Socio-ecological precarity at the juncture of multiple crises

Abstract

Drawing upon the literature on the critical geographies of precarity, as well as feminist readings of non- and more-than-human geographies and political ecologies, this review proposes a socio-ecological precarity framеwork to address gaps in discussions and examinations of nonhuman vulnerabilities, forms of resistance, and infrastructures of conviviality and care. Socio-ecological precarity is posited as relational, politically generative, and transformative.

I Introduction

Theorising precarity, precariousness and precarisation as signifiers of risks and crises is not new. The challenges posed by the global climate predicament, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have jointly created a conjuncture of crises that are constituted by the inherited politics of extant socio-spatial injustices, while being constitutive of new possibilities. Indicatively, a ‘crisis’ can be seen as a ‘a moment of breakdown and stress that holds out the possibility of renewal and reconfiguration’ (Castree, 2022: p. 11). The use of ‘precarity’ as a dual descriptor that ‘implies both a condition and a possible rallying point for resistance’ (Waite, 2009: p. 412) provides a good fit for investigations and analyses of convergent socio-ecological crises.

Despite being theorised by academics and used by activists since the 1960s, precarity both re-emerged and proliferated after the 2008 economic crisis. Butler’s (2015, 2010) definition of precariousness as an ontological condition – and precarity as politically induced injustice – has offered a key vantage point in this context. Human geography has hosted a burgeoning sphere of research, based on the foundations of the ‘critical geographies of precarity’ laid by Waite (2009). Rich theorisations of precarity have been developed in economic and, more specifically, labour geography, as well as the subdisciplines of cultural, political, and economic geography (Anderson, 2017; Blunt and Sheringham, 2019; Joronen and Rose, 2021; Lewis et al., 2014; Strauss, 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Woon, 2013). Most of the work in this domain, however, has been produced in what is commonly referred to as the Global North, and particularly the ‘Anglosphere’ (Natarajan et al., 2019; Phillips and Petrova, 2021).

While theorisations of precarity have been crucial for social, cultural, and political geographers, the deployment of this framework within political ecology has been less frequent, despite its clear connection to the uncertainties and struggles brought about by overlapping socio-ecological crises (Craig, 2017). And yet, this is not the first (or the last) time that our society has faced intersecting adversities and uncertainties (Castree, 2010; Harris et al., 2019; O’Brien, 2011; Petrova, 2017). Thanks to scholarship on the subject, we are all once again reminded of not only our vulnerabilities and co-dependencies but also of our individual and collective agencies (Sultana, 2021). The ongoing convergence of multiple crises has brought about a new critical juncture that both reveals and transforms the shared subjectivities of humans and nonhumans alike. Such efforts are in line with attempts to unsettle the categorical delineation between ‘humans’/‘society’ and ‘nonhumans’/‘nature’, otherwise a common denominator of discussions on the Anthropocene, hybridity, new materialism, the more-than-human, and posthumanism in geography (Castree, 2003; Falcon, 2023).

Nevertheless, ongoing discussions of precarity/precariousness are radically incomplete because they fail to include the fullness of socio-ecological entanglements despite the emphasised need for investigating and theorising nature–society relationships through the lens of entangled existential, ontological, and epistemological crises (Sultana, 2021). Despite the dedicated efforts of critical geographers to foster inclusive research approaches that transcend the nature vs. society binary, there remains a need to cultivate methods of generating knowledge that possess the capacity to confront the deep complexities associated with comprehending and addressing these diverse elements (Hawkins et al., 2015: p. 332).

In response to the above, I propose the notion of ‘socio-ecological precarity’ as a means of bringing together the human and nonhuman attributes of socio-ecological entanglements and systems – including animals and microbiomes – to depict the rendering of, and the resistance to, politically induced injustices. Socio-ecological precarity encompasses the coexistence of dynamic processes and diverse human and nonhuman elements within inhabited landscapes (Lorimer 2012). Consequently, I posit that politically induced precarity should be regarded as the consequence of complex socio-natural relations. This leads me to ask two questions: Firstly: what does socio-ecological precarity entail, and how can we comprehend its implications? And secondly: what happens when we incorporate the perspective of the nonhuman realm into discussions of the foundations of precarity?

