In this viewpoint, drawing on a critical lens in both climate change adaptation and digital agriculture studies, we scrutinize how adaptation, digitalization, innovation and participation are discursively represented, understood and imagined in existing peer-reviewed literature as enabling equal and just agricultural transformations. Reviewing digital-agriculture-adaptation literature between 2010 and 2023, we find that most studies are ambiguous about how they define adaptation and how they frame it under digitally driven development narratives such as Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). Digital technologies are mostly introduced as tools and services in a top-down way by business and state actors, or researchers who are external to local communities. There is limited evidence on how and whether farmers are consulted or on how they take initiatives in technological innovations for agricultural adaptation. We argue that the literature conceptually and methodologically integrating agricultural adaptation and digitalization is still lacking, and existing debates are fragmented and siloed. Future research should narrow in on politics, situated context and farmers' perspectives, lived experiences and subjectivities to counteract the current preponderant top-down, development agenda and techno-fix. Towards this goal, ongoing debates in digital geographies, critical agrarian studies and feminist political ecology can help cross-pollinate the subfield of digitally mediated agricultural adaptation to climate change.

Migrants constitute a sizable portion of vulnerable workers in digitally-mediated work, particularly in the gig economy. They face wide-scale labour exploitation as well as exclusions and further marginalization from existing labour markets and welfare systems. Policy intervention is a focal point of debate in the expanding gig economy literature. In Nordic countries, it is often assumed the welfare state will regulate the gig economy, but due to ambiguous understandings of what the gig economy is, debates are focused on topics such as taxation, often downplaying complexities. This study aims to explore how strategic silences towards migration underpin policy narratives relating to the foregrounding of gig economy in welfare contexts, specifically Sweden. Our approach highlights silence as an agentic and strategic process. Based on twenty-three selected Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU series) issued between 2016 and 2022, we first mapped the main themes regarding the gig economy in the Swedish policy arena. We show the Swedish state is shifting to recognize migrants and the gig/platform economy, but the role of structural inequalities remains ambiguous. We further critically analyzed contents of ten reports and show silence is strategic in two ways: first maintaining normative work forms as the key interest of the state and second, positioning precarious migrant labour as a sphere of exclusion. This study provides new perspectives and insights into the governance of the gig economy by highlighting the role of strategic production of silences regarding structural inequalities and the tensions within welfare-labour relations.

A rapidly growing body of work explores platform-mediated economy and work under the umbrella term ‘Platform Urbanism’. This focus and academic discourse risk keeping digital spaces and practices in the rural context in the shadow or subordinated to urban-based understandings. Concurrently, digital studies on the rural have for long focused on technocratic approaches to improving information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and connectivity. While recently the potentials of digitalization in transforming agriculture, small businesses, health care, and transportation in rural areas are receiving significant attention, these debates remain surprisingly disconnected from vibrant discussions of the platform economy. Thus, the remaking of rural geographies through the platform economy, and vice versa, remains under-examined. This chapter addresses the importance of spatiality and geography in considering the platform economy with examples of rural small business and agriculture. It illustrates why the nuances and complexity of rural spaces need to become part of understanding the dynamics of the platform economy. Centring rural as important and spatially significant not only lifts the complexity of rural platform processes but also creates opportunities for new questions and patterns. Rural geographical perspectives highlight relational and interlocking spaces found in the rural platform economy and offer the potential for a deeper understanding of social-technical-spatial relations.

Digital technologies are changing how and where we live, work and socialize. Rural areas are distinctive spaces and places but in the current debates of new digital phenomena, digital spaces and practices risk not being contextualized with sensitivities to rural geographies. This study aims to map how digital has been examined to date in rural-focused studies, and accordingly present propositions for how rural-digital studies can be sensitive to the distinctive and diverse character of rural spaces and places. We conduct a two-stage/scale literature review, combining 1) computational topic modelling from a Global Dataset (459 article abstracts) with 2) qualitative content analysis from a sub-dataset focusing on the Nordic region (Nordic Sub-Dataset, 17 full articles). We begin with a topic modelling analysis generating ten major themes (topics) leading to an overview of how research areas are connected to the meaning of rural context. Turning to the Nordic region, as an in-depth example, we illustrate the complexity of rural digital geographies, through a qualitative content analysis. This demonstrates that digital in rural contexts are primarily positioned outwardly as social/regional development and business/economy, and less situated inwardly through individual experience and community building. Combined we show a wide spectrum of rural-digital relations but demonstrate that rural contexts in rural-digital relations need more attention. We propose three propositions to invite deeper rural contextualizations in future digital studies to uphold the importance of rural spaces and places through, by and with digital geography.

This paper is a unique roundtable discussion between geographers to explore, contextualizeand problematize the role of geography in the gig economy. It brings together eight researchersfrom across Europe all working with qualitative methods and studying the gig economy. Basedon reflections and commentaries regarding the spatialities and temporalities in and of the gigeconomy, we offer an innovative approach to exploring complicated factors in an emerging andrapidly growing field. We highlight the multiple layers of geography in physical and digitalspaces and the, sometimes blurry, interactions between these. We also show howtemporalities shape the geographies of the gig economy. This paper contributes to developing,deepening and advancing theoretical challenges in understanding the gig economy. It alsobrings these challenges into an accessible, yet thorough publication that can be used inteaching about the gig economy and digital geography. We provide a pedagogical tool tosupport university teachers in using this document in their courses.

