Hands that adapt: Seasonal labour migration, climate change, and the making of adaptable subjects in Turkey

Increasingly uncertain climatic patterns, insecure labour conditions, and ever-shifting typologies of human mobility all contribute to the persistence of “cheap food, cheap labour and high profits” logic in the Mediterranean Basin. While changing temporalities and deteriorating environmental conditions reveal complex dynamics in the Mediterranean agro-migration system, the protagonists of this activity, migratory seasonal agricultural workers are often side-lined in political ecology, critical human geography, and development studies. Yet with their precarious labour being indispensable to “save the crops”, their livelihoods are under the direct and indirect impacts of multidimensional environmental and socio-economic changes. This chapter focuses on the case of migrant seasonal workers within labour-intensive agriculture systems in the eastern Mediterranean with a focus on the political economy and legitimising discourses of climate change adaptation policies. Everyday forms of labour resistance practised in migrant labour-intensive agriculture can potentially help just adaptation practices through the labourers’ refusal to accept the terms of their subordination. Thus, drawing on an empirical case from southern Turkey, the findings here suggest the need to go beyond the incremental socio-spatial fixes towards a better understanding of the underlying interests and values in transformative adaptation research.