Resilience thinking versus political ecology: understanding the dynamics of small-scale, labour-intensive farming landscapes

2012 ◽  
pp. 95-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Widgren
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Intensive Farming ◽  
Resilience Thinking ◽  
Farming Landscapes

scholarly journals Visceral Encounters: A Political Ecology of Urban Land, Food, and Housing in Dubuque, Iowa

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Chennault ◽  
Klavitter ◽  
Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Community Gardens ◽  
The Body ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Racial Relations ◽  
Food Gardening ◽  
Political Ecologies

Through a praxis of co-authorship between a university scholar and two community gardeners/organizers/activists, this article showcases the ways in which knowledge, practices, and relationalities emergent in community gardens in Dubuque, Iowa USA directly engage with the politics of food, land, and housing. The authors engage in co-authorship across university and community boundaries to ontologically reframe knowledge production and draw critical attention to the everyday livelihoods and political ecologies experienced within marginalized communities. We use extended conversations and interviews to analyze the food, land, and housing issues that emerge in the context of uneven racial relations and neighborhood revitalization. We then organize our analysis using a Political Ecology of the Body (PEB) framework to consider how people’s bodily, emotional, and social lives impact their relationalities with food, gardening, and neighborhood spaces. Our findings show that community gardening efforts are transforming the Washington and North End neighborhoods—even if these changes appear to outsiders to be small-scale or difficult to measure—while also calling attention to the anti-oppression and anti-racism work that remains to be done. Our co-authorship demonstrates how community gardeners and university partners can work together to contest histories of marginalization and foster more socially just relations.

Growing Ourselves to Death? Economic and Ecological Crises, the Growth of Waste, and the Role of the Media and Cultural Industries

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81
Author(s):  
Trish Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses

Since the financial crash of 2008, large sectors of capitalist economies have been enveloped by a crisis that is typically represented by media discourses in purely economic and financial terms. However, the crisis is also ecological. Yet, while media discourses frequently embrace and propose small-scale environmental remedies, it is rarely pointed out that such calls stand at odds with the consumer capitalist system under which the media industries operate. Adopting a ‘business as usual’ approach to consumption, the media industries encourage the public to shop their way out of recession, despite crippling austerity measures that have been imposed on them. This is in the face of an unprecedented ecological crisis which is now largely accepted as due to anthropogenic factors. In light of this ecological crisis, continued growth-based economic paradigms are increasingly deemed unsustainable. Yet frequently, media discourse uncritically takes growth and waste as two aspects of an unchanging and necessary paradigm. Against this backdrop of economic and ecological crises this paper draws on a set of critical cross-disciplinary literature from Harvey's political economy, to Foster and Moore's political ecology to Baran and Sweezy on waste, through to Adorno, Bourdieu and Garnham, to identify and engage with the strategic role of the media. It outlines crisis theories of economy and ecology, moving on to discuss crucial, if neglected aspects of the role of the media and cultural industries with respect to these crises. This paper advances the view that the role of the media in construction of norms with respect to consumption practices and waste is of significance and arguably needs to be incorporated into crisis theory of both economy and ecology.

scholarly journals "We feed the world": the political ecology of the Corn Belt's driving narrative

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Lukacs Rissing
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
World War ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
The World ◽  
Agricultural Production Systems

Industrial grain production occupies most of Iowa's farmland. Around the edges of corn and soybean monocultures, however, small-scale, diversified farmers establish alternative agricultural operations and sell to local markets. One narrative, "we feed the world", stretches across these two spheres; its roots lie in post-World War II geopolitics, and its contemporary iterations reflect the actions of private agricultural interest groups. As a rhetorical strategy, asserting "we feed the world" invokes neo-Malthusian fears to reposition differences in agricultural production systems within a moral framework where yield primarily determines agricultural legitimacy. This article ethnographically analyzes how this narrative intersects the lives and livelihoods of conventional and alternative farmers alike. Today, the narrative serves three functions: defending industrial agricultural systems against criticisms,justifying the pursuit of ever-higher yields on moral grounds, and gatekeeping agricultural legitimacy. Examining this discursive mechanism yields insight into the diversity of strategies through which actors within the industrial agricultural system reproduce particular land use practices in service of their own interests.

scholarly journals Successful small-scale irrigation or environmental destruction? The political ecology of competing claims on water in the Uluguru Mountains,Tanzania

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Harrison ◽  
Anna Mdee
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
External Support ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Water Shortages ◽  
Uluguru Mountains ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Small Scale Farmers ◽  
Nearby City

Abstract In the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania, an expansion in informal hosepipe irrigation by small-scale farmers has enabled the development of horticulture, and resulted in improvements in farmers' livelihoods. This has largely taken place independently of external support, and can be seen as an example of the 'private' irrigation that is increasingly viewed as important for sub-Saharan Africa. However, these activities are seen by representatives of government and some donors as the cause of environmental degradation and water shortages downstream, especially in the nearby city of Morogoro. As a result, there have been attempts to evict the farmers from the mountain. Negative narratives persist and the farmers on the mountainside are portrayed as a problem to be 'solved.' This article explores these tensions, contributing to debates about the formalization of water management arrangements and the place of the state in regulating and adjudicating rights to access water. We argue that a focus on legality and formalization serves to obscure the political nature of competing claims on resources that the case illustrates. Keywords: irrigation; Tanzania; ethnography; political ecology; water

scholarly journals Decentralization for Increased Sustainability in Natural Resource Management? Two Cautionary Cases from Ghana

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6885
Author(s):  
James Natia Adam ◽  
Timothy Adams ◽  
Jean-David Gerber ◽  
Tobias Haller
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Natural Resource Management ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
African Countries

In Sub-Saharan African countries, governments are increasingly devolving natural resource management from central administration to the local government level as a trend toward subsidiarity. In parallel, efforts to implement formalization processes have resulted in a puzzling institutional arena, wherein mixed actors are struggling to influence the paths of institutional change and the associated distribution of land and land-related resources. Relying on political ecology and new institutionalism in social anthropology, we investigate how the decentralization of formalization of rights in artisanal and small-scale gold mining can lead to paradoxical outcomes, often negatively impacting social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Two comparative case studies are performed in Ghana. Our results show that the negative effects of formalization efforts for resource end users are to be understood in the broad context of actors’ repositioning strategies following the selective implementation of decentralization. The authors conclude that increasing the power of the central government and line ministries to control local resources can influence the disenfranchisement of local people’s participation and control of natural resources, resulting in a relentless environmental crisis.

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