In speaking to these quandaries, I will seek to deepen our understanding of the multifaceted nature of precarity – as a simultaneously social and ecological phenomenon – while foregrounding the complex interactions that shape human experiences in socionatures. I will argue that socio-ecological precarity embodies the convergence of overlapping crises while functioning as a mechanism to reveal how vulnerabilities and conflicts are produced and resisted across the nature-society divide. This dynamic is seen across different scales and timeframes, and within variegated socio-technical and care (infra)structures. Furthermore, I will underscore the importance of considering human and nonhuman agency within encounters that can lead to transformative outcomes, with the capacity to produce both violence and conviviality.

To date, the socio-ecological aspects of precarity have often been approached through research on the conditioning of class. For example, Neimark et al. (2020) have addressed issues of gendered labour injustices through their framing and engagement of the ‘eco-precariat’, based on Standing’s (2011) concept of ‘precariat’. In their analysis, they unpack the production and vulnerabilities of a socio-economic group that provides both formal and informal labour for the ever-growing green economy (p. 498). However, my take on socio-ecological precarity is a slight departure from the economic aspects of labour and green economy interventions. I contend that analyses of socio-ecological precarity require more inclusive considerations of the politics of human and nonhuman encounters and engagement beyond the traditional economies of class-making (Gibson and Graham, 1992).

In seeking to further dialogues among critical feminist thinking, political ecology, environmental geography, and the critical geographies of precarity, my contribution is organised in four sections. First, I critically review and develop the temporal and scalar embeddedness of socio-ecological precarity through a relational lens, to uncover the socio-natural scaffolding of human–nonhuman interactions. In the second section, these relations are scrutinised with regard to the socio-ecological enactment of infrastructures and care. The third section examines how nonhuman and human precarities have been scripted in the politics of entangled socionatures, in the context of multiple agencies, encounters, and conflicts. In the fourth section, I foreground the transformative potential of socio-ecological precarity, by unpacking the limits of conviviality in socionatures. The conclusion proposes new potential pathways for future engagements with socio-ecological precarity as a politically generative framework.

II Towards temporal-scalar socio-ecological precarity

To understand the socio-ecological contact points between human and non-human precarities, I now turn to the multiple scalar and temporal horizons across which these connections are enacted and articulated. Based on a dialogue between the ‘critical geography of precarity’ (Strauss, 2018; Waite, 2009) and feminist readings on non- and more-than-human precarities (Behzadi, 2019; Bloom, 2020; Eriksson, 2018; Natarajan et al., 2019), I discuss socio-ecological precarity through a relational lens.

Theorisations of a socio-ecological precarity as a temporal-scalar issue have been aided by rich and multifaceted framings of, and approaches to, ‘scale’ and ‘scalarity’ – for example, see Blakey’s (2021) discussion of the politics of scale through Rancière and Linder’s (2022) humanistic reading of scale. Drawing on Massey (2005), Strauss (2018) has emphasised the need to approach precarity as a socio-spatial concept, by investigating how scale is relationally and phenomenologically constructed and experienced. A pivotal progress review of the field was provided by Coe (2012), who deploys precarity to place and discuss worker agencies at multiple scales. In a similar vein, but speaking to the domain of ‘precarious geopolitics’, Woon (2013) casts precarity as a shared vulnerability to unpack the importance and possibilities of emotional nonviolent actions. In cultural geography, Anderson (2017) has brought the notion of precarity into a dialogue with understandings of how power is felt and lived with in everyday life. Lewis et al. (2014, p. 584) have divided geographers into two groups based on their understanding of precarity as a condition: ‘those who see it as something specific to work under neoliberal labour market conditions … and those who see it as a feature of broader life’. Their progress report provides an in-depth theoretical deployment of precarity to explore the labour circumstances of migrants and forced labour. They develop the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ to capture the socio-political context and the multiple everyday precarities of asylum seekers in the UK, as a result of encounters with the system’s inherent brutalities and cruelties (Lewis et al., 2014).

