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Political Deference in a Democratic Age: British Politics and the Constitution from the Eighteenth Century to Brexit
by Catherine MarshallThis book explores the concept of deference as used by historians and political scientists. Often confused and judged to be outdated, it shows how deference remains central to understanding British politics to the present day. This study aims to make sense of how political deference has functioned in different periods and how it has played a crucial role in legitimising British politics. It shows how deference sustained what are essentially English institutions, those which dominated the Union well into the second half of the twentieth century until the post-1997 constitutional transformations under New Labour. While many dismiss political and institutional deference as having died out, this book argues that a number of recent political decisions – including the vote in favour of Brexit in June 2016 – are the result of a deferential way of thinking that has persisted through the democratic changes of the twentieth century. Combining close readings of theoretical texts with analyses of specific legal changes and historical events, the book charts the development of deference from the eighteenth century through to the present day. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of deference, it picks out key moments that show the changing nature of deference, both as a concept and as a political force.
Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England
by Piers J. HaleHistorians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation. Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live. Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was "the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly "Darwinian. ” By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Political Ecology
by Karl Zimmerer Thomas J. BassettThis volume offers a unique, integrative perspective on the political and ecological processes shaping landscapes and resource use across the global North and South. Twelve carefully selected case studies demonstrate how contemporary geographical theories and methods can contribute to understanding key environment-and-development issues and working toward effective policies. Topics addressed include water and biodiversity resources, urban and national resource planning, scientific concepts of resource management, and ideas of nature and conservation in the context of globalization. Giving particular attention to evolving conceptions of nature-society interaction and geographical scale, an introduction and conclusion by the editors provide a clear analytical focus for the volume and summarize important developments and debates in the field.
Political Ecology
by Paul RobbinsThis fully updated new edition introduces the core concepts, central thinkers, and major works of the burgeoning field of political ecology.Explores the key arguments and contemporary explanatory challenges facing the sub-disciplineProvides the first full history of the development of political ecology over the last century and its theoretical underpinningsConsiders the major challenges facing the field now and for the futureStudy boxes introduce key figures in the development of the discipline and summarize their most important worksFully updated to include recent events, such as the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, as well as both urban and rural examples, from the developed and underdeveloped world
Political Ecology of Industrial Crops (Earthscan Food and Agriculture)
by Abubakari AhmedThis book employs a political ecology lens to unravel how industrial crops catalyse ecological, agrarian, socioeconomic, and institutional transformation. Using the conceptual tools and perspectives of political ecology, namely multi-scalar analysis and attention to marginalisation, social difference, and discourses and narratives, this volume provides a critical and comprehensive assessment of the transformative power of industrial cropping systems. It presents a truly international overview by drawing on a range of case studies from the global South, including soybeans in South America, cashew nuts in Guinea Bissau, cotton in India, maize in China, jatropha in Ghana, sugarcane in Peru and Eswatini, and oil palm in Ghana and Peru. The unique case studies are put into perspective with chapters introducing the key concepts of political ecology and critical dimensions of industrial cropping systems related to large-scale land acquisitions, land grabbing, and marginal land. The individual chapters employ different approaches all rooted in political ecology, thus offering a rich overview of how the field engages with such cropping systems. Overall, this volume contains valuable propositions for improving current policies and practices in industrial crop settings in both developed and developing countries. Through its comprehensive and interdisciplinary outlook, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political ecology, agrarian studies, development studies, and ecological economics.
Political Ecology: A Critical Engagement with Global Environmental Issues
by Tor A. Benjaminsen Hanne SvarstadThis textbook introduces political ecology as an interdisciplinary approach to critically examine land and environmental issues. Drawing on discourse and narrative analysis, Marxist political economy and insights from natural science, the book points at similarities, differences and inter-connections between environmental governance in the global North and South. A wide range of carefully curated case studies are presented, with a particular focus on Africa and Norway. Key themes of power, justice and environmental sustainability run through all chapters. The authors challenge established views and leading discourses and present research findings that may surprise readers. Chapters cover topics including wildlife conservation, climate change and conflicts, land grabbing, the effects of population growth on the environment, jihadism in the African Sahel, bioprospecting, feminist political ecology, and struggles around carbon mitigation within a fossil fuel-based economy. This introductory text provides tools and examples for both undergraduate and postgraduate students to better understand on-going struggles about some of the world’s most urgent challenges.
