Grassroots innovations, understood as bottom-up experiments on more socio-ecologically sound practices, have been a primary focus in civic-oriented studies on transformative pathways to sustainability. However, grassroots innovation studies often adopt a socio-technical systemic approach, whereby grassroots actors’ aspirations, mobilization efforts, and visions beyond the scope of certain socio-technical transitions are largely left off.

textabstractRural politics in the time of global land grabs and neoliberal agricultural development have received much international attention. However, the processes at work in the post-socialist countryside (such as in Russia and Ukraine) are rarely addressed in the critical agrarian studies debates. The prefix ‘post-’ in post-socialist and post-Soviet studies is often associated with lagging behind. This doctoral study demonstrates that the analysis of rural politics in these settings can generate new insights about contemporary changes in the agrarian world.

textabstractMainstream adherence to land titling as a strategy to address rural poverty has gained even more sway against the backdrop of the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale farmland acquisitions, known to some as “global land grabbing”. The orthodox narrative, embraced in toto by organisations such as the World Bank, is that formal property rights mitigate the risks of these land acquisitions and allow the poor to access the benefits of these acquisitions.