Vasudevan’s (2015) work on the makeshift urbanism and squatting refers to precarity as a ‘condition of dependency’. The geography of squatting, he explains, ‘is a response to and an expression of housing precarity’ (Vasudevan, 2015: p. 352). Blunt and Sheringham (2019) also consider housing precarity in their review of home-city connections through urban domesticities (homemaking in the city) and domestic urbanism (the city as home). Drawing on Marxist thinking of labour and social reproduction, Tyner (2016) uses precarity to scrutinise the conceptualisation of ‘shared mortality’ in addition to making a distinction between ‘premature death’ and ‘truncated life’. Strauss (2020a, 2020b, 2018) advances the spatialities (and scalarities) of precarity through three extensive and rich progress reviews, situated in labour geography and migration. In this body of work, Strauss charts the progress of geographical thought on precarity by outlining key research milestones, discussing ongoing theoretical and epistemological challenges, and identifying open questions and directions for future scholarship. The first of the three reviews posits that labour geography can benefit from the deployment of precarity and precariousness (Strauss, 2018), against the background of the rather limited conceptualisation of precarity – at the time – by geographers as a whole, and economic geographers in particular (Strauss, 2020b). In her second report, Strauss draws on Elwood et al. (2017)‘s relational geographies to frame precarity and precariousness as a theoretical and political project that is underpinned by the interconnections among ontology, epistemology, and knowledge production. The third review compiles insights from a diverse body of geographical contributions on precarity to highlight intersections of race, gender, and capital underpin precarity more broadly, and academic precarity within geography more specifically (Strauss, 2020a).

Of note in this context are several special issues with a focus on precarity, published in key geographical journals. For example, a special issue of Social and Cultural Geography (SCG) edited by Harris and Nowicki (2018) develops spatial and temporal analyses of precarity’s cultural embeddedness. The four papers in the special issue espouse an urban reading of precarity through collective imaginaries, while drawing insights from Butler (2010) and Berlant (2011). They articulate a shared critique of the glamourisation of precarity and everyday resistance (Ferreri and Dawson, 2018). Urban precarity is also explored in a special Geoforum issue on ‘Precarious urbanisms’ edited by Philo et al. (2019). Most of the papers in this edition apply precarity to explanations of urban politics and injustices, based on evidence sourced from cities in the Global North. However, Lancione’s (2019) paper moves beyond deploying precarity as an analytical tool by theorising the ‘pre-makings’, the ‘in-makings’, the ‘un-makings’, and the ‘re-makings’ of housing precarity of Roma in Bucharest, Romania. Seeking to illuminate the embeddedness of precarity in different forms of ecological dispossession and displacement, Lesutis (2021) shows how precarity is constituted through the structural, symbolic, and direct violence of fossil fuel extractivism in Mozambique. He juxtaposes Rancière’s (2015) reading of politics and aesthetics with Lefebvre’s (1992) insights on the political potentialities of difference emanating from the contradictions of abstract space and Butler’s (2015) framing of precarity as a possibility of resistance and transformation.

Several concepts have been used to unpack the cross-scalar and -temporal nature of human and nonhuman entanglements and precarities. For example, geographers and other social scientists have employed the notion of ‘climate precarity’ to analyse how the unpredictable, slow-burn nature of climate change creates longer-lasting forms of precarity (Griffin, 2020; Natarajan et al., 2019). More specifically, Natarajan et al. (2019, p. 900) employ climate precarity ‘to situate both the material relations and experiences of farmers-turned-brick-workers in relation to climate change and to the wider economy’. Climate precarity, they argue, is not purely created by climate change but instead is deeply embedded in the inability to predict rainfall patterns and the increased uncertainty over adverse weather more generally. Chakrabarty (2009) has introduced a temporal element to this debate, by arguing that historical understandings of the Anthropocene need to combine human and planetary time in a multi-scalar framework based on ‘species-thinking’. He posits that we need a scaled-up imagination of human time because human existence is inseparable from co-dependent and intergenerational human–nonhuman relationalities. In a sense, this is a response to the ‘all-too-human’ (Yoshida, 2020) interpretations of various socio-environmental and socio-ecological aspects of climate change. Yoshida unveils the entanglements between precarity and biophysics through processes of ‘scaling the ocean’s vulnerabilities’ that are ‘performed within relational practices in turbulent ways’ (Yoshida, 2020: p. 462).

The analogous idea of ‘planetary precarity’ has been used by Bloom (2020) as another descriptor of our time. She critically engages with the work of three female artists – Anne Noble, Judit Hersko, and Joyce Campbell – who challenge the nature–society dichotomy by reopening questions of scale along gender, science, and the relation of the human to the nonhuman in the Antarctic. These aspects and relations, Bloom (2020) argues, were dismissed in the ‘Heroic Age of Exploration’ of Antarctica. While Bloom (2020) does not explicitly theorise precarity as a concept, some of her reflections on the work by the three artists make compelling arguments on nonhuman agency and power. Bloom (2020, p. 4) talks about Judit Hersko’s work as ‘intimate encounters with the landscape’ through which the co-dependency of human and nonhuman systems exists in an ‘extreme environment that is on the verge of a slow collapse’. This point is in line with Butler’s (2010) ‘ontological precariousness’ – a concept that reflects vulnerabilities transpiring through co-dependency. Bloom (2020) addresses precarity as a form of politically induced inequality in her positions on the politics of power and the potency in terms of the (mis)recognition of nonhuman agency. She questions the ethics of the ‘scale of measure’ while discussing how Hersko’s art moves away from the conventional emphasis on large mammals – such as polar bears – as symbols of anthropogenic climate change. Instead, Hersko foregrounds the otherwise marginalised agency of microscopic creatures, such as Clione antarctica (sea angel) and the microscopic Limacina helicina (sea butterfly) and their invaluable role in the oceanic food chain.

