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• 'Poaching' is analytically inadequate to understand local hunting. • Recorded data in Even Books are socially constructed and cannot be taken at face value. • Hunting manifests contestations of the distributional politics of conservancies. • Hunting hinges on an ontological foundation that contrasts with the predominant conservation discourse. The argument in this paper is not commonly made in the conservation literature. We argue that 'poaching' and 'illegal hunting' are inadequate concepts for understanding why local forms of hunting persist despite their being banned and criminalised. A 'poacher' 'poaches' because a set of institutionalised rules recognises and identifies him or her as such. Instead, we propose to use the concept 'local hunting' and 'local hunters'. We also argue that conservation policies and specifically the creation of environmental subjects, conservancy's distributional politics and a contrasting ontological foundation of community-based conservation play keys role in explaining the continuity of 'local hunting'. More space is needed to situate local hunters and their hunting practices and motivations in the broader conservation discourse and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Smallholder production is a significant contributor to rural livelihoods and rural economies in much of the developing world. Yet, there is evidence of increasing disengagement in some regions, including southern Africa. However, there has been little consideration of the rates and the livelihood, ecological and policy implications of such. In this paper we examine previous studies on rates of deactivation of crop fields by smallholders in the communal areas of South Africa, supported by repeat photo images and case study material. Together these various methods show that it is a widespread phenomenon occurring at variable rates. Over short periods deactivation of crop fields can be balanced through some reactivation or intensification of homegardens. But over longer periods there is a net decline in the area of fields cultivated in many areas, with corresponding increases in the area of fallow land which, through time, may undergo changes towards more natural vegetation. We review the drivers of this deactivation of field cropping, and then contemplate the possible socio-economic and ecological implications at local and national scales. We show that there are numerous and profound implications that require greater understanding and policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution critically engages with the academic debate on de-agrarianisation which has gained common ground in political economy perspectives of agrarian change in South Africa. De-agrarianisation represents long-term processes of occupational adjustment, income-earning reorientation, social identification and the spatial relocation of rural dwellers away from strictly agricultural modes of livelihood. In contrast, we do not treat the decline in agriculture as a necessarily linear structural process and phenomenon. The substantial variation of de-agrarianisation that exists amongst and between regions and homesteads, and in time and space, means that general patterns cannot be easily established. De-agrarianisation may very well be a temporal phenomenon and processes of re-agrarianisation or re-activation of cultivation may be more common than expected in some areas. We draw on original material from a study on the Wild Coast, South Africa to underline that agriculture currently may be in a stage of de-activation in scale, but certainly not in terms of scope, intensity, agrarian identity and contribution to wellbeing. We encountered two distinct styles of farming, reflecting, in turn, a certain order of the agrarian landscape of the Wild Coast: one which builds on notions like ‘keen farming’ which is very much supported by lifestyle ideas that “farming is our life” and “we like farming” and a second one that suggests it “saves money to continue farming”. These styles are not static, but adjust with time and are often inter-related with and shaped by particular historical circumstances. These styles, we argue, reflect and safeguard continuities of farming in places like the study area for current and future generations. The continuity of farming is specifically maintained through family farming by drawing on family labour, including the youth, combined with low degrees of commoditisation and a fair degree of investment in equipment and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special issue that is dedicated to a critical inquiry of the deagrarianisation and depeasantisation theses. It sets the scene for the contributions that are included in the special issue and sketches the themes that are covered. An analysis of this kind is important because ultimately, it is concerned with key agrarian questions about the future of family farming, food security and sovereignty, land-based livelihoods and rural areas as a whole. The contributions to this special issue explore ways of conceptualising agriculture and the rural. For some, a leading question is whether and how processes of repeasantisation and re-agrarianisation are relevant to robust agrarian pathways. Other contributions prefer relational approaches and analyse transformation processes using concepts like ‘territory’ and ‘(re- and/or de-)territorialisation’, ‘landscape’ and ‘assemblages’ to examine processes of change in the rural domain. They share the premise that it is worthwhile exploring the underlying dynamics of these processes as real and representing agrarian pathways that hold the promise of a dynamic agrarian future and vibrant countrysides. The articles also agree on the need to go beyond understanding development as unilinear and dichotomous. They all engage critically with the rather predominant view that deagrarianisation and depeasantisation are inevitable, evolutionary outcomes of the ongoing processes of agrarian transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the emergent properties of deagrarianisation processes in two villages in the central Eastern Cape, South Africa. The claim of is that much of the deagrarianisation literature and debate does not acknowledge the importance of landscapes and the interaction between their constituent elements, notably people, forests, grasslands, fields, grazing lands, open spaces, built environments and homesteads, all of which contribute to shaping and, in turn, are shaped by livelihoods. Conceptualising a landscape as a spatial entity and associated assemblage of practices, discourses and history, this paper dissects the landscape in terms of land uses for residential and cultural purposes, growing, grazing and gathering. These land use categories together represent the rural domain to which the villagers are attached as a place and a home. Their use of the land is not necessarily oriented to fully exploring its productive potential. The article explores the transformation from a productive landscape to one which largely hinges on consumption. The blurring of boundaries between the formally designated land use categories signifies the transformations occurring in many of the rural areas in the former homelands of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the emergence of a regenerative, agroecological mode of agriculture following the ongoing process of experimentation and learning by a settlement of landless people and farm workers. It examines how they engaged anew with ‘nature’ and generated resourceful farming practices as