Julio C. Postigo

Neoliberal policies have disrupted work relationships across the world, intensifying their subordination to productivity and profit imperatives, turning them increasingly uncertain. Although companies have developed a rhetoric of concern for workers’ integration and sa2tisfaction, many workers experience the workplace as an alienating environment. Research on work alienation has been given limited scholarly attention in the management sciences. Drawing on the perspectives of critical theory, organization studies, and business ethics, we analyzed the dynamics of alienation in large and medium companies in Peru, based on information coming from 53 in-depth interviews with workers in different industries. We examined practices of alienation along four dimensions (powerlessness, meaninglessness, self-estrangement, and social isolation), and elucidated the variety of reproduction, feedback, and resistance mechanisms through which alienating relationships are reinforced and contested. In the neoliberal world of work, alienation has become an increasingly sophisticated feature, which makes it particularly difficult to identify and criticize.

The IPCC´s six global reports assessing scientific climate knowledge are major achievements in the challenging climate science-policy interface. Yet the IPCC’s success as a scientific authority that produces credible, legitimate, and salient scientific reports for policymakers in an era when climate change is not universally acknowledged requires boundary work. This boundary work creates a highly regulated and rigorous process for producing reports, which reinforces the autonomy of scientific knowledge from politics, but it results in the exclusion of what the IPCC considers “non-scientific knowledge,” regardless of the importance of that knowledge. Indeed, despite its global influence and legitimacy, the IPCC´s knowledge production system has been increasingly criticized for underrepresenting non-Western scientific knowledges, including Indigenous Peoples’ ways of knowing. Because multi-source knowledge enhances societal capacity when it comes to responding to change, this marginalization likely hinders effective policymaking for the transition to adaptation and resilience. Reflecting on my experiences working with a group of IPCC authors´ to include Indigenous knowledges in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Working Group 2 (adaptation and vulnerability), I consider in this paper the ways the boundaries that guide IPCC knowledge production might be leveraged for engagement with, rather than the exclusion of, non-Western scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledges. In so doing, I chart a path toward a more comprehensive, multi-layered system through which to co-assess climate knowledge in future IPCC reports while protecting the reports’ legitimacy and capacity to guide international policy.

While wildfires can be beneficial and part of a natural process, there have been numerous instances around the world, particularly in recent years, where wildfires have had devastating consequences for society. Weather conditions have created extreme wildfire behavior, resulting in speeds and intensities that can overpower suppression resources. It is ever more critical that communities and agencies take actions to mitigate and prevent wildfire disasters. We have developed a tool that enables wildfire practitioners to assess the risk of wildfire to structures in a straightforward, rapid, and affordable manner. The approach leverages information often collected by communities (for example, building footprints, zoning) and available vegetation datasets. In conjunction with local wildfire management regulations, our project also used wildfire exposure to help identify wildland-urban interface (WUI) boundaries. We used this approach on three communities in the Arctic (Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon) to assess wildfire risk. We determined that there is considerable wildfire risk in urban Arctic communities, with a greater percentage of structures at high or very high risk in Fairbanks (26%) and Whitehorse (22%) compared to Anchorage (14%). Combining local wildfire management practices with wildfire exposure is a successful way to identify meaningful WUI boundaries, which are essential for obtaining mitigation funds and planning. The key to producing updatable wildfire risk and vulnerability maps is accurate, up-to-date information on vegetation, building footprints, and zoning. With this information and the tool outlined here, communities and agencies have a way to inform community wildfire protection plans and identify impactful mitigation actions.

The failure of Western science-based solutions to address global environmental change has given credence to knowledge co-production that engages multiple knowledge systems, including local knowledge. Co-production—which is widely favored by Indigenous scholars—requires understanding how Indigenous populations produce their knowledge and who the knowledge producers are. To answer the how and who , we demonstrate how local knowledge is an open and dynamic way of knowing that synthesizes information from multiple sources, including Indigenous knowledge and, at times, positivist science. To do this, we analyze Aymara farmers’ process of knowledge production, which aims to support a regime shift in the science-based agronomic technical assistance that failed to effectively address local farming challenges on its own. We surveyed and interviewed expert farmers (i.e., yapuchiri ) in 46 Bolivian Aymara communities to understand how they produce knowledge (i.e., the yapuchiri process). Aymara farmers developed a rigorous system for producing “expert farmers” ( yapuchiri) , which is geographically, culturally, and socially situated. Yapuchiri establish their expertise through experimentation, rigor, replication, and dissemination, activities that are also part of the scientific process. Our study also reveals that inequality in yapuchiri knowledge production results from structural factors such as land tenure, status in the community, gender norms, and marital status. By examining how local knowledge is produced and who produces it, we can better understand power relations and inequalities in knowledge systems as well as drivers of innovation and collaboration, all of which are fundamental for co-producing knowledge to address global environmental change.

Pastoralism in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region of Pakistan has undergone significant sociocultural, economic and ecological changes over the last three decades. The economic value of mountain pastoralism has been underestimated and ignored, leading to the loss of Indigenous ethnomedicinal knowledge and threatening food and livelihood security in the eastern Hindu Kush region. This study explores the changes and transformations in mountain pastoralism and their societal impacts, focusing on the loss of Indigenous ethnomedicinal knowledge, traditional skills, food security and livelihood sustainability. Primary data were collected through extensive field surveys conducted from 2010 to 2023. Secondary data were obtained from census reports, rural settlement records, the Food Department of Lower and Upper Chitral districts and the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) Peshawar. The study found significant changes and transformations in various aspects of mountain pastoralism, including a decrease in livestock population, alterations in grazing arrangements, the abandonment of high-pasturing practices and the loss of Indigenous ethnomedicinal knowledge and skills. Reduced livestock population causes shortage of meat, milk and other dairy products. Insufficient self-provision of livestock products has led to heavy dependence on external foodstuff on the market, which has raised the prices of food items to unaffordable levels, leading to food insecurity. Further, this is the first ever study to document ethnomedicinal Indigenous information about 61 plants species and one mineral and their therapeutic application. It is inferred that changes in mountain pastoralism underlay the swift erosion of traditional ethnomedicinal knowledge. Finally, this study provides nuanced insights for conservation of medicinal flora and establishes a foundational framework for further scientific investigations in phytochemistry and ethnopharmacology to evaluate novel active ingredients for potential drug discovery within the area. The findings will be useful for policymakers and practitioners in designing effective programmes and policies to decrease vulnerability and enhance food and livelihood security. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

Enhanced anthropogenic climatic variability challenges small farmers. In the Sumapaz páramo (Colombia), higher irregularity in precipitation and temperature reduces the quality of pasture and cattle health. Data from surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups were analyzed to understand livestock farmers’ responses to the impacts of climatic variability. To estimate the communities’ resilience in the páramo, we used the capitals framework, the Baseline Resilience Indicator for Communities (BRIC), and cluster analysis. The responses of most households aim to reduce the impacts of climatic variability on the production system, chiefly intensifying practices such as the rotation of paddocks, livelihood diversification, purchase of grass, and buying and selling livestock. Interestingly, farmers did not recognize the value of the types of capital for responding to climatic variability. Results showed that the use of available physical, social, and economic capitals render the farming system resilient. Our probit model estimated that economic and human capitals are the largest and most significant contributors to communities’ capacity to respond to climatic variability. However, pre-existing non-climatic vulnerabilities are also important. For example, poverty hinders farmers from using their income in response to climatic variability. The place-based measurements used in this research are easily understood and applicable by local policy makers to address increasing climate variability.

The health of soil, a fundamental resource for life on Earth, is severely compromised by global environmental change. Evidence shows that the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local communities influences sustainable land management, hence the importance of understanding Indigenous soil classification. Using a participatory approach, we conducted semistructured interviews, focus groups, and collective mapping of soils in 4 Aymara communities of the Bolivian Altiplano. We found that families in the 4 communities organize their territory in homogenous zones, based upon characteristics perceivable by sight, touch, smell, and taste. The description and meaning of the zones refer to characteristics such as location, soil color, preferred land use, and topography. We argue that homogenous zones are kaleidoscopic and polysemic units of spatial organization of the Aymara territory. Each meaning conveyed is like a face of a kaleidoscope and refers to different features of the zone. They are polysemic because the descriptions of the zones refer to multiple elements of different kinds (eg color and fertility). Indigenous and local knowledge of soils has coevolved with thousands of years of Altiplano farming, leading to prescriptive and flexible homogenous zones of sustainable land management. These knowledge systems and the cultures they belong to constitute crucial elements for generating knowledge supporting transitions to sustainability.