Political Ecology: Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life
by Enrique LeffThis book offers a conceptual framework for the critical understanding of the present socio-environmental conflicts. It reflects on the evolution of subject and thought, a shift in environmental thinking triggered by the development of eco-territorial conflicts and the social responses given to the environmental question. Bringing together 40 years of the authors writing and research, the book explores the transition from ecological economics and historical materialism to ecological Marxism. It unpacks the forging of political ecology from value theory in political economy, to ecological distribution and ecologies of difference; a transition to an environmental rationality grounded in the ontology of diversity, a politics of difference and an ethics of otherness. This evolution in thinking gives consistency to a theoretical discourse able to respond to the territorial conflicts generated by the radicalization of the environmental question as a key social issue of our times. The book is a call to respond to the urgent challenge of reversing the tendency towards the entropic death of the planet and to building a sustainable world order.
Political Economy and International Order in Interwar Europe (Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought)
by Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak Alexandre M. CunhaStandard histories of European integration emphasize the immediate aftermath of World War II as the moment when the seeds of the European Union were first sown. However, the interwar years witnessed a flurry of concern with the reconstruction of the world order, generating arguments that cut across the different social sciences, then plunged in a period of disciplinary soul-searching and feverish activism. Economics was no exception: several of the most prominent interwar economists, such as F. A. Hayek, Jan Tinbergen, Lionel Robbins, François Perroux, J. M. Keynes and Robert Triffin, contributed directly to larger public discussions on peace, order and stability. This edited volume combines these different strands of historical narrative into a unified framework, showing how political economy was integral to the interwar literature on international relations and, conversely, how economists were eager to incorporate international politics into their own concerns. The book brings together a group of scholars with varied disciplinary backgrounds, whose combined perspectives allow us to explore three analytical layers. The first part studies how different forms of economic knowledge, from economic programming to international finance, were used in the quest for a stable European order. The second part focuses on the existence of conflicting expectations about the role of social scientific knowledge, either as a source of technical solutions or as an input for enlightened public discussion. The third part illustrates how certain ideas and beliefs found concrete expression in specific institutional settings, which amplified their political leverage. The three parts are enclosed by an introductory essay, laying out the broad topics explored in the volume, and a substantial postscript tying all the historical threads together.
Political Economy of China’s Climate Policy (Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path)
by Jiahua PanThis book covers major advances in China’s climate policy over the past decade and presents theoretical approaches to climate justice and low-carbon transformation from a Chinese perspective. It analyzes the political economy of China’s climate policy, and subsequently addresses the following major aspects: carbon emissions and human rights, equity and carbon budgets, economic analysis of low-carbon transformation, economics of adaptation to climate change, and international climate regime building.
Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies
by Pietro Daniel OmodeoThis book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.
Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies And The Making Of Life
by Adam Bobbette Amy DonovanThis book explores the emerging field of political geology, an area of study dedicated to understanding the cross-sections between geology and politics. It considers how geological forces such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and unstable ground are political forces and how political forces have an impact on the earth. Together the authors seek to understand how the geos has been known, spoken for, captured, controlled and represented while creating the active underlying strata for producing worlds. This comprehensive collection covers a variety of interdisciplinary topics including the history of the geological sciences, non-Western theories of geology, the origin of the earth, and the relationship between humans and nature. It includes chapters that re-think the earth’s ‘geostory’ as well as case studies on the politics of earthquakes in Mexico city, shamans on an Indonesian volcano, geologists at Oxford, and eroding islands in Japan. In each case political geology is attentive to the encounters between political projects and the generative geological materials that are enlisted and often slip, liquefy or erode away. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners across the political and geographical sciences, as well as to philosophers of science, anthropologists and sociologists more broadly.
