The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation Book

Contents: List of Figures and Tables. List of Contributors. Foreword by Steve Rayner. Preface to the South Asian Edition. List of Acronyms and Abbreviations. Introduction/Lyla Mehta. Part I. Why Does Scarcity Matter? Commentary/Lyla Mehta: 1. The Scare, Naturalization and Politicization of Scarcity/Lyla Mehta. 2. Everybody’s Got the Fever: Scarcity and US National Energy Policy/Nicholas Xenos. The Ghosts of Malthus: Narratives and Mobilizations of Scarcity in the US Political Context/Betsy Hartmann. Part II. Economics and Scarcity Commentary/Lyla Mehta: 1. Economics and Scarcity: With Amartya Sen as Point of Departure?/Ben Fine. 2. Deconstructing Economic Interpretations of Sustainable Development: Limits, Scarcity and Abundance/Fred Luks. 3. Water Can and Ought to Run Freely: Reflections on the Notion of Scarcity in Economics/Sajay Samuel and Jean Robert. 4. A Bit of the Other: Why Scarcity Isn’t All It’s Cracked up to Be/Michael Thompson. Part III  Resource Scarcity, Institutional Arrangements and Policy Responses: Food, Agriculture, Water and Energy Commentary/Lyla Mehta: 1. Scarcity as Political Strategy: Reflections on Three Hanging Children/Nicholas Hildyard. 2. Seeing Scarcity: Understanding Soil Fertility in Africa/Ian Scoones. 3. Chronic Hunger: A Problem of Scarcity or Inequity/Erik Millstone. 4. A Share Response to Water Scarcity: Moving beyond the Volumetric/Bruce Lankford. 5. Advocacy of Water Scarcity: Leakages in the Argument/Jasveen Jairath. 6. The Construction and Destruction of Scarcity in Development: Water and Power Experiences in Nepal/Dipak Gyawali and Ajaya Dixit. Afterword: Look beyond Scarcity?/Lyla Mehta. Appendix: Institute of Development Studies Conference Statement on Scarcity. Index.

Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. It is made out to be an all-pervasive fact of our lives – be it of housing, food, water or oil. But has the conception of scarcity been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in academic and policy debates? Has overhasty recourse to scarcity evoked a standard set of market, institutional and technological solutions which have blocked out political contestations, overlooking access as a legitimate focus for academic debates as well as policies and interventions?

Theoretical and empirical chapters by leading academics and scholar-activists grapple with these issues by questioning scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They examine scarcity debates across three of the most important resources – food, water and energy – and their implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The book looks at how scarcity has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the North and South. The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' Through this examination the authors demonstrate that scarcity is not a natural condition: the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated.