A 2008 report from the World Bank assessing poverty revealed that single-headed female households were among the poorest in Grenada. Ten years later, this statistic remained unchanged. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 aims to end poverty in all its forms, noting that the most vulnerable are women and girls. If single-headed female households are among the poorest, not just in Grenada but elsewhere, why do they remain understudied? Should we not try to use participatory and evidence-based research to help improve their lives and therefore reduce poverty? Support for Education, Empowerment and Development (SEED) is a Conditional Cash Transfer programme (CCTP) started by the government in Grenada to assist citizens who are struggling financially, including single mothers. The social, economic and political implications of CCTPs are well documented within development research, but not enough research has focused on the impact of CCTPS on the lives of single mothers. Studies focus on groups such as children, adolescents, households, and married women, while neglecting single mothers. Limited research on the experiences of single mothers reveals that they face discrimination, invisibilization and are stereotyped. Within development research, there is no mention of Grenada’s SEED programme. This research investigates the economic and social lives of single mother beneficiaries and their experiences. Convenient sampling was employed to recruit the participants, which included 20 current and former single mother beneficiaries of the SEED programme. Drawing from the preliminary findings, single motherhood for SEED beneficiaries is marred by struggles financially, socially and mentally. CCTPs are also burdensome for single mothers due to the added responsibility of fulfilling the conditions associated with these programmes. Overall, this study seeks to give voice and contribute to the literature of single mother beneficiaries and SEED with the aim of influencing future policies.

The 21st century has seen borders increasingly digitized, monitored, and enforced, raising critical questions about governance in a world dominated by technology. In Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, biological and social borders collapse, exposing the coercive dynamics of state power over bodies and communities. Through surveillance, reproductive governance, and the shifting boundaries of humanity, the novel explores how systems of control disproportionately affect marginalized bodies. Nonetheless, the text gears me toward rethinking governance as a negotiable construct. It reveals how the boundaries between the human and the non-human, autonomy and state control, and survival and extinction are redefined in a time of crisis, allowing for a reconstitution of power. My analysis will demonstrate that, in Future Home of the Living God, governance is not a fixed structure but one that can be renegotiated, revealing both the vulnerabilities and possibilities inherent in these transformations. Drawing on posthumanist thought, I consider the novel’s treatment of posthuman bodies, as well as what governance might look like when the boundaries between the human, the non-human, and the technological become porous.

Despite repeated exposure to severe storms, Cuba’s distinctive disaster management model has continued to be extremely successful. Through policy, risk reduction, and mass participation, an organized and effective system has been developed to protect the population. This paper will examine the efficacy of Cuba’s approach to disaster management which is not only reliant on efficiency but also on socio-cultural values of solidarity and participation. More specifically, I will explore the underlying cultures that inform, support, and propel Cuba’s disaster management procedures. I argue that Cuba’s disaster preparedness, response, and recovery practices are grounded within the value and action of solidarity, which is unique within the context of disaster management. Solidarity is noticeably present in all areas of the country’s disaster management system and is highlighted throughout all levels of Cuban society – from interactions between neighbours to governmental policies. With solidarity at the centre of Cuba’s disaster management system, this paper will demonstrate that policy has the capacity to change values and behaviours, and, in turn, values and behaviours can change policy. Global disaster management is now urgent, and diverse strategies must be explored to address climate change. The Cuban model acts as an example of successful disaster management and offers insight into the transformative role of solidarity and how it can be reproduced in other social contexts. Through examining how the discourse and action of solidarity in disaster management are realized in government policy, mass media representation and grassroots perceptions and actions, this paper will make a new contribution to understanding the subject in Cuba and beyond.

In the central highlands of Guatemala, the increasing variability of weather and the growing severity of climatic stresses are widely recognized as a significant threat to the region’s economically important horticultural sector and the livelihoods of the predominantly indigenous peasant agricultural producers who cultivate the vast majority of the sector’s fresh fruits and vegetables, which are primarily destined for export markets. To address these risks, Guatemala’s semi-public agricultural development bank, Banrural, has partnered with the non-profit Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organization to provide vulnerable small-scale agricultural producers with an index-based agricultural insurance product known as Produce Seguro (PS). Similar to other index-based weather insurance products, PS benefits policyholders when select weather-related measures deviate from their historical norms. Despite promises of security, clients of PS remain highly susceptible to a host of environmental stresses, including those covered by their insurance policies. In this paper I explain why, focusing upon the historical role that public and private household debts have played in the development of Guatemala’s horticultural export sector and the vulnerability of its peasant agricultural producers. By channeling insurance payments to policyholders’ outstanding loan balances at Banrural, PS is founded upon an implicit understanding of how climatic stresses intersect with the stresses of debt that burden most horticultural farming households. Yet, drawing upon interview and survey data, I argue that the insurance is primarily oriented towards alleviating the threats that a changing climate pose to the bank’s loan portfolio rather than the threats it poses for peasant livelihoods.