Political Islam and Violence in Indonesia (Asian Security Studies)
by Zachary AbuzaPolitical Islam and Violence in Indonesia presents a penetrating new investigation of religious radicalism in the largest Muslim country in the world. Indonesia is a country long known for its diversity and tolerant brand of Islam. However, since the fall of Suharto, a more intolerant form of Islam has been growing, one whose adherents have carried out terrorist attacks, waged sectarian war, and voiced strident anti-Western rhetoric. Zachary Abuza’s unique analysis of radical Islam draws upon primary documents such as Jemaah Islamiyah’s operations manual, interviews, and recorded testimonies of politicians, religious figures, and known militants, as well as personal interviews with numerous security and intelligence experts in Indonesia and elsewhere, to paint a picture at once guardedly optimistic about the future of Indonesian democracy and concerned about the increasing role of conservative and radical Islam in Indonesian society. This book will be of great interest to students of Indonesian politics, Asian studies, political violence and security studies in general.
Political Species: The Evolution and Diversity of Private Organizations in Politics (ISSN)
by Karsten RonitIn Political Species, Karsten Ronit expertly argues that evolutionary biology can provide important sources of inspiration for analyzing the proliferation of private actors/organizations in domestic and global politics. Focusing on the evolution of a diversity of such private actors/organizations in politics, Ronit emphasizes that individuals are affected by and contribute to societal, cultural, and political evolution through a range of formal organizations and that societies, cultures, and politics influence and build upon values and norms transmitted by individuals via these formal organizations. By being mindful of these contextual factors and keeping in mind the important research done in the micro- and macro-perspectives, we can gain a better understanding of the diversity of private actors/organizations and how they evolve and adapt. Evolutionary biology teaches us that over time, different varieties emerge, specialize, and adapt to the ever-changing conditions in complex environments before accumulating into new species. Much change characterizes these processes of political evolution because actors constantly emerge and add to the existing population of private actors that, in one way or another, are engaged in politics.
Political Spirituality in the Face of Climate Collapse: Of Monsters, Megaliths, Mules, and Muck
by James W. PerkinsonThis book takes its motive force from our contemporary climate crisis. It seeks to reorient human (and especially Christian) understanding, towards a more ecologically-focused, indigenously-informed way-of-living. James W. Perkinson argues that our current eco-climatic and socio-political emergency is the culmination of a 5,000-year history of supremacist “settlement,” in which city-states first emergent in Mesopotamia and Egypt not only begin coercively organizing labor into surplus production and ecosystems into inordinate and destructive yields of “goods,” but in the process, also simultaneously “deform” the Spirit-World “haloing” of natural phenomenon into outsized service of imperial reach. Perkinson recognizes globalized humanity as an emerging monstrosity destroying both human culture and the world. How we re-envision and revalue, at our critical juncture, our inescapable interdependence with the more-than-human world as peer and teacher and even “elder,” is the central theme that throbs below the surface of the very disparate topics commanding attention in each chapter.
Political Victory: The Elusive Prize of Military Wars
by Brian CrozierSuccess in war has always been difficult to measure. What is judged successful by military leaders may not be judged so by political leadership, nor by the wider public, at least in a Western-style democracy. The public is generally inclined to applaud military victory, but it instinctively reserves the right to ask afterwards: Was it really worth it? In Political Victory, Brian Crozier looks at modern wars involving democracies to evaluate victory and defeat by the success or failure of political outcomes.Crozier begins with the two world wars, where in both cases the German aggressor was defeated by three key democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. In World War I military victory was squandered by treaty terms that led to the advent of Hitler and Nazism. By contrast, the total defeat of Nazism in 1945 left the Western Allies in charge of some two-thirds of Germany's population, thus enabling the victors to convert the vanquished to democracy. Crozier also deals with the break up of empires following World War II, comparing how Britain avoided full-scale war in contrast with France's violent confrontations in Southeast Asia and Algeria.America's involvement in Vietnam is analyzed in the wider context of the Cold War and the mounting challenge of international communism to Western democracies. His assessment stresses the lack of popularity in America for the idea of democratizing a region to which the U.S. has no historical or sentimental attachment. Among the smaller conflicts considered in this volume are the Suez crisis of 1956, the Falkland Island war between Britain and Argentina, and the fateful Soviet involvement in Afghanistan that helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet system. Crozier concludes with analyses of the 1991 Gulf War and the Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia.Crozier's final chapters focus on looming threats around the world with particular emphasis on international terrorism and the challenge of radical Islam. Both historical and timely, Political Victory will be of interest to military historians, political scientists, and foreign affairs specialists.
Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (The Information Society Series)
by Aure SchrockThe first detailed history of Code for America that examines how democratically designed government systems can collectively improve technology&’s impact on society.For decades, tens of thousands of volunteers and employees of Code for America have taken a different path to institutional change: through designing and implementing infrastructure. In Politics Recoded, Aure Schrock employs a robust, organizational ethnography to analyze how Code for America&’s infrastructural organizing changed how politics get exercised, showing how we citizens can work directly with the government on projects to improve our collective livelihoods. Drawing from theories of organizing, social infrastructure, racialized organizations, technical cultures, and intersectionality, Schrock argues that our &“post-techlash society&” must no longer presume that corporate platforms or social networks can level social inequities.An underrecognized yet influential organization, Code for America emerged from a tech culture background that prioritized networks and publicity over the long, slow work of institutional change. But its evolution demonstrates how to push beyond the fundamental flaws of tech-forward organizing. This, the first history of Code for America, shows how promoting agentic citizenship and brokering in empathy let the organization influence policy at all levels of government—and demonstrates why we need to bolster institutions to ensure that everyone is justly represented and receiving the benefits. Appealing to those in political science, communication, and information studies, Politics Recoded will empower practitioners and activists to revolutionize technological design and participate in alternative forms of civic engagement.
Politics and Development in a Transboundary Watershed
by Joakim Öjendal Sofie Hellberg Stina HanssonWater - and its governance - is becoming a global concern partly because it is turning into a goods in short supply, with devastating effects on literally billions of people, but also because it is the "carrier" of global warming; whether through irregular weather patterns or through flooding, water is how global warming will be 'felt'. The lion's share of the globally available fresh water resources is to be found in transboundary systems. In spite of its significance, the generated knowledge on how to deal with transboundary waters is weak and leaves policy makers with seemingly unavoidable, trade-off dilemmas and prioritizations, often with detrimental effects. In order to disentangle this predicament this volume works with one case: the Lower Mekong Basin and covers state-of-the-art academic and practitioners' knowledge and hence appeals to a wide audience. The topic this volume addresses is situated in the nexus of an IR- (International Relations) approach focussing on transboundary politics and its inclination to remain within the sphere of state sovereignty and national interest on the one hand, and Development studies, with its imperatives on participation, planning, and intervention, on the other. The dilemma, we argue, of better understanding transboundary water management lies in how to understand how these two rationalities can be simultaneously nurtured. Audience: This book will be relevant to scholars, as it provides cutting-edge research, and students, since it covers the primary debates in the field, interested in resource management, regional politics, and development issues in the area. It also addresses the global debate on transboundary water management and presents an in-depth case of one of the globally most sophisticated attempts at pursuing sustainable river basin management. Finally, practitioners and policymakers would benefit greatly because all contributions have explicit policy relevance, launching suggestion on improvements in water management.
Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society
by Zeynep PamukA new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologiesOur ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other.Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies.Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.
Politics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and STEM: Among White Coats
by Cinzia GrecoPolitics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and STEM: Among White Coats collects critical examinations of the politics, positionality, and epistemological and methodological issues of doing ethnography in a number of locales across the globe and in fields including computer science, astronomy, mining, biology, and medicine. The book captures a wide breadth of ethnographic case studies conducted by scholars at different stages of their careers, with various geographical backgrounds, and working across different settings and regions of the world, demonstrating the unfolding of overlapping concerns in unique ways. ‘Among White Coats’ is the first systematic and critical examination of the politics and epistemology of doing ethnography in biomedicine and STEM, adding to the extensive production of studies based on the ethnography of medicine and ethnography of science, as well as the ongoing debate on the foundation of ethnography. The book is geared toward academics and research students from different disciplinary backgrounds. It is a resource useful not only for students and Ph.D. candidates but also for expert ethnographers, presenting the most recent debates on ethnography and knowledge production in the STEM and biomedical fields. The book is partly a response to the growing awareness of the increasingly pertinent objective for ethnographers to reflect on their positionalities in their writing. Thus, this book offers a reflexive guide to thinking through the political and practical aspects of ethnographic practice.
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
by Bruno Latour Catherine PorterA major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology--transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks. " Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society--and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a "commonsense" division--which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of "mononaturalism" and "multiculturalism," Latour develops the idea of "multinaturalism," a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by "diplomats" who are flexible and open to experimentation.
Politics of the Environment: A Survey
by Chukwumerije OkerekeThe environment is increasingly seen at the forefront of many political agendas. Covering important topics, such as the Kyoto protocol and deforestation, this book provides extensive coverage of all aspects of environmental politics. Essays of around 6,000 words in length make up the bulk of the book. Written by notable experts in the field of environmental politics, these essays each examine a different aspect of the subject.
Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays On Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer
by Andrew NorrisThe Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps--in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death--are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben's radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben's thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors--Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger--but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists' approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben's arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" to Schmitt's Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today's most important political theorists. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall
Politics, Statistics and Weather Forecasting, 1840-1910: Taming the Weather (Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine)
by Aitor AnduagaWeather forecasting is the most visible branch of meteorology and has its modern roots in the nineteenth century when scientists redefined meteorology in the way weather forecasts were made, developing maps of isobars, or lines of equal atmospheric pressure, as the main forecasting tool. This book is the history of how weather forecasting was moulded and modelled by the processes of nation-state building and statistics in the Western world.
Pollen Biology and Biotechnology
by K R ShivannaThe author offers an overview of pollen biology and biotechnology for students and researchers in areas such as reproductive biology, biotechnology, aeropalynology, plant breeding, horticulture, and forestry. Citing more than 1,500 references to pollen research, the text covers topics including advances in understanding pollen tube growth, the use of pollen for gene transfer, and advantages and disadvantages of various pollination systems for production of species limits.
Pollen Chemistry & Biotechnology
by Nesrin Ecem Bayram Aleksandar Ž. Kostic Yusuf Can GercekPollen is made up of many chemical constituents such as proteins, sugars, lipids, minerals and phytochemicals. These components make pollen products an excellent source of nutrients and antioxidants for consumers. However, mycotoxigenic fungi are also common in pollen, creating contamination from generated mycotoxins. With adequate monitoring, sampling, processing and storage of pollen the development of mycotoxins can be significantly prevented. Since pollen grain has strong membranes which can limit the bioavailability of some nutrients and phytochemicals, novel methods and pretreatments are required with special emphasis on microbiological pretreatment methodologies. Pollen Chemistry & Biotechnology summarizes current knowledge of the chemical composition of pollen, its importance as a functional food ingredient and its health promoting properties. As Introduction part a short elaborate about botanical characteristics and data, including morphology and anatomy of pollen and bee preferences, is given. Important factors such as the botanical and geographical origin, best practices for preservation of nutritional composition, bioactivity and safety of pollen are covered in full. The nutritional profile of pollen based on data for minerals, lipids and nutrients is presented. A detailed phytochemical profile of pollen based on data for phenolics, flavonoids, carotenoids, vitamins, bioactive compounds is also covered. Areas for the improvement of the bioavailability of different nutrients and bioactive compounds of pollen via applied pretreatments are presented, as are best practices for adequate pollen collection, procession and storage in order to obtain safe products. At the end, an overview about pollen bioactivity as reason to use it as source of pharmaceuticals is made.