Author: Dr Kevon Rhiney, Rutgers University, US
In this working paper I draw attention to the varying ways underlying forces of economic globalization and global environmental change have been threatening the livelihood security of farmers throughout the Caribbean. The paper also sheds light on some of the local-scale implications of these wider changes, and highlights the fact that the impacts are likely to produce uneven vulnerability outcomes mediated largely around differences in the social and economic landscapes in which individual farmers operate. While the paper draws strongly on the growing body of regional analyses of vulnerability and resilience, I also seek to move the discourse beyond the usual binary and mutually exclusive representations of these two concepts. Instead, I argue that farmers in the Caribbean are neither fully vulnerable nor fully resilient to these global forces. And in fact, their resilience may at times create the very conditions that engender new forms of vulnerability. The paper therefore calls for a critical rethinking (and even decentering) of these two dominant frameworks, if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the root causes and overarching forces shaping regional farmers’ insecurities to global change.
Please click here to access the full paper.
Caribbean In/Securities: Creativity and Negotiation in the Caribbean (CARISCC) 
February 27, 2017 at 3:34 pm
This excellent paper does the important conceptual work of comparing vulnerability, resilience and in/security – it critiques the sufficiency of all three of these concepts in really addressing or accounting for the experiences and the agency of small farmers in the Caribbean, as well as, importantly, the inequities and contestations between them. The paper raises important questions about the extent to which such concepts can be redeployed to think about how the line between security and insecurity is negotiated by small farmers – Kevon suggests that if farmers do show resilience and agency (for example through “the application of traditional knowledge and social cooperation”), this can compound their neglect and marginalization, as they are no longer seen as ‘vulnerable’. How can more fine-grained analyses be conceptualised?
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February 27, 2017 at 3:41 pm
I agree, this is a really thoughtful call to question some of the taken-for-grant terms we use, and how they might be problematic depending on where they are used and by whom.
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February 27, 2017 at 3:49 pm
Hi Susan, Yes, what I’m loving about the whole network process is how it brings in the kind of multiplicity that both you and Kevon are talking about in your papers – we’re writing plurally and we’re writing about plurality.
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February 27, 2017 at 8:42 pm
Thanks Pat and Susan! That’s exactly where I am going with this paper; there is certainly a need for more nuanced approaches with regards to understanding how people negotiate their (in)securities on a daily basis. This doesn’t necessarily demand us to discard these concepts. Instead, it points to the need for us to unpack and critically engage the sort of meta-narratives in which these concepts are so often situated.
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