Profile

Kai is a political ecologist, political economist, and theorist of rural and agrarian transition. His research considers how capital reorganizes agrarian and rural regions across the world to maximise capital accumulation at the expense of people and ecologies, and how workers, communities, and social movements fight back. He is particularly interested in how land-use changes in pursuit of a green transition in the imperial core impose social and ecological harms on workers in the periphery of the global economy. Kai also researches developments in green political theory, with a focus on degrowth, eco-Marxist, anti-colonial environmentalist thought.

Kai is a co-director of the progressive policy platform, Abundance, where he is involved in implementing ‘public-common partnerships’. This is an organizational form that democratises control over assets, resources, and landscapes. As part of this research, Kai is involved in a project to implement a regenerative aquacultural system on the Isle of Skye and efforts to repurpose Britain’s council farm estates as sites of agroecological transition and food sovereignty.