Whose hope? Normative asymmetries in planetary rural geographies

This commentary engages with the formulation of planetary rural geographies, a significant intervention against the erasure of the rural in planetary urbanisation discourse. By foregrounding more-than-human relations, it recovers the analytical salience of rural spaces as sites of crisis, conflict, and hope. This commentary identifies a tension that has persisted through two rounds of dialogue: the framework's aspiration to transcend anthropocentrism is itself an irreducibly human enterprise, in which human epistemic authority determines which rural practices qualify as ‘hope’. Crisis and conflict operate as analytically open categories; hope tends to function as a normative filter admitting only practices that pass a more-than-human threshold. Drawing on critical engagements with the more-than-human turn, I argue that the framework risks reconstituting a new evaluative hierarchy – anthropocentric/more-than-human – structurally parallel to the urban/rural hierarchy it critiques. To move beyond this impasse, I propose situated hope : a relocation of hope's analytical starting point from predetermined philosophical standards to the actual practices through which rural inhabitants negotiate desirable futures in specific places.