Bloom (2020) has praised Hersko’s photo-collages by depicting alternative imaginative worlds with less conspicuous polar aesthetics, in which humans and nonhumans are attuned in their struggle to resist and survive the transformation of Antarctica. Here, once again, we can see a subtle reference to precarity as a dual signifier; not only as a descriptor of precarious conditions and processes but as a collective form of human and more-than-human resistance and struggle. Furthermore, the concern for a planetary precarity asks for a ‘more-than-human’ sense of security (Morrissey, 2021). Uncovering the foundations of such processes requires a relational exploration of more-than-human infrastructures, including mutual interdependency and care. A multi-scalar and -temporal analysis of more-than-human precarity holds the potential to shape debates and practice on socio-ecological transformations and conjunctural crises across different geographies.

III Socio-ecological precarities of infrastructures and care

The conjunction of multiple crises – economic, environmental, and geopolitical – has revealed crumbling infrastructures, the inadequate provision of care, and human–nonhuman co-dependencies. I now, therefore, discuss how responses to multiple crises have generated politically induced injustices and struggles for both humans and nonhumans (Davis et al., 2019). When it comes to approaches to socio-ecological precarity as a form of infrastructure and care, a useful entry point is provided by Barnett (2018, p. 10) who argues that ‘recognising the effects of infrastructure on our more-than-human cohabitants becomes necessary if we are to embrace earthly coexistence as a political project’. In terms of socio-ecological precarity and care, Griffin’s (2020, p. 343) ethnographic research of Indigenous food vulnerabilities in Iñupiaq Alaska has not only witnessed how ‘unfolding radical environmental change’ creates precarities in Kivalina but also how those precarities are underpinned by historical struggles for territorial sovereignty and enduring practices of intracommunity care.

Seeking to shift the anthropocentric focus of the scholarship on infrastructures onto what he calls ‘infrastructure as nonhuman habitus’, Barua’s (2021) review of the ontology of more-than-human infrastructures expands the meaning of Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of ‘habitus’ by incorporating the literature on animal lifeworlds, habits, and modes of sensing. In unpacking how infrastructures and nonhuman worlds coexist, ‘infrastructure as nonhuman habitus’ is then elucidated through the exploration of three modes of animal–infrastructure entanglements: i) ‘repurposing’, which explains how the shift of perspective onto nonhumans such as termites can allow infrastructural affordances to counter their design; ii) ‘recombinance’, which refers to how infrastructures mediate nonhuman existence through the example of the synchronous evolvement, proliferation, and decline of the Peppered moth (Biston betularia) and the pollution lichen (Lecanora conizaeoides) in the heavily polluted 19^th century, with high concentrations of sulphur dioxide in the air; and iii) ‘reconciliation’, which draws on reconciliation ecology to refer to the active design of infrastructural landscapes in encouraging and maintaining nonhuman life (Barua, 2021). This author believes that a wider infrastructural beyond-human ontology can set the scene ‘for another kind of politics where nonhuman life might be allowed to subvert capitalist capture’ (2021, p. 1484). Such subversions, according to him, might render possibilities for ‘new coalitions that foster infrastructural commoning’ (2021, p. 1484).

