The purpose of this study is to understand what impact courses in sustainable agriculture have had on small-scale farming women in Zambia, who have started using alternative techniques in their farming. Weather conditions, political issues and other circumstances in Zambia have made it difficult for people to grow enough crops to feed their families and gain extra money alternative methods are being promoted by organisations at all institutional levels, in order for people to survive. At Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre, east of the capital, Lusaka, sustainable methods in farming practices are taught to small-scale farmers. It is a qualitative study, accomplished within the field of Human Geography, and the theoretical frameworks that have been used are political ecology of sustainability, low-external input in sustainable agriculture, and gender and development. The qualitative methods used are in accordance to Rapid Rural Appraisal, where small-scale farming women have been interviewed on a semi-structural basis. Additionally, secondary data in the form of literature has been gathered and direct observations have been made in the field. Results show that the courses in sustainable agriculture have had an impact on the lives of participating small-scale farming women and that they are able to spread their knowledge to neighbouring small-scale farmers. It also shows that politics has a major influence on the daily life of the women.

Several authors have challenged Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) as inoperable and technocratic for the issues surrounding water resources known as contemporary water resource politics. As a result, new methods and analytical frameworks have been suggested for IWRM that have been qualified as interdisciplinary water research. Interdisciplinary water research is proposed to be context-based and focused on politics and management. Thus, principles underlying IWRM, such as public participation are gaining more attention because those principles enable sustainable water resource decisions to achieve socio-economic and ecological equity. This exploratory case study examines public participation in IWRM by looking at two villages in Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Participatory activities used to incorporate villages into water resource decisions are evaluated at different levels of government up to an international river basin organization known as the Mekong River Commission (MRC). The study uses a critical Third World political ecology perspective to elucidate water resource politics surrounding low levels of participation found among IWRM institutions in Lao PDR. Findings also reveal public participation in water resource decisions is politically complex. The participation of villages in water resource development decisions was related to issues surrounding national policies such as poverty alleviation, land allocations, resettlement, and swidden agriculture. Meanwhile, other types of participation were found in which villages could maintain control over their water interests. The study concludes more research is required surrounding water resource politics to better identify more effective and genuine participation of people whose livelihoods are dependent on water resources.

Several authors have challenged Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) as inoperable and technocratic for the issues surrounding water resources known as contemporary water resource politics. As a result, new methods and analytical frameworks have been suggested for IWRM that have been qualified as interdisciplinary water research. Interdisciplinary water research is proposed to be context-based and focused on politics and management. Thus, principles underlying IWRM, such as public participation are gaining more attention because those principles enable sustainable water resource decisions to achieve socio-economic and ecological equity. This exploratory case study examines public participation in IWRM by looking at two villages in Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Participatory activities used to incorporate villages into water resource decisions are evaluated at different levels of government up to an international river basin organization known as the Mekong River Commission (MRC). The study uses a critical Third World political ecology perspective to elucidate water resource politics surrounding low levels of participation found among IWRM institutions in Lao PDR. Findings also reveal public participation in water resource decisions is politically complex. The participation of villages in water resource development decisions was related to issues surrounding national policies such as poverty alleviation, land allocations, resettlement, and swidden agriculture. Meanwhile, other types of participation were found in which villages could maintain control over their water interests. The study concludes more research is required surrounding water resource politics to better identify more effective and genuine participation of people whose livelihoods are dependent on water resources.

<p>Through a case study of Carteret County, North Carolina, this research explores historic and contemporary narratives about fishery resource-use issues (e.g., conflicts over ocean spaces and species, disputes over fisheries governance, competing claims about the value of fish and fishing) in order to contribute to nature-society research in the fields of political ecology, cultural and economic geography, and environmental history. This project has three main objectives: (1) To analyze how historic narratives about fish and fishing have changed over the past century; (2) To evaluate the resource-use narratives of contemporary commercial and recreational fishers; and (3) To examine the process of state fisheries policymaking.</p><p>This project employed discourse analysis to analyze historic newspaper articles, contemporary interviews with commercial and recreational fishers, and North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission meeting records. This research showed increasing frictions between commercial and recreational fishers over time, precipitated by state regulatory decisions and increasingly divergent interpretations by fishers of the proper roles for fish in environmental, economic, and social systems. Commercial and recreational fishers had distinct ways of thinking about fishery resources, shaped by their personal fishing histories as well as larger socioeconomic trends. In particular, though both types of fishers would agree that `fish are valuable public resources that should not be wasted,' their definitions of value, public, and waste were very different. Further, both recreational and commercial narratives are expressed within the policy process, and most policymaker decisions are compromises between commercial and recreational arguments. Political alliances frequently shift, but Division of Marine Fisheries staff (and their reports) often display substantial power to influence decision-making. Fish stock assessments often serve as objects around which moral arguments are made about how fisheries should be managed and allocated. </p><p>Overall, this research indicates that valuing nature also means valuing particular types of interactions between human and nonhuman nature (in this case fish). Further, different modes of interacting with fishery resources over decades have worked to separate recreational and commercial fishers socially and politically (leading to clashes where they overlap spatially). Where these cultural politics matter most is in struggles over the purpose of different types of fish and the meaning of central concepts in fisheries management, as the outcomes have implications for both the practical use of resources and the character and scale of governing institutions.</p> / Dissertation

Wetlands are vital ecosystems that provide ecological, economic and social benefits to societies. In the Tampa Bay region in West Central Florida, a growing population has put immense pressure on wetlands. The situation has not gone unnoticed in the public domain with concerns raised about the need to formulate policies that would protect them. However, it has been difficult to ascertain the level of citizen involvement in the decision making process. This study aimed at investigating whether the perceptions and concerns of citizens drove them to influence local water policy. Questionnaires were used to collect data from residents living in close proximity to well fields situated in wetlands in Northwestern Hillsborough County. Results of the research showed that residents demonstrated a high degree of knowledge about water resources in the Tampa Bay region. Residents expressed concerns about groundwater pumping and development, and attributed them to changes in their environment. However, there was little engagement from residents with decision makers to address these concerns. This study therefore recommends that improved participatory mechanisms be created by local water agencies to incorporate valuable inputs from the public.

This study addresses food security in three communities in rural, central Honduras by looking at the interrelationships among nutritious food, environmental and political forces, and cultural behaviours through the collection and analysis of local knowledge and laboratory data. Evaluation of ethnographic research were combined with analysis of policy documents and the nutritional analysis of ninety local varieties of corn. Research showed how households in three rural communities in the mountains of Honduras, struggle to access sufficient, safe and nutritious food while respecting cultural and agricultural diversity. Policies to address food security need to not only address the diversity of environmental niches, and a history of disenfranchisement of most rural farmers from the political process, but also the cultural ideals that impact definitions of hunger and nutrition. Analysis of 90 varieties of local landraces show that coloured varieties of maize have higher nutritional value for protein, anthocyanin, and vitamin A content. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship, CIDA's CGIAR-Canada Linkage Fund (CCLF)

