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This research is an ethnographic case study of the emerging ecotourism economies in the agricultural village of San Gerardo de Rivas, Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. Due to the village’s location as the main entry point to climb the country’s tallest mountain within Chirripó National Park, the majority of households in San Gerardo now derive some income from tourism. I conducted twenty household surveys, followed by twenty-one semi-structured interviews with male and female heads of households and representatives of local organizations and tourism businesses. Drawing on local perspectives, I found that ecotourism was a complementary income source to agriculture and that men and women were engaging differently in ecotourism employment. Local organizations were involved in the participatory management of ecotourism activities within Chirripó National Park. Ecotourism has affected environmental practices and local people are strategically negotiating the direction of tourism development, including through using environmental discourses, to optimize the benefits to their community.

This research is an ethnographic case study of the emerging ecotourism economies in the agricultural village of San Gerardo de Rivas, Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. Due to the village’s location as the main entry point to climb the country’s tallest mountain within Chirripó National Park, the majority of households in San Gerardo now derive some income from tourism. I conducted twenty household surveys, followed by twenty-one semi-structured interviews with male and female heads of households and representatives of local organizations and tourism businesses. Drawing on local perspectives, I found that ecotourism was a complementary income source to agriculture and that men and women were engaging differently in ecotourism employment. Local organizations were involved in the participatory management of ecotourism activities within Chirripó National Park. Ecotourism has affected environmental practices and local people are strategically negotiating the direction of tourism development, including through using environmental discourses, to optimize the benefits to their community.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis examines the trajectories of agrarian change on community-owned commercial farms in the Levubu Valley in the northern part of Limpopo Province, South Africa. Levubu is a locality where fertile land was developed and made highly productive after state-led dispossession of African communities. White farmers were initially resettled on a state-run irrigation scheme, but later became independent large-scale commercial farmers linked to global agro-food markets. The thesis focusses on four Communal Property Associations (CPAs) that acquired ownership of farms in Levubu. Government’s post-apartheid land restitution programme required the CPAs to enter into ‘strategic partnership’ agreements with agribusiness companies. Resettlement of beneficiaries on these farms was ruled out in an attempt to sustain existing production systems and levels of employment. After these partnerships collapsed, CPAs have attempted to run the farms themselves, through operating companies employing professional farm managers. Using key concepts from agrarian political economy, the thesis seeks to understand the dynamics of production and social reproduction on the farms and the political tensions that have arisen since restitution occurred. It also explores how this form of land restitution has impacted on the livelihoods of farmworkers. The study combines intensive (or qualitative) research methods, involving indepth interviews, focus groups and direct observations, and extensive (or quantitative) approaches, mainly in the form of a farmworker household survey undertaken in two communities. This research design has allowed for ‘retrospective’ analysis of changes over time to be complemented by ‘circumspective’ analysis of the relations and dynamics of property, production and power on community-owned farms in Levubu. The main findings of the study are that neither joint venture companies nor community-owned farming enterprises have been able to distribute dividend payments to claimant community members as yet. Rather, when profits have been realised they have largely been invested back into productive enterprises. Few other benefits have been received either, other than the preferential employment of some claimant farmworkers on the farms, a small number as managers or supervisors. Although additional jobs were created in the initial stages of restitution, these enterprises have struggled to maintain employment levels. Poor management decisions have meant that increased labour costs have not been accompanied by increases in productivity and output. Severe tensions and conflicts have arisen within CPAs, manifested in different forms of identity politics and competing ‘modes of belonging’. Tensions in communityowned large-scale farming enterprises are explained by the contradictory unity of capital and labour within community-owned enterprises, with difficult choices to be made between enhancing social reproduction or ensuring accumulation and profitability. These combine with complex processes of identification in socio-political struggles around access to and control of key resources. These findings suggest that policy makers should re-examine assumptions in relation to community-owned farming enterprises and explore mechanisms through which individual beneficiary households can realise more significant benefits. One policy option might be to seek the complementarity of large-scale commercial farming and smallholder farming systems, both on land restored to CPAs through restitution and in communal areas.

This research is an ethnographic case study of the emerging ecotourism economies in the agricultural village of San Gerardo de Rivas, Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica. Due to the village’s location as the main entry point to climb the country’s tallest mountain within Chirripó National Park, the majority of households in San Gerardo now derive some income from tourism. I conducted twenty household surveys, followed by twenty-one semi-structured interviews with male and female heads of households and representatives of local organizations and tourism businesses. Drawing on local perspectives, I found that ecotourism was a complementary income source to agriculture and that men and women were engaging differently in ecotourism employment. Local organizations were involved in the participatory management of ecotourism activities within Chirripó National Park. Ecotourism has affected environmental practices and local people are strategically negotiating the direction of tourism development, including through using environmental discourses, to optimize the benefits to their community.