a result of a threefold process of cultural re-appreciation, a re-grounding in local natural resources and a political-economic re-positioning towards prevailing regimes in policies, markets and technologies. We argue that the construction of resourceful farming culminates around: finding and forging productive alignments with non-human nature such as weeds, trees and mychorrizal fungi, viewing the contribution of non-human nature not only in terms of their value as a commodity, but as adding value in many different ways and building a socio-material resource base and an institutional setting that allows farmers to farm more autonomously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Analysed 50 cases of knowledge co-production for decision-making under uncertainty. • Synthesised strategies to design inclusive decision processes with robust outcomes. • Provided recommendations for decision co-production's challenges and opportunities. Decision-making under uncertainty is important for managing human-natural systems in a changing world. A major source of uncertainty is linked to the multi-actor settings of decisions with poorly understood values, complex relationships, and conflicting management approaches. Despite general agreement across disciplines on co-producing knowledge for viable and inclusive outcomes in a multi-actor context, there is still limited conceptual clarity and no systematic understanding on what co-production means in decision-making under uncertainty and how it can be approached. Here, we use content analysis and clustering to systematically analyse 50 decision-making cases with multiple time and spatial scales across 26 countries and in 9 different sectors in the last decade to serve two aims. The first is to synthesise the key recurring strategies that underpin high quality decision co-production across many cases of diverse features. The second is to identify important deficits and opportunities to leverage existing strategies towards flourishing co-production in support of decision-making. We find that four general strategies emerge centred around: promoting innovation for robust and equitable decisions; broadening the span of co-production across interacting systems; fostering social learning and inclusive participation; and improving pathways to impact. Additionally, five key areas that should be addressed to improve decision co-production are identified in relation to: participation diversity; collaborative action; power relationships; governance inclusivity; and transformative change. Characterising the emergent strategies and their key areas for improvement can help guide future works towards more pluralistic and integrated science and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millennium Villages Project (MVP) was implemented in various villages across sub-Saharan African countries to catalyse the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and provide evidence of step-wise societal transformation by 2015. This paper critically analyses from an assemblage perspective the MVP's ‘quick win’ strategy to achieve the MDGs with a focus on the implementation of agricultural interventions and their impacts on the socio-technical fabric in Sauri Millennium Village (SMV) in western Kenya. Our anatomy of MVP highlights that MVP is a continuation of a decades-long of development approaches that sets out to fix development. Analysis of our qualitatively collected longitudinal data show that the SMV was blind to individual and collective forms of agency and heterogeneity among the social actors; hence grassroots corruption, elite capture of agricultural inputs, injury of social relations and exacerbation of the existing inequalities within the community. It spawned tensions and suspicions within the community. The farmers reworked the introduced ideas and technologies to fit to their needs and actively engaged with their own locally produced and exchanged resources. Typical for SMV was also an extremely questionable style of reporting that hid its achievements and failures from the general public. The “Big Promise” that MVP would deliver did not materialise; it simply failed to achieve its objectives and was unable to learn from previous interventionist strategies, it fractured communities and faded into oblivion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of game farming is set in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Game farming reorders the use, meaning and value of land and animal species. However, what it means for rural development processes in the immediate region and beyond is not well accounted for. We perceive game farming as an assemblage that brings together new actors, new forms of land use and new discourses. We argue that although game farming has generated new opportunities and new forms of added value to the available resources (e.g. eco-tourism, trophy hunting, game-meat production), situated in the history and contemporary context of the Eastern Cape, it is a contested, and from a development point of view, problematic land-use practice. We argue that game farming constrains land and agrarian reforms: the distribution of land and income remains skewed; ‘poaching’ occurs and game farms do not, or only minimally, generate new and badly needed employment opportunities. The game farm has emerged as an exclusive, globally well-connected space. The nature of the relationships this space maintains with the surrounding communities is, however, such that the overall contribution to rural development in South Africa is questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on longitudinal research engagement with villages and government projects in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, we argue the case for a strong revamp of government policies on rural development. Thereby we suggest that the legitimacy of ascribing to policy a notion of "post-apartheid" is largely redundant as current development policies in rural South Africa have not changed sufficiently. Notably the underlying rationale behind government interventions and associated governance mechanisms remains highly technocratic. This represents a strong continuity in the role of the state and its quest to restructure and modernise the rural economy. We question the efficacy of such a technocratic approach when it seems so disconnected from the socio-economically fluid and spatially heterogeneous spaces created by rural populations who, in the process of defining and pursuing their livelihood goals in relation to particular identities, and ideals around notions of modernity, produce livelihood constructions and identities that are seldom confined to the village or the agricultural sector alone. • Achieving development goals and priorities require a policy making process going beyond technocracy. • The moniker 'post-apartheid' to refer to post-1994 rural development policies is often misgiven. • The 'technological fixing' projected and implemented and imposed i on rural communal settings is misconstrued. • Rural villages are extremely heterogenous in composition and life styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Gender mainstreaming in development policy and practice ignores intersectionality. • Cultural practices are an essential component of assemblages. • An assemblage perspective on gender and intersectionality unveils changing relations between humans and nonhumans. • MVP and similarly designed interventions fracture social relations among and between women in Luo households. • Both deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes in the Luo