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Social issues and theoretical background: the sustainability of human societies depends on the intergenerational transmission of capital stocks, whether natural, social or economic. With ever more competition for economic resources, sustainability must increasingly focus on the mutual reinforcement of social and natural capital. This perspective is particularly relevant for peasant agriculture and producers, who are constantly at risk of social and economic exclusion, but whose social and natural capital remains important, though often underutilized, even by the peasants themselves. The concepts of commoning and social capital are useful for addressing these issues and activating biocultural heritage from an ethically inclusive sustainability perspective. Objective and methods: We seek to understand how peasants organize to collectively achieve goals of social and economic inclusion that could promote their sustainability and resilience in the face of economic constraints. Using field surveys and participatory action research, we analyzed the social, economic, and environmental factors that fostered the emergence and sustainability of producer organizations and their value chains. This was done in three peasant organizations in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, whose common starting point is the valorization of traditional quinoa grain, but which differ greatly in terms of size, internal dynamics and organizational trajectories. Results: The successes and challenges of the social innovations implemented in the three cases studied provide lessons on how farmers can mobilize their social capital and leverage the resources of their cultural and natural capital to achieve ethically inclusive sustainability. While some lessons remain context-specific, others appear to be independent of the size and place of organizations, and several demonstrate the importance of socio-ethical interactions cultivated both within organizations and with consumers.

The scarcity or unpredictability of natural resources is a threat to cooperation within human societies. Exacerbated competition between individuals could affect social cohesion and collective action, generate conflicts over natural resources, and compromise their sustainable use. Yet, our in-depth archaeological study of the arid Andean highlands of Bolivia reveals the sustainable development of a complex agrarian society in a harsh environment marked, moreover, by a prolonged climatic degradation from the 13th to the 15th centuries. The 49 community settlements studied comprised independent family households that managed their own economic resources. A detailed study of the granary and housing structures of 549 of these households provided a strong quantitative data set for an analysis of Gini coefficients for grain storage capacity and housing area. This agro-pastoral society flourished with neither notable inequalities of wealth between villagers nor apparent long-lasting conflicts between villages. By sharing local knowledge, labor, and natural resources, this society succeeded both in limiting power and wealth concentration, and in sustainably producing food surpluses to be exchanged with neighboring populations. These results indicate a high degree of social cohesion and low levels of social and wealth inequality, similar to other well-established horticultural and agricultural societies around the world. We propose a conceptual model of low inequality in agrarian societies subject to extreme or unstable environments, where the sharing of knowledge, resources, and labor are the adaptive social responses to cope with the uncertainty in natural resources. The sustainability of the society is then guaranteed by a balance between collective action and family-based social organization.