The infrastructural entanglements elaborated by Barua (2021) are further investigated by Shukin (2018), through his encounters with radioactive wild boars in Japan’s post-Fukushima reality. He argues that investigations of precarity beyond the human can bring new understandings of the co-constitution and ‘life-supporting bonds’ between humans and nonhumans that are essential ‘to the functioning of capitalism’ (Shukin, 2018: p. 113). Shukin (2018) acknowledges Allison’s (2013) observations of how animals are often in the focus on many discussions in post-Fukushima’s ‘precarious Japan’ but emphasizes that it is problematic to talk about precarity as a condition shared by humans and nonhumans. This is because ‘if precarity can excite a sense of shared vulnerability and species kinship’ (Shukin, 2018: p. 115) then the governance of precarity can also create hierarchies among some animals and species, rendering some of them exterminable if they ‘obstruct the biopolitics of repairing damaged life’ (Shukin, 2018: p. 115) demanded by socio-technical disasters. It is worth mentioning that Shukin uses ‘precarity’ and ‘vulnerability’ interchangeably here. For this author, the exploration of precarity beyond the human cannot be placed on an equal footing with the capitalist flexibilisation, disposability, and exploitability of the labour and lives of nonhumans. Moreover, it cannot ‘be limited highlighting how nonhumans are biopolitically managed as individuals or populations that are kept alive or put to death according to changing calculations of human, economic and environmental health’ (Shukin, 2018: p. 120). Instead, he argues, the focus should be on nonhumans who may also ‘creatively reorder or refuse to continue producing and reproducing for capitalism’ (Shukin, 2018: p. 120).

Shukin’s (2018) line of argument touches slightly on the questions on precarity and more-than human labour asked by Strauss (2020b) in her third progress report on labour geographies, where she deliberates on how we can ‘account for and theorize nonhuman labour and its infrastructural imbrications in an era of climate disruption’. When understood through such a lens, socio-ecological vulnerability recognises the broader risks and vulnerabilities within social-ecological systems. However, socio-ecological precarity as a politically induced injustice zooms in on the specific injustices and power dynamics that result in precarious conditions. It foregrounds the political and institutional forces that shape and exacerbate vulnerability, contributing to social and ecological injustices. Socio-ecological precarity, thus, focuses on the deliberate imposition of conditions of uncertainty on human and nonhuman communities and ecosystems by dominant policies and institutions. It highlights the different ways in which power structures, governance mechanisms, and decision-making processes contribute to the creation and resistance of architectures of precarity.

The relative neglect of nonhuman agencies in precarity has implications for how socio-environmental crises are mitigated and alleviated. Yoshida (2020, p. 467) has emphasised the lack of attention to nonhuman others in precarity studies ‘in relation to the disproportionate distribution of exposure to the irreversible impacts of climate crisis’. She calls for precarity research to unpack the symbioses and struggles that arise as a result among interactions between humans and their nonhuman counterparts. This also strengthens the need for unveiling the precarious infrastructures of care (Bouzarovski, 2022; Lopes et al., 2018) and their articulation across hybrid socio-natural settings.

IV Nonhuman–human precarity: Transformative (and violent) encounters

‘The propensity for humans to kill and care for animals is highlighted by crisis’

(Gibbs, 2021: p. 371).

I closed the previous section with an argument about the potential risks of neglecting nonhuman precarity. Here, I turn to the nuances of how nonhuman agency has been inscribed and instrumentalised in the rendering of human and nonhuman precarities within the politics of entangled socionatures (Swyngedouw, 1999) especially in the time of multiple crises. However, rather than conceptualising nonhuman agency per se (for a detailed discussion, see Buller, 2015; Lorimer, 2012), this section reviews how nonhuman precarity and agency have been inscribed and ab(used) in the thrown-together (Massey, 2005) socionatures, with all their potential and messiness.

Following on relational ontologies, geographers working on human-nature politics have paid ample attention to how nonhumans are shaping and co-constituting the world around us. As Sarah Whatmore (2006, p. 604) has argued ‘[a]nimals and technological devices have variously been used as “agents provocateurs’’ in ‘the messy heterogeneity of being-in-the-world’ (Whatmore, 2002: p. 147). Cooke and Lane (2018) have argued that agency is more often ascribed to plants that are unwanted and unruly (such as invasive species), which according to Lawrence (2022) renders rather one-sided conceptualisations of ‘planty’ agency as being active and antagonistic. Pearson (2015) would agree that the conceptualisation of nonhuman agency as a form of resistance acknowledges and values the nonhuman existence based merely on its ability to impede humans. Thus, this perspective artificially divides ‘nature’ and ‘society’ as mutually exclusive spheres. Such depiction of nonhumans creates discourses that can hinder the basic principles of multispecies justice (Tschakert, 2022).

