Papers by George Cusworth
The Geographical Journal
With its focus on the species level of the Anthropos, there is growing concern that the Anthropoc... more With its focus on the species level of the Anthropos, there is growing concern that the Anthropocene analytic lacks the conceptual nuance needed to grapple with the unevenly distributed harms and responsibilities tied up with issues of biodiversity loss, global warming, and land use change. Conceptual variants like the patchy Anthropocene have been proposed to better capture the justice implications of these socio‐ecological crises, directing attention to their spatially ubiquitous yet context‐specific character. The figure of the plantation has come to play an important role in this scholarship due to the contribution intensive agriculture had made to these interlinking crises. Through empirical study of the regenerative agricultural movement, this paper reflects on how regenerative farmers use different sites (fields, soils, livestock stomachs) to apprehend their agro‐ethical responsibilities to more‐than‐human actors both near to and far from the landscapes they manage. Our aims ...
Environment and Planning A, Aug 18, 2022
This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to w... more This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to which institutional equity investors, and specifically ‘universal owners’ with highly diversified shareholdings, engage with public issues associated with livestock agriculture. As share ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, and the market for Environmental, Social and Governance investment products grows, these investors are increasingly involved in governing the activities of publicly traded corporations (including leading agribusinesses). This paper brings together political economy and marketization studies research to explore how universal owners become concerned about particular environmental and ethical problems, why they overlook other public concerns, and in what ways their selective engagement with ethico-political issues might be altering the content of food politics. Comparing universal owners’ engagements with farm animal welfare issues and with tropical deforestation within animal feed supply chains, we argue that these institutions engage with tropical deforestation because it presents a financially material risk to firms across multiple industries. By contrast, the specificity of farm animal welfare issues to agribusinesses means that they do not pose a material risk to the overall performance of universal owners’ highly diversified asset portfolios. Efforts to concern universal owners about livestock agriculture's social, environmental and health impacts thus generate a food politics which focuses primarily on risks to global economic systems and renders animals themselves distinctly immaterial.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Jul 8, 2022
Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are ... more Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are driving sustained discussions about the place of beef and dairy farming in a sustainable food system. Proposed solutions range from ‘clean‐cow’ sustainable intensification to ‘no‐cow’, animal free futures, both of which encourage a disruptive break with past practice. This paper reviews the alternative proposition of regenerative agriculture that naturalises beef and dairy production by invoking the past to justify future, nature‐based solutions. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK, it first introduces two of the most prominent strands to this green rebranding of cattle: the naturalisation of ruminant methane emissions and the optimisation of soil carbon sequestration via the use of ruminant grazing animals. Subsequent thematic analysis outlines the three political strategies of post‐pastoral storytelling, political ecological baselining and a probiotic model of bovine biopolitics that perform this naturalisation. The conclusion assesses the potential and the risks of this approach to grounding the geographies and the temporalities of agricultural transition in the Anthropocene: an epoch in which time is out of joint and natures are multiple and non‐analogue, such that they provide slippery and contested grounds for political solutions.
Journal of Rural Studies, Dec 1, 2021
A thesis submitted to The University of Gloucestershire in accordance with the requirements of th... more A thesis submitted to The University of Gloucestershire in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Natural and Social Sciences A research project co-funded by the Countryside and Community
Social Studies of Science, Nov 15, 2022
The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to cla... more The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to classify and measure the natural world interact with the things they were designed to observe. The idea of performativity also captures the way these interactions shape or distort the governance activities that metrics are used to inform. The performativity of metrics reveals how mundane practices of measurement and auditing are inscribed with substantial power. This has proven particularly true for the global warming metrics, like GWP100, that are central to the management of anthropogenic climate change. Greenhouse gases are materially heterogenous, and the metrics used to commensurate their various warming impacts influence the distribution of both culpability and capital in climate policy and markets. The publication of a new warming metric, GWP* (or GWP Star), has generated a modest scientific controversy, as a diverse cast of stakeholders recognize this performativity seek to influence the metrological regime under which they live. We analyse this controversy, particularly as it unfolded in the fractious discourse around sustainable food and farming, to develop the concept of reflexive performativity: where actors are anticipatory and strategic in their engagement with the metrics that are used to govern their lives. We situate this idea in relation to, and in tentative evidential support of, the concept of reflexive modernization.
Journal of Rural Studies, Apr 1, 2020
This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following publis... more This is a peer-reviewed, post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the following published document and is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 license: Cusworth, George ORCID: 0000-0002-7623-938X (2020) Falling short of being the 'good farmer': Losses of social and cultural capital incurred through environmental mismanagement, and the long-term impacts agri-environment scheme participation.