Denna rapport är en unik rundabordsdiskussion mellan geografer för att utforska,kontextualisera och problematisera geografins roll i gigekonomin. Detta samlar åtta forskarefrån olika kontexter i Europa som alla arbetar med kvalitativa metoder och forskar omgigekonomin. Baserat på reflektioner och kommentarer om rumsligheten och temporaliteternai och av gigekonomin erbjuder vi ett innovativt tillvägagångssätt för att undersöka kompliceradefaktorer i ett fält som växer och förändras snabbt. Vi lyfter fram flera aspekter av geografi ifysiska och digitala rum och platser och de, ibland luddiga, interaktionerna mellan dessaaspekter. Vi visar också hur temporaliteter formar gigekonomins geografier. Denna rapportbidrar till att utveckla, fördjupa och främja teoretiska utmaningar för att förstå gigekonomin.Det för också dessa utmaningar till en tillgänglig men ändå grundlig publikation som kananvändas i undervisningen om gigekonomin och digital geografi. Vi inkluderar ett pedagogisktverktyg för att stödja universitetslärare att använda detta dokument i sina kurser.

The livelihoods approach has become dominant for understanding poverty issues and advising on development policies. Spatial perspectives have been increasingly recognised to be important for understanding the increasing complexity and dynamics of livelihoods with regional development, urbanisation and close rural-urban interactions. This study further develops this perspective by highlighting the concepts of geographical context, location and urban hierarchy and adopts a multi-scalar analytical approach. The study examines the rural poor's livelihood strategies in Jilin Province of China based on two surveys conducted with about 3000 households in total and multiple logistic regression analysis. Our results demonstrate that half of the rural poor depend on incomes and livelihood strategies without labour input. From a macro-spatial view, the rural poor living in the Western and Eastern Areas, which have more challenging geographical contexts, are more dependent on subsidy income. From a micro-spatial view, rural livelihoods change, with spatial patterns depending on distance to urban areas and the type of these areas; small and medium-sized urban areas are more important for the rural poor's livelihoods. Geographical context makes these urban effects on rural livelihoods spatially more heterogeneous. Spatial understandings of livelihoods research help to better target and tailor poverty alleviation policies.

The new connectivity, through mobile phones, social media, and wireless internet, is an agent in social change in the drylands. In this chapter, we present four case studies: the introduction of mobile apps in Mongolia and Kenya, the role of mobile telephony in the Sahel, and the introduction of online learning in the Negev Desert. Each of these case studies develops an argument around the role of connectivity in ‘giving a voice’ to the people living in drylands. Indeed, as the studies show, the new technology of communication is a resource for such populations, especially when we focus on the benefits of improved communication and access to information. However, the effective use of such a resource is hampered by the lack of knowledge of dryland dynamics among the developers of the new technology and by the imposed power relations of the State. Also, the technology may follow its own pathway, being appropriated by the population in unexpected ways and creating new power relations that may also lead to conflict.

Digitally-mediated forms of services are increasingly normalized and rapidly transforming working and everyday lives creating new digital-social-spatial relations. The platform economy, in particular, offers new ways of work and new means of consumption. These changes challenge welfare states, both in the operations of institutions and to their foundational social goals and values. In Sweden, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social and labour market segregation intersected and amplified inequalities resulting in media covering and querying the nature and role of platform-mediated work within the Swedish welfare context. Located within an intersectional perspective, this study explores how media articulations of platform-mediated work shape theoretical understandings of the platform economy during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. This was conducted through an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of Swedish-language newspapers between January and September 2020 (96 articles). We show understandings of the platform economy are active and shifting in temporal and spatial contexts. We highlight how work and working forms tie closely to ideas of equality and welfare in the Swedish context. Intersectional perspectives reveal the central role of power structures in local context – a specific time/place- and decenters normative economic perspectives of the platform economy. This study reinforces the need for more studies on the platform economy that foreground social relations to understand inequalities produced in and through social-technological activities. 

This paper investigates the drivers and mechanisms behind the zero lease phenomenon in Sweden, which is characterised by no monetary transfer between landowners and land users, and has been captured in agricultural statistics since the late 1990s. The phenomenon is examined through a theoretical framework which combines rent theory with geographical and historically contextualised views of farming and farmland tenure. We use rent statistics but focus on exploring the geographical dimensions of zero lease farmland in Sweden, mapping spatial variations of rents, the scale of free-leased fields and the geographical location of these fields both at the farm and regional level. Our results show how the zero lease is related to geographical space and ongoing transformation processes in agriculture and rural spaces over time. The paper concludes that the zero lease creates a temporal flexibility for landowners, preserves non-monetary landscape values, and creates opportunities for future farming by preserving landesque capital. This Swedish example illustrates well how, when globally integrated markets force farmers to either restructure, intensify or extensify, and old farming models do not fit the global agri-food systems, farmers find ways to adjust through spatial and temporal means. Seeing the zero lease through farm geographies may suggest opportunities and solutions for making an alternative food and farming future.

Throughout history, urban centres have existed at the margins of drylands. Nowadays they are expanding in connection to new local, national, and global contexts. Rich research on the urbanization–migration relationship, especially in Africa and Asia, has not given much attention to dryland cities, while emerging research suggests that climate change effects entangled with conflicts in resource use are driving or displacing people to dryland cities. Drawing on livelihoods and translocal perspectives that centralize human agency in (re)producing places and shaping relations between places through migration/mobilities, this chapter explores the driving forces behind the growth of dryland cities and the contribution of rural–urban migration to this process. Our two empirical cases—Khartoum in Sudan and Inner Mongolia in China—demonstrate that dryland cities have been produced simultaneously through migrants’ bottom-up actions, changing human–environment relationships, and shifting policy. Urban growth in drylands is nurtured by resources in the rural area through the mediation of migrants, which calls for research to look beyond the urban–rural dichotomy. Despite following some general characteristics and development directions, the dynamics of dryland cities are shaped by particular environmental and geographical characteristics of the drylands, which are associated with rural migrants’ more flexible and opportunistic but less settled relationships to the cities.