Precarity has been misused in other contexts too. Work on socioeconomic precarity has shown that there is a correlation between intensified socioeconomic precarity and the global rise of right-wing populism (Apostolidis, 2022). According to Apostolidis (2022), this perspective is particularly evident in some Western societies, where traditional systems supporting widespread economic well-being have gradually eroded and where political agendas have capitalised on and fuelled public sentiments of insecurity and anger. Thomas (2015) argues that persistent human–nonhuman Western divisions are not in line with Indigenous understandings and practices. According to her, mainstream environmental management – including national legislative and judicial structures in many (post)colonial countries – continues to be informed predominantly by Western colonial understandings of the relationships between society/people and nature that excludes and marginalises Indigenous and local people. Despite Lorimer’s (2012) claim that the Anthropocene manifests ‘the public death’ of the nature–society divide (p. 593), recently, Iordăchescu and Vasile (2023) have also pointed to a contrary turn that reinstates the nature–society divide through the development and implementation of prohibitive, and even criminalising, conservation policies (e.g. through severe restrictions on local people’s use of protected areas).

Multiple studies have pointed to the problematic origin of nature–society division. In the Hurunui District, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where Thomas (2015) undertook her research, colonial representations of the Hurunui River, as a wilderness area or primarily an economic resource, continue to be deployed to influence environmental politics. Such an environmental politics, Thomas (2015) argues, allows colonial power relations to persist, silencing people (in her research, Māori people) who understand the world differently. In the given instances, nonhuman (animal) agency tends to be enacted through human, often colonial practices of delivering ethics concerns for nonhumans, while increasing the precarities of Indigenous communities and local people. For example, protected areas are enacted as sites of exclusion and violence (Iordăchescu and Vasile, 2023).

Margulies (2019) uses Mbembe’s (2019) concept of necropolitics to delve into the intricate relationship between animals as political subjects, entangled in multifaceted conflicts involving more-than-human elements. This approach directly addresses the question of ‘who must die’ when different species coexist within specific geographies. As Margulies (2019) explains, the tea plantation landscape in Gudalur, India, which is situated alongside protected areas with one of the highest densities of elephants and tigers in the world, renders circumstances under which workers who are particularly marginalised are at a higher risk of encountering dangerous animals. Thus, colonial-style plantation-conservation landscapes become necropolitical landscapes, in which human and nonhuman precarities are enmeshed and played against each other. Such environmental politics and conservation practices can undermine genuine efforts to address human and nonhuman precarity and hinder effective environmental action. That is precisely why Thomas (2015) argues for the decolonisation of ‘more-than-humanisms’.

Other instances of the negative inscribing of nonhuman agency can come from less expected places of care(less) practices of species conversation enacted under the auspices of neoliberal nature conservation. In such cases, nonhuman vulnerability can be seen as a form of social status constructed based on the control of capital (Borkfelt and Stephan, 2022). Vulnerability extends beyond the realm of attractiveness or repulsiveness. Despite the apparent opposition between attractiveness (i.e. charismatic mammals) and repulsiveness, (i.e. invasive species more broadly), the underlying logic remains the same. Both circumstances reflect the vulnerability of not being deemed useful within the anthropocentric power structure. This situation emphasises the need to challenge and question the criteria by which worth and usefulness are assigned and to recognise that vulnerability can stem from not fitting into an anthropocentric framework. Highlighting the interconnectedness of vulnerability and power dynamics calls for a re-evaluation of the human–nonhuman relationship and the hierarchies that perpetuate unequal vulnerabilities. Socio-ecological precarity contributes to such investigations of vulnerability by providing in-depth (i.e. ethnographic) insights about human and nonhuman vulnerabilities. But that is only one of the attributes of precarity as a concept. The instrumentalisation of precarity draws upon vulnerability, while furthering the politics of socionatures by focussing on the hierarchies of power and power dynamics. In addition to the rendering of human and nonhuman vulnerabilities, this process can also reveal the contested issues associated with the (lack of) enactment and/or the abuse of human and nonhuman precarities.

Socio-ecological precarity moves beyond human actors to encompass non- and more-than-human entities that are often exploited to displace or restrict the activities of local communities that depend on natural resources. Fluri (2021) has argued that extraction offers a valuable framework for investigating the diverse geographies related to the displacement of both humans and nonhumans from specific spaces due to political and geopolitical processes. These dynamics involve the displacement and removal of individuals and entities from their environments. However, conservation initiatives aimed at protecting specific areas and their resources often exacerbate the human/nonhuman dichotomy, rather than recognising the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman realms within a larger integrated framework. The concept of nonhuman precarity has the potential to be misused and distorted in the context of environmental populism (Boelens et al., 2022) where ideologies and movements exploit environmental concerns for their own political and/or exclusionary agendas.