Agriculture and Human Values, May 11, 2021
Across the European Union, the receipt of agricultural subsidisation is increasingly being predic... more Across the European Union, the receipt of agricultural subsidisation is increasingly being predicated on the delivery of public goods. In the English context, in particular, these changes can be seen in the redirection of money to the new Environmental Land Management scheme. Such shifts reflect the changed expectations that society is placing on agriculture-from something that provides one good (food) to something that supplies many (food, access to green spaces, healthy rural environment, flood resilience, reduced greenhouse gas emissions). Whilst the reasons behind the changes are well documented, understanding how these shifts are being experienced by the managers expected to deliver on these new expectations is less well understood. Bourdieu's social theory and the good farmer concept are used to attend to this blind spot, and to provide timely insight as the country progresses along its public goods subsidy transition. Evidence from 65 interviews with 40 different interviewees (25 of whom gave a repeat interview) show a general willingness towards the transition to a public goods model of subsidisation. The optimisation and efficiency that has historically characterised the productivist identity is colouring the way managers are approaching the delivery of public goods. Ideas of land sparing and land sharing (and the farming preference for the former over the latter) are used to help understand these new social and attitudinal realities. The policy implications of these findings are discussed, with reference to the new scheme's 'priority themes'.
Progress in environmental geography, Feb 9, 2023
A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work... more A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work has integrated insight from feminist ethicists into research on food production, human–nature relations, and agricultural land use. As scholars elsewhere in the humanities have discussed, though, there is often a violence committed in care's name. In the case of food production and farming, I argue that the focus on affect, local multispecies relations and a proximal encounter-based ethics risks obscuring ethically significant and potentially violent food system dynamics that unfold beyond the farm gate. To better accommodate these remote yet important outcomes, I argue that scholars deploying an ethics of agricultural care should pay greater attention to the metabolisms of the farms, labs, nurseries, gardens, and allotments they study. Such an approach can accommodate those things that enter the case study site (fertilizer, animal feed, seed, etc.) and those things that leave it (vegetables, grain, pollution, etc.) as well the more-than-human transformations and interactions that take place within it. By being attentive to these material inflows and outflows, new ethical responsibilities emerge to act in the speculative hope that violence can be minimized, and care can flourish across a broader spatial range.
England commissioned the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of... more England commissioned the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire to carry out some specific research. The findings from this research will be used by Defra to help inform the development of a digital media strategy to set out how digital products and tools could be used to augment the written Technical Guidance to best achieve the ELM objectives.
What is regenerative agriculture? Although this concept is frequently used in discussions about f... more What is regenerative agriculture? Although this concept is frequently used in discussions about food systems transformation, and is starting to attract the attention of corporates and the mainstream, it lacks a formal definition, and what counts as "regenerative" can vary based on the individual asked, or the context. In this explainer, we explore ways of thinking about regenerative agriculture in relation to its various definitions, the stakeholders using the term, its knowledge practices and knowledge base, and how it fits in with wider goals for food system change.
Progress in Environmental Geography
A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work... more A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work has integrated insight from feminist ethicists into research on food production, human–nature relations, and agricultural land use. As scholars elsewhere in the humanities have discussed, though, there is often a violence committed in care's name. In the case of food production and farming, I argue that the focus on affect, local multispecies relations and a proximal encounter-based ethics risks obscuring ethically significant and potentially violent food system dynamics that unfold beyond the farm gate. To better accommodate these remote yet important outcomes, I argue that scholars deploying an ethics of agricultural care should pay greater attention to the metabolisms of the farms, labs, nurseries, gardens, and allotments they study. Such an approach can accommodate those things that enter the case study site (fertilizer, animal feed, seed, etc.) and those things that leave it (v...
Social Studies of Science
The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to cla... more The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to classify and measure the natural world interact with the things they were designed to observe. The idea of performativity also captures the way these interactions shape or distort the governance activities that metrics are used to inform. The performativity of metrics reveals how mundane practices of measurement and auditing are inscribed with substantial power. This has proven particularly true for the global warming metrics, like GWP100, that are central to the management of anthropogenic climate change. Greenhouse gases are materially heterogenous, and the metrics used to commensurate their various warming impacts influence the distribution of both culpability and capital in climate policy and markets. The publication of a new warming metric, GWP* (or GWP Star), has generated a modest scientific controversy, as a diverse cast of stakeholders recognize this performativity seek to influenc...