Alternative agriculture and counter-cuisine movements have grown to a strong cultural current in Western European and North American societies. In recent years,these movements have begun to converge and coalesce around the concept of localizing agri-food relations and commodity chains as a way of redressing the deleterious environmental, social, and economic consequences of what are seen as dominant globalized food relations. This dissertation reports on a regional study in Eastern Kansas of the political economy of local food relations that has arisen through this producer and consumer response. It is an effort to recognize the regional interplay of disparate forces in constructing local food systems in the interest of framing more contextualized and nuanced questions about the environmental, social, and economic outcomes of alternative agri-food development. Network, conventions, and spatial analysis theories and methods were customized and put into practice in the service of these aims, using triangulation among them to mitigate each of their individual weaknesses in representing the variable embeddedness, politics, and spaces of local food in Eastern Kansas. It was found that local food generally represents a marketing niche in urban consumerism that is served primarily by regional rural producers. The distances, agricultural and food ecologies, forms of organization, and values underpinning local food linkages were all found to vary quite considerably throughout the region, creating a diverse combination of development agendas and impacts from local food networks and making food localization a highly contested concept. Local food development in its current form is thus highly dependent on urban/rural dialectics and projects of urbanization that lack open, transparent, and reflexive governance. Critical acknowledgement of these development interdependencies is important as a step toward encouraging social, economic, and environmental justice through local food development.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis critically analyses collective action processes and outcomes in Community Forestry through the concept of embeddedness. This research focuses on the questions of when people cooperate, how and why collective action emerges and evolves, and what leads or does not lead to equitable outcomes. The thesis makes a fundamental distinction between equality and equity. The research focuses specifically on the Nepalese experience with Community Forestry (CF), which is regarded as one of the most progressive CF programs being implemented in one of the poorest countries in the world. The thesis adopts an integrated research approach involving multiple actors, scales and methods with a focus on local level CF processes and forest users. This study considers the Forest Users Group (FUG) as a unit for analysis. Field work was conducted in three FUGs from the mid-hill region of Nepal over seven months between August 2001 and February 2002. The field research moves downwards to the household level and upward to the district, national and international level actors. It employs a combination of the process analysis and actor oriented approach and qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how CF is being driven, who is driving it and why CF is advancing in a certain direction. The study shows that the emergence, evolution and outcomes of collective action in CF are complex and varied due to specific and changing socio-cultural, economic, political and ecological contexts. Without understanding the complexities, in which peoples’ motivation and collective action are embedded, we cannot explain the emergence and evolution of collective action in CF. This thesis challenges the rational choice tradition and some key points of Common Property Regimes (CPR) theory and highlights the concept of embeddedness in participatory natural resource management. The thesis highlights the problem of decentralised CF policy and the forest bureaucracy. Decentralisation universally imposes a formal democratic system based on equality without acknowledging unequal societies. In Nepal, there has been little reorganisation of the forest bureaucracy. Despite being an international model for community forestry, in Nepal the existing bureaucracy has been unable or unwilling to transfer knowledge to forest users. The thesis concludes by stating the need to avoid the pitfalls of some democratic principles associated with standardisation and formalism. This means transforming bureaucratic norms and ideology. Context is central for the sustainable and equitable management of natural resources. It must be further researched and applied in decision-making if CF is going to achieve its potential to improve the condition of forests and the welfare of rural people.

Thèse (M.E.R)--Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1986. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

The rush for land has escalated the last decade, with Sub-Saharan Africa as the most targeted region. Governments, local elites and foreign corporations are increasingly taking control over large areas of agricultural lands with the aim of creating higher financial returns and achieve food security. This phenomenon, known as land grabbing, has received a lot of attention worldwide, not least from non-governmental organizations and scholars stressing the negative impacts on rural farmers and families. Yet, several international organizations as well as many African governments keep advocating the positive effects that land grabbing can have on poverty reduction and economic growth. The dominating capitalist and neoliberal view on development, focusing largely on the economic part, undermines the social and environmental impacts that these investments bring. The purpose of this comparative study is therefore to examine, analyze and compare these impacts in Ghana and Ethiopia, two countries heavily affected by land grabbing. This is done through the lens of political ecology, where concepts such as environmental justice, accumulation by dispossession and sustainable rural livelihoods will be of particular significance. Based on a systematic literature review, the results show that land grabbing projects, said to aim at stimulating economic and social development, have resulted in dispossessions, injustices and environmental conflicts wherein indigenous communities have been deeply affected. Their traditional livelihoods, based mainly on cultivation, fishing, gathering and hunting, have been threatened by several impacts from the land grabs. These include loss of land, declined access to resources, damaged ecosystems, deforestation and lack of alternative ways to maintain food security.