Socio-ecological precarity deconstructs discourses of exclusionary green nationalism (Lubarda, 2017) in their efforts to instrumentalise nonhuman precarity by advocating for ethnonationalist or xenophobic policies that reinforce exclusionary narratives and promote divisive ideologies of ‘us’ versus the ‘others’. More specifically, ecological nationalism has been defined as ‘a condition where both cosmopolitan and nativist versions of nature devotion converge and express themselves as a form of nation-pride in order to become part of processes legitimising and consolidating a nation’ which ‘links cultural and political aspirations with programs of nature conservation or environmental protection’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Cederlöf, 2005: p. 6). Claims in the name of nonhuman precarity can be used to justify oppressive or authoritarian measures in the name of nature conservation. This can involve limiting human rights and freedoms under the pretext of protecting nonhuman beings and ecosystems. It may result in the displacement or marginalisation of local communities who have sustainably coexisted with their environments for generations.

V Transformative socio-ecological precarity: The limits of meaningful conviviality

Following on conceptualisations of precarity as a transformative process (Phillips and Petrova, 2021), socio-ecological precarity highlights the collective experiences of more-than-human communities and activists engaged in socio-environmental struggles and actions for clean air, the protection of rivers, and the preservation of homes. Life in the Anthropocene emphasises further that all socio-environmental struggles are convivial, and coexistence is necessary. However, it is unclear whether such more-than-human ‘living in difference’ is transformative. Doubts become stronger if we take into consideration the convincing critique of conviviality as being highly romanticised or presented as a ‘meaningful encounter’ (Valentine, 2008; Wilson, 2017); or that conviviality is a politically neutral concept (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006; 2022). As Wilson rightfully underlines (2022, p. 1148), the absence of encounter can ‘distort ecological knowledge’ (Fredriksen, 2019: p. 771), but so too can its presence.

Since Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006) convincingly elaborated the politics of conviviality over 15 years ago, a plethora of analyses have been undertaken in the name of more inclusive and just takes on socio-ecological coexistence. The everyday Anthropocene, defined as ‘the ongoing, everyday more-than-human relationships, actions and less-than-planetary assemblages through which the Anthropocene is sensed and lived’ (Fredriksen, 2021: p. 531), is the context that permits a study of how more-than human conviviality and socio-ecological precarity are truly negotiated from below. Moreover, Mansfield et al. (2015, p. 285) approach forests as a complex network of power dynamics that encompass negotiations among diverse actors, including people, trees, understory plants, wildlife, hydrological conditions, and other pertinent elements. Rather than being framed as a mere conflict between individuals seeking control over forests, this perspective recognises the intricate interplay of various forces within forest ecosystems. Cooke and Lane (2018, p. 1715) position plants as active collaborators in commoning and suggest that plant–human commoning could counter individualised neoliberal governance and the privatisation of exurban landscapes through enclosure.

Following the ground-breaking emergence of the Montecristi Constitution of Ecuador in 2008, which acknowledged nature (or ‘Pacha Mama’) as a subject with rights, the global rights of nature movement have witnessed remarkable growth. Many jurisdictions worldwide have followed suit, bestowing some form of legal subjectivity upon nature. Of particular note, since 2017, is how the concept of ‘river personhood’ has captured widespread attention, generating one of prominent cases of nature’s newfound agency in news headlines worldwide (RiverOfLife et al., 2021). One example is can be found in Australia, where Indigenous leaders have pursued the recognition of the Martuwarra (Fitzroy) River as an ancestral person with a right to life and flow. Boelens et al. (2022) has investigated concepts and calls for action such as ‘sentient rivers’ and ‘rights-of-rivers’ in what they have called ‘river-as-subjects’ ontologies that delve into the exploration of how, why, and with which consequences rivers are perceived as subjects. Such initiatives – otherwise deeply rooted in narratives and politics centred around care and ethics – have been included in broader decolonial work undertaken by local communities, and communities of Indigenous people, to alleviate human and nonhuman precarities. Nevertheless, the implementation of the river-as-subject idea does not inherently ensure decolonising or emancipatory outcomes due to unequal power dynamics, as well as legal, political, and economic agendas (Boelens et al., 2022).

Wilcock et al. (2013) have proposed an alternative approach to foster diverse discussions on the subject. By combining posthumanist, Indigenous, and physical geographies, the authors propose the concept of ‘ethnogeomorphology’ to explore the ‘landscape of lived experience’ as spaces where various place-based engagements intersect. The paradigm allows for the acknowledgement of multiple place-based relationships and emphasizes the active role of landscapes in shaping cultures (Wilcock et al., 2013: p. 595). In making anticolonial decisions concerning nature, it is crucial to recognise and honour the distinct rights of Indigenous communities, granting them greater control over these processes. In that sense, convivial conservation necessitates human–wildlife conflict interventions that transcend negative and liberal peace strategies and instead embrace a positive ecological peace approach (Hsiao and Lan, 2022). The goal would be to foster transformative human and nonhuman relationships beyond the ‘Nature Needs Half’ movement’s aims to protect 50% of the planet by 2030, while promoting radical cohabitation across the whole of the Earth (Fletcher et al., 2023). Indeed, geographically bounded efforts to conserve specific land and sea territories have been criticised for human rights violations, in addition to negative impacts on people and local communities (Fletcher et al., 2023). The ‘Whole Earth’ conviviality, has been argued, would reconcile the two key issues of social injustice and growth-driven capitalist economies (Büscher and Fletcher, 2019). Despite promising potentials and opportunities, conviviality is never straightforward: it is underpinned by conflicts and compromises (Toncheva and Fletcher, 2021), requiring continuous negotiations as ‘a mutual dependence of all participants, nonhuman and human’ (Given, 2018, p. 71). In that sense, an anti-precarity politics (Apostolidis, 2022) – involving struggles for political and social equality alongside ‘liveable inter-dependency’ (Butler, 2015: p. 69) – must also be a politics of socio-ecological precarity between humans and non-humans.

VI Conclusions

A myriad of studies undertaken by geographers, including progress reviews, have discussed the multifaceted concept of precarity. Nevertheless, as I have argued here, theorisations and the use of ‘precarity’ have been mostly focused on humans with regards to labour, migration, and other aspects of human existence. Encounters and interactions with nonhumans have often been largely marginalised from relevant discussions, even if geographers have argued strongly for the inclusion of humans and nonhumans as inseparable parts of socionatures (Tozzi, 2021). The need for an integrated analysis of human and nonhuman precarities has been exacerbated by the conjuncture of multiple socio-ecological crises that have (re)produced multispecies precarities. The politics of rendering responses in the Anthropocene – a concept that is now increasingly used as a descriptor of the era of accelerating and converging socio-environmental crises (Davis et al., 2019) – has revealed hierarchies underlying the uneven distribution of human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Returning to the first question asked by this review – in terms of the constituent components and implications of socio-ecological precarity – I have posited that this framework unravels politically induced human and nonhuman injustices, modes of resistance, and infrastructures of conviviality and care. I have posited that socio-ecological precarity links human and nonhuman parts of socio-ecological features – landscapes, biophysical processes, animals, and microbiomes – to depict the rendering of, and the struggles with, politically induced injustices. Beyond serving as a signifier of the conjunction of multiple crises (Watts, 2018), socio-ecological precarity can also be seen as a process demonstrating the politics of rendering vulnerabilities and conflicts, as well the transformative potential (or the lack of it) in efforts to foreground the agentic capacities and rights of nonhumans – by outlining relational, generative, and transformative potentials.

In terms of the second question – regarding the incorporation of the nonhuman realm into discussions on the foundations of precarity – and based on a critical reading of geographies of precarity, critical feminist thinking, and environmental geography, I have sought to demonstrate how socio-ecological precarity holds the potential to shape debates on socio-ecological transformations and overlapping crises. This contingency is reflected i) across different scales and temporal frameworks; ii) as constituted in, and constitutive of, infrastructures and care; iii) within the politics of ascribing human and nonhuman agency in encounters that can be transformative but sometimes nevertheless violent; and iv) as a potential of, or limits to, conviviality.

Moving forward, socio-ecological precarity can offer a common ground for a much-needed cross-fertilisation of ideas and a dialogue between the geographies of precarity and political ecology. It helps recognise and address the rendering of political subjectivities, as well as the production of knowledge and policy to address multiple crises. Socio-ecological precarity brings together a range of concepts – around necropolitics, conflicts, multi-species justice, and conviviality – while revealing the limitations and romanticisations that underpin them. In that sense, an anti-precarity politics (as a counter to uncertainty) cannot promise stability to those who are precarious. Rather, the prospect is one of continuous struggle, negotiation, and compassion against the background of growing crises faced by humans and nonhumans alike.