Through the prism of a Nepali remittance village, this book critically examines poverty and livelihood dynamics remade through transnational labour migration and remittances, and their interrelationships with land, rural labour and agriculture. The concept of The Remittance Village emphasises rural people’s transnational mobilities as a key feature of contemporary dynamics in many parts of the Global South, which are reconfiguring rural social, economic and ecological textures. Sunam challenges complacent linear narratives that assume new opportunities such as transnational migration, and remittances provide better pathways for the rural poor to come out of poverty, as well as narratives that understate the importance of land and farming for the rural poor. He demonstrates both that new opportunities are inaccessible for many poor people and that accessing these opportunities often engenders increased precarity and vulnerability. In The Remittance Village, he finds that even those accessing new opportunities are successful only when their household member(s) are simultaneously engaged in in-situ (non-)agricultural activities. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including human geography, anthropology of development, and sociology. It is also recommended reading for policy makers, international development agencies and I/NGOs working on rural development in the Global South. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

As measured by its per-capita income, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with large parts of its population trapped in poverty within a stunning, but difficult to control natural environment. Under these conditions, since the wake of the 21st century, international labour migration and the associated remittances of large amounts of foreign exchange have rapidly gained influence on the country’s economic and social development, triggered by internal disturbances, in particular economic downturn and political upheavals, as well as external dynamics which boosted an uprising international demand for unskilled labour. While there is hardly any basic dissent about the short- to mid-term Positive growth effect for Nepal’s economy, surprisingly little is known about the consequences of this form of livelihood security at the individual household level, apart from some anecdotal evidence, although neither policy makers nor NGOs may effectively craft their strategies without considering this phenomenon. This book was developed from an Alumni Workshop held in Kathmandu in 2015, where, focusing on this knowledge gap, wide-ranging original research about the consequences of family members’ absence and the receipt of remittances was presented. Moving on from this starting point the authors further elaborated their work to make it accessible to a broader public, and exploitable as a resource for policy making and follow-up research. In addition, this volume includes detailed facts and figures about outmigration from and inflow of remittances to Nepal. With a view to long-term development implications of international migration it also considers the gain of knowledge and access to international academic networks brought into the country by returned scholars. The editor of the volume, Béatrice Knerr, is a professor of development economics, affiliated to the University of Kassel, Germany, where, until 2015, she was heading the Department of Development Economics, Migration and Agricultural Policy (DEMAP). Afterwards she has served as guest professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) in Merida, Mexico, and at the College of Economics of Hue University, Vietnam. Presently she is on contract with the Brawijaya University of Malang, Indonesia, where she is joining research projects on rural development and teaching various modules in the Economics Faculty. As an expert in the implications of labour migration on the development of low- to middle-income countries she has published and edited around 30 books and 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Through the prism of a Nepali remittance village, this book critically examines poverty and livelihood dynamics remade through transnational labour migration and remittances, and their interrelationships with land, rural labour and agriculture. The concept of The Remittance Village emphasises rural people's transnational mobilities as a key feature of contemporary dynamics in many parts of the Global South, which are reconfiguring rural social, economic and ecological textures. Sunam challenges complacent linear narratives that assume new opportunities such as transnational migration, and remittances provide better pathways for the rural poor to come out of poverty, as well as narratives that understate the importance of land and farming for the rural poor. He demonstrates both that new opportunities are inaccessible for many poor people and that accessing these opportunities often engenders increased precarity and vulnerability. In The Remittance Village, he finds that even those accessing new opportunities are successful only when their household member(s) are simultaneously engaged in in-situ (non-)agricultural activities. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and students from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including human geography, anthropology of development, and sociology. It is also recommended reading for policy makers, international development agencies and I/NGOs working on rural development in the Global South.

In Far West Nepal - an area extremely impoverished also by Nepalese standards - labour migration to India has been an integral part of the livelihood strategies of the majority of people for several generations. This research is based on case studies among male and female migrants in Delhi coming from four villages of Far West Nepal. The analysis focuses on selected aspects of the migrants' daily lives, such as working and living conditions, management of loans and savings, and remittance transfer. It was found, that the whole migration process is mainly facilitated by transnational kin and friendship networks. To grasp the geographical and social dimensions of the migrant's lives an integrative approach in joining the sustainable livelihoods approach, Bourdieu's theory of practice, the concept of social capital and the concept of transnational migration was developed. Further results show, that the majority of the migrants are male. The unskilled migrants occupy a distinct niche, in which men have been working as watchmen and car cleaners for generations. The job market is highly organized since jobs are handed over and sold within networks. If wives of migrants are in Delhi for longer periods, they engage in housekeeping. For financial needs migrants established their own informal savings and credit associations. Although migration is firstly seen as an opportunity by the migrants, it can as well perpetuate debt and dependency and entail that they remain migrants for their whole lives.

By March 2020, COVID-19 had affected nearly every community on earth, either with infections or with mobility restrictions. Significant peer reviewed research effort has gone into understanding the virus and its spread, mainly from an epidemiological and medical perspective. Political ecologists have been somewhat critical of such analyses because of their failure to understand the sociality of COVID-19 and its emergence. They emphasise the need to look for how the virus has acted upon inclusions and exclusions and current cleavages in society despite the fact that it can potentially attack anyone anywhere. Commentaries have therefore drawn attention to the more-than-human assemblages that allowed COVID-19 to infect humans; global food chains and capitalism; and social inequalities that underpin uneven exposure and access to health care. In this Research Topic we seek papers that engage with political ecologies of COVID-19. We welcome articles that are based on empirical research in specific contexts, attempting to understand the impacts of the viral outbreak, as well as articles which lay out research agendas for political ecologies of COVID-19. What questions need to be asked? What does it mean to take a socionatural and political ecological approach? What can we learn from the state(s) response in different places? How can such analyses add to the global conversation about the pandemic?