In many countries, including Turkey, agriculture is a major component of the rural population income, and in these rural areas women are the cornerstones of the agricultural production. Resources, especially water, land, livestock, crops, and knowledge about agricultural production are crucial for preserving the livelihoods of most of the world's rural families. Access to, control over, and management of these resources determines which farming activities are pursued, what goods may be produced, and whether the lives of rural households are enhanced or diminished. Yet, gender influences who has access to these resources and what level of access they have. Although women work in the fields, the homes, outside the farm, and at the markets, their male counterparts often maintain control of the decision making over the household and its economy. Thus, women, more than men, bear the burdens - physical, psychological, social, moral, economic, and legal- of these gender inequalities. Previous studies focused on the women farmers' unpaid work in agriculture and household duties, their access to technical information, credit, extension services, critical inputs such as fertilizers and water, and marketing around the world including Turkey. However, there are not many studies addressing the Turkish women farmers' gender inequality positions from a feminist standpoint lens. Drawing on the feminist standpoint theory, the purpose of this study was to explore the gender inequality experiences of women farmers on small farm practices in Turkey. Utilizing qualitative methods through the lens of feminist inquiry as a methodological approach, this study explored several aspects addressed by research questions associated with social positions: gender division labor; women's work in agriculture and household; decision making dynamics of rural families; accessing resources and knowledge; agrarian change; and effect of gender on small farm practices from Turkish women farmers' standpoints. Feminist standpoint data were collected through 23 individual in-depth interviews, and five focus group sessions with women farmers in their villages, located in southern region of Konya province, in Turkey. Data were analyzed thoroughly following the constant comparative method by using the computer software, Atlas.ti. Initial codes used in data analysis were based on concepts and themes drawn from both the literature and theoretical framework. The results demonstrated that there are gendered roles and responsibilities on small farm practices; women participants carry out both farm and household tasks, and in this sense bearing a heavier workload burden than men. Moreover, women's work in agricultural production, subsistence production, providing care for family members, or work in the extended family house, is invisible. The results also highlighted that these rural women's formal education level is low and they lack access to extension education services. Further, they lacked decision making power, compared to their husbands, on household resources and income on these small farm practices. Additionally, this study pointed out that there is an ongoing depeasantization in these rural villages and the migrating rural women hold unemployable positions in the cities due to their limited skills and poor education background. This study concludes with recommendations for individuals, community organizations, Turkish government agricultural policy makers, and extension education systems to better assist these women in their work. / Ph. D.

Contemporary global agriculture has been undergoing transition towards different pathways. In developed countries, a shift from productivist agriculture to multifunctional agriculture has begun since the 1980s (Wilson, 2007). In the developing world, agricultural modernisation is still the primary strategy for agricultural development, and driven by urbanisation and industrialisation, deagrarianisation of rural society has been widely identified (Bryceson, 1996; Rigg, 2006a). As the largest developing country in the world, China embarked on market reform three decades ago and has ever since experienced dramatic socio-economic transition towards modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Significant levels of academic attention have focused on empirically identifying economic and policy drivers of Chinese agricultural production from a structuralist standpoint, largely neglecting the agency of smallholders and sociocultural factors. To address the resulting literature gap, this thesis adopts an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis through an in-depth case study of a rural community in southwest China. A multi-methods approach is used to collect data, including questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focus groups, participant observation and the analysis of secondary data. The results suggest that Chinese smallholder agriculture has been dramatically transformed by an array of socio-economic forces. The “intensive, sustainable, diverse” Chinese smallholder agriculture which Netting (1993) portrayed, has been progressively shifted towards extensive, unsustainable and less diverse pathways. It suggests that the “perfunctory agriculture” performed by Chinese smallholders is the outcome of interactions and negotiations between various political, socio-economic and institutional constraints and farmers’ agency. Another key finding is that moving out of agriculture is becoming the norm in Chinese rural society. Most smallholders show willingness to rent out agricultural land and to enter into a capitalist relationship with employees, rather than primarily being cultivators of their land. Land transfer markets have become increasingly buoyant at the local level, and large-scale capitalist agriculture seems to be the desired future of Chinese smallholder agriculture for both the Chinese government and smallholders. Besides, based on the case of Hu Village, this thesis discusses the convergences and divergences between the road of Chinese agricultural development and that of developed countries and other emerging BRIC economies. Lastly, based on the findings of this research, four policy implications are proposed including sponsoring agricultural mutual aid groups, strengthening agricultural extension services, enhancing farmers’ negotiation power through laws, and initiating comprehensive socio-economic reforms to facilitate farmers’ pursuit of non-farm employments.