Conservation Science and Practice
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to w... more This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to which institutional equity investors, and specifically ‘universal owners’ with highly diversified shareholdings, engage with public issues associated with livestock agriculture. As share ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, and the market for Environmental, Social and Governance investment products grows, these investors are increasingly involved in governing the activities of publicly traded corporations (including leading agribusinesses). This paper brings together political economy and marketization studies research to explore how universal owners become concerned about particular environmental and ethical problems, why they overlook other public concerns, and in what ways their selective engagement with ethico-political issues might be altering the content of food politics. Comparing universal owners’ engagements with farm animal welfare issues and with tropical deforestation ...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are ... more Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are driving sustained discussions about the place of beef and dairy farming in a sustainable food system. Proposed solutions range from ‘clean‐cow’ sustainable intensification to ‘no‐cow’, animal free futures, both of which encourage a disruptive break with past practice. This paper reviews the alternative proposition of regenerative agriculture that naturalises beef and dairy production by invoking the past to justify future, nature‐based solutions. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK, it first introduces two of the most prominent strands to this green rebranding of cattle: the naturalisation of ruminant methane emissions and the optimisation of soil carbon sequestration via the use of ruminant grazing animals. Subsequent thematic analysis outlines the three political strategies of post‐pastoral storytelling, political ecological baselining and a probiotic model of bovine biopolitics that perfor...
Sustainability
Most monitoring and evaluation programmes for agri-environment schemes focus on understanding the... more Most monitoring and evaluation programmes for agri-environment schemes focus on understanding the environmental outcomes and the cost-effectiveness of these schemes. Evaluation of the social dimensions of agri-environment schemes, particularly the socio-cultural factors that might influence the quality of engagement with the schemes and the social wellbeing impact of scheme engagement, is limited. This is a critical gap in knowledge as there is growing recognition that without more explicit consideration of the farmers involved in land management as agents of change, the required environmental improvements will not be achieved. The aim of this paper was to undertake a systematic literature review to inform the development of a set of social indicators that can be used to measure the level of farmers’ engagement with their scheme agreement and the social sustainability outcomes from participation. Following the literature review and a short-listing ranking exercise with two sets of e...
England commissioned the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of... more England commissioned the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire to carry out some specific research. The findings from this research will be used by Defra to help inform the development of a digital media strategy to set out how digital products and tools could be used to augment the written Technical Guidance to best achieve the ELM objectives.
Global Environmental Change, 2021
With the intensification of agriculture, the simplification of crop rotations, and the rise in de... more With the intensification of agriculture, the simplification of crop rotations, and the rise in demand for meat, dairy and cereal products, legume production and consumption are at an historic low in Europe. But as the environmental consequences of agriculture (biodiversity loss, high greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution) and the health outcomes of modern diets (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity) become better known, so great and varied hopes are being expressed about the future role of legumes in the food system. This paper catalogues and scrutinises these hopes, mapping the promissory narratives now orbiting around legumes. It identifies six food futures, each of which is made possible through the greater use of legumes in various production, processing, marketing and consumption contexts. These promissory narratives are theorised as contrasting responses to three major areas of contestation in the food systems literature. Namely i) the sustainability of livestock management, ii) the role of technology in different visions of the 'good diet', and iii) the merits of different models for how to make agricultural management more sustainable. It identifies the promiscuity of legumesin terms of the range of food futures they permitbefore distilling three points of consensus amongst advocates of the potential of legumes. These points of consensus relate to their nitrogen fixing capacity, their high protein content, and their long-standing historical role in the context of European food and farming. This map of legume dreams serves to guide deliberations amongst researchers, policymakers and industry stakeholders about the futures of plantbased food in Europe.
Agri-environment schemes (AESs) offer remuneration for land managers who implement environmental ... more Agri-environment schemes (AESs) offer remuneration for land managers who implement environmental management techniques onto their farms. Participation is voluntary, and the schemes are designed to go beyond the agri-environmental management standards placed on farmers by other policies. Between 2005 and 2014, Environmental Stewardship (ES) was England’s main agri-environment scheme. It was itself split into two tiers – Higher Level Stewardship and Entry Level Stewardship (ELS). This research project assesses the long-term impacts of the ELS tier of ES and focusses on the social, attitudinal and behavioural features of the scheme’s extended impact. The data was collected through 40 in-depth interviews, 24 of which also had a longitudinal, repeat interview component. The interviews took place in two different case-studies with contrasting agricultural profiles (landscape characteristics, representation of different farm systems). An important element of the research relates to the lon...
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Papers by George Cusworth