable action has an effect in the world. The purpose of generating a quantifiable, representable impact is so that consumers might decide that it makes a company or product more worthwhile and more deserving of a consumer’s money on a market. On a market, a consumer has the ability to decide that other qualities (price, brand, convenience, etc.) could potentially outweigh good environmental action. The purpose of explaining all this is to show just how limited a utilitarian approach (one in which goods are measured, weighed, and seen as interchangeable) to fixing environmental problems is. What Archer demonstrates is that by tracking environmental action in terms of comparable, fungible impacts, one allows corporate actors to count their pollution or bad action, and continue to do it anyway, both masking it behind impact measures and abdicating any final responsibility to consumers. At the close of the paper, Archer offers a different way of thinking about sustainable environmental action, one that draws on various strands of indigenous thinking to illustrate what it would look like and how much more effective things would be if we understood good environmental action in terms of nonnegotiable values (in philosophy language, a “deontological” approach).

The enormity of climate change and the many ways one might address it is overwhelming. This chapter examines two movements that have sought to do so. One, the green bond movement, seeks to explicitly create opportunities for market participants to prioritize labeled sustainable and climate investment. The other, the divestment movement, seeks to move investment away from fossil fuel companies via direct political action that pressures large entities like universities and nonprofits to take their money out of fossil fuel companies and emissions intensive industries. Tripathy’s argument is twofold. First, he describes how the two movements, despite profound ideological and cultural differences, share an underlying assumption that climate change can be addressed by manipulating the workings of financial markets. Our increasing realization that neither of these movements, in isolation or in combination, has been even remotely successful in addressing the problem of climate change should remind us of a classical critique of market solutions: markets are inadequate when it comes to efficiently addressing problems with very distant and broad societal consequences. The chapter thus suggests that the failure of two market approaches with such diverse profiles should make us expand our political will and imagination to look beyond markets for future means to address climate change. Second, Tripathy suggests that in our necessary endeavor to develop alternative solutions, we may seek inspiration from the divestment movement. What is particularly interesting in this movement is its emphasis on democratic ideals of participation and inclusion in the political process itself, as well as its broad conception for a necessary agenda of societal change required to address climate change.

One characteristic of the United States has been overlapping waves of dispossession, settlement, and dispossession again. These waves of dispossession and settlement often come with big changes in economic and political systems, and with no small amount of violence. Here, Oliver writes about historically black communities who, in the wake of slavery, established townships on Indian land in what is now the state of Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, too, “Indian Land” was in part established when white settlers forced Indians out of other parts what is now the United States and into Oklahoma. A more recent wave of dispossession has come about due to the oil-fracking boom that has swept the great plains of the United States. With this boom has come oil speculation and speculators seeking to move black communities out of their homes and off their land. Often this sort of dispossession comes in the language of the home as an investment, and the home owner as an investor seeking to make profit. This logic of marketization challenges the idea of the houseowner as a cornerstone of the community and instead implies a self-understanding as a Homo economicus seeking to maximize personal utility. Oliver shows how the communities weigh these arguments as people decide what sort of community they want to live in and what money, if any, they should make from their homes.

One remarkable feature of market imperialism as it has affected welfare provision is just how deep it has become entrenched in the act of caring for people. Here, Clotworthy describes how the provision of eldercare in Denmark has been taken over by a system that aims to create idealized, active, and independent older people. Eldercare is thus increasingly subject to a “competition state” focused on optimizing costs by “responsibilizing” both care providers and senior citizens as rational and independent decision-makers. What Clotworthy shows, though, is that creating a welfare system with this sort of ideal in place runs the risk of ignoring the actual person sitting in front of you. The system acts more as a gatekeeper than a care provider, and thus leaves people alienated in their old age. Clotworthy contrasts this with eldercare systems that make a direct provision of care in order to show another way of caring for older adults.

One feature of neoliberal market imperialism is the idea that no corner of life should be off limits from market-based competition and profit. Rather predictably, this sort of economic thinking has found its way into the provision of healthcare, even in the context of countries with socialized, nationalized healthcare such as the United Kingdom. Here, Shapiro examines what happens to care for mothers and children in the United Kingdom after the introduction of neoliberal reforms and compares it to Sweden, both ostensibly national systems, but differing in their degree of market creep. Shapiro makes use of a legal, human-rights-based frame of analysis to show that birth in Sweden is far better for human well-being than it is in the UK. In terms of the overarching theme of the book, the chapter is an example of the advantages of increased government planning against neoliberal orthodoxy. Her analysis also points to the alliance between neoliberal austerity policies and the defense of traditional conservative “family values.”

Healthcare is a wonderful, tragic case of the limits of individual capacity in making consumer choices. Often health and medical decisions are so complicated, so expensive, and have consequences so far in the future that it is practically impossible for ordinary individuals to make informed choices about their medical priorities. Given this, it is a natural reach for expert help (i.e., doctors), and the hand of government regulation (in the form of national insurance schemes). Here, Gersel, Souleles, and Thaning look at two national healthcare systems (Switzerland and the United States) that make use of market-based and for-profit mechanisms to provide healthcare. The crucial difference between them is that the United States remains wedded to the idea that individuals can and should make their own informed choices about their care (see pp. 32–36). In contrast, Switzerland has put a hard limit on what can reasonably be expected of individual choice in healthcare provision and has enacted a number of mandatory regulatory guardrails. It should come as no surprise, at this point in the case book, that citizens are taken better care off in the system that actually recognizes limits to individual consumptive behavior in healthcare, rather than sticking to the presumption of the hyper-intelligent Homo-economicus. It turns out we can in this case predict what people need, better than they themselves can through their purchases in an open market (see pp. 38–44).

When we think about how innovation happens, we’re at a bit of a loss to understand it because our common-sense notions of innovation owe so much to Silicon Valley hype and propaganda. When we imagine innovation, we often think about strong personalities, aggressive and spectacular disruption, and ruthless profit-seeking. Scroggins suggests that much meaningful innovation actually happens beyond attempts at dispruptive innovation and attraction of venture capital where innovation is narrowly seen as a driver of economic activity. Instead, innovation tends to emerge from stable, rather boring groups of people working outside of job markets and for-profit corporations, on projects that are of personal or group interest, valuable to the people working on them for intrinsic, seemingly self-evident reasons. To show this, Scroggins describes two paths both taken in the same Silicon Valley do-it-yourself biotechnology laboratory. A neoliberal approach tried to use the democratization of a technology, in this case synthetic biology, as a lever to implement the classic disruptive strategy of entering low-end and opening new markets. The alternative approach proceeded on a slower and more deliberate path, without market forces and the promise of funding. What separated the alternative from the neoliberal approach is, according to Scroggins, its constant focus on community over commodity, and process over product.

Increasingly jobs are impermanent, insecure, and gig-based. From a neoliberal perspective gig work is imagined as granting more freedom than traditional forms of employment and gig workers are portrayed as entrepreneurs who work for themselves, maximizing their human capital in a flexible manner. In this chapter Elliott writes about what its like to be a tea plantation worker in Kenya, particularly given the rise of gig work in that sector. What Elliott found in the course of her field work is that many tea plantation worker are nostalgic for the permanent job and its attendant benefits, legacies of latecolonial welfare paternalism. In fact, what remaining permanent plantation jobs there are often seem like a good deal compared to gig work, since it may offer benefits absent in the gig economy, such as housing, water, and some kind of pension scheme and health insurance. Elliot does not argue in favor of a return to the “security” and “benefits” of traditional plantation labor, a highly hierarchized, exploitative, and often oppressive system with limited possibilities for social mobility. Rather, she suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the way work happens and is conceived under neoliberal conditions when traditional plantation offers preferable options to gig work. Human flourishing requires options beyond colonial tyrany and the neoliberal conception of freedom. She thus suggests that we may need to imagine ways of making a living that don’t involve a job.

This chapter looks at the provision of water by two different Southern California water agencies. One jurisdiction seeks to meet its water needs by financing and buying water from an expensive, energy-intensive desalination plant; the other jurisdiction successfully persuades its residents to reduce and change their consumption patterns of water and saves a huge amount of money as compared to the agency that bought into the desalination plant. What’s interesting from our book’s critical point of view is that the water agencies had different ideas about how people behave as water consumers. The jurisdiction that bought the expensive and wasteful desalination plant spent far more money and ended up wasting a huge amount of water because they didn’t even entertain the idea that people’s water consumption habits could change. Like good neoliberals they assumed that people were selfish, that they are attempting to maximize their individual utility, and that they had relatively stable preferences, which it would be foolish to attempt to change substantially. They paid dearly for those assumptions. In addition, the case demonstrates, how even in relation to complex problems such as handling water supplies, conscious human prediction and problem-solving can outperform market-based mechanisms. The case shows, in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy, that it is possible to plan.

When life throws you a problem, the solution our contemporary market moment proffers tends to be some sort of phone-based computer program, that is, an app. In this chapter, the authors take a look at apps designed to manage menstrual cycles. In so doing, the authors show that apps tend to individualize a problem, prize forms of efficiency and normative ideas of gender, all with a mystifying veneer of utopian market optimization and self-help. What’s interesting for us is the way that apps can individualize the problems they’re trying to solve and in so doing often seek to assist people in enhancing their human capital. The authors close with a contrast to anticapitalist punks seeking not individual optimization but collective liberation. In turn these punks offer those who menstruate a liberatory relationship with their own bodies.