This dissertation explores the relationship between land tenure and livelihoods in pre-Saharan Morocco as an ethical struggle over subsistence rights and the definition of community. Research in an oasis valley of southern Morocco indicated how changing land use practices framed contestations over community, political authority, and social hierarchies. The dissertation specifically examines the extension of settlement and cultivation from the oasis into the arid steppe. The research methodology contextualizes household decision-making around land use and livelihood strategies within the framework of land tenure regimes and other regional, national, and global processes. Households with the resources and prestige to navigate customary tenure regimes in their favor used these institutions to facilitate land acquisition and investments in commercial agricultural production. Rather than push for capitalist land markets, they invoked a discourse of communalism in support of customary regimes. In contrast, marginalized families without access to land mobilized to divide collective lands and secure individual freehold tenure. This complicates a prominent critique in agrarian studies that privatization signals the immersion of peripheral lands into neoliberal tenure regimes. The research shows that in southern Morocco, resistance to communal tenure regimes favoring elites was rooted in a discourse of subsistence rights and ethical claims to membership in a just community rather than a simple acquiescence to the power of neoliberal property relations. The dissertation therefore explores the shifting fault lines of social differentiation and the political and cultural embeddedness of land in processes of "repeasantization," the resurgence of rural peasantries in the context of the growing industrialization of global food production. The research draws on cultural anthropology, geography, and political economy to explore an understudied issue in the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: the economic and environmental dimensions of agrarian livelihoods and rural social dynamics from a critical theoretical perspective.

In India, the 1992 Reservation Law and the 2006 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have formalised women as legitimate actors in rural development. These gender-inclusive policies do not necessarily conform to the traditional domestic role of women, which often precludes them from formally engaging in political processes and labour outside the home. In Northern India, these major policy shifts are illustrated in ancient irrigation management systems. With growing rural outmigration and climatic variability aggravating water resources and food security issues, irrigation management is increasingly dependent on the active participation of women. Yet irrigation management is still widely perceived as a male responsibility. This thesis investigates how women adapt and respond to new institutionally mandated responsibilities and expectations as female leaders and as water users. The research is presented in four complementary papers based on quantitative and qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Three major findings emerged to contribute to theories and evidence of the role of public policies in shaping gendered outcomes for common pool resource management in irrigation system in India. First, gender norms affect women differently depending on their public role in the community. Unlike non-political women, female leaders, as public figures, must secure communal approbation to gain power, credibility, and socio-economic networks. As a result, female leaders shape their political behaviour and policy preferences around local notions of femininity, female morality, and labour-based ideas of expertise. Second, for female water users, gender inclusive policies that legitimise their role as participants in formal political processes and the labour force for irrigation management increase their likelihood to defy gender-based restrictions and engage in formal political processes around irrigation management. Third, providing that formal/legal structures legitimize their actions, women will readily breach gender norms if they are to economically benefit from it. The implication of this research are that policies aimed at providing legal support for women to engage in formal rural development, combined with formalised economic opportunities for women are effective eroding agents of gendered institutions and are catalysts in facilitating the engagement of women in all areas of rural development. Given worldwide concerns over rural development, this study encourages such governmental actions to enable the effective and full engagement of future generations of women in the formal management of common pool resources.

The analysis of agrarian change presented in this thesis integrates state practices and wider politics to the study of rural differentiation, using a case study of Zimbabwe. Most studies of agrarian change in the 21st century have tried to come to grips with rural differentiation in Africa, its causes and effects, by using particular models such as those of neo-classical economics, livelihood approaches, Marxist analysis of accumulation and social and cultural networks, or a combination of variables from the four approaches. However, these theoretical approaches fail to comprehensively integrate the role of the state and politics into the analysis of rural differentiation. My study explains differentiation by exploring beneficiary selection, production and accumulation processes on Zimbabwe’s Fast Track land reform resettlement schemes. Fast Track involved a series of partisan and violent invasions of largely white owned commercial farms from 2000, which constituted the largest land redistribution in post-colonial Africa. Scholars exploring politics and the Zimbabwean state have not applied their insights to an analysis of field based data on production and accumulation on Zimbabwe’s resettlement farms. I argue that the restructuring of the state and politics as an instrument of violence and as a site of accumulation dominated by patronage-both justified through ideology-was central to agrarian change after 2000. I find the three concepts of violence, patronage and ideology more useful in capturing the nuances and modalities of empirical realities on resettlement schemes than neo-patrimonial theories that provide generalised accounts of the African state. Though still acknowledging the role of other differentiating factors such as social networks, hard work by resettled farmers and economic factors, it is through the integration of political processes into the analysis of agrarian change that, I argue, one can understand better the dynamics shaping rural differentiation in post-2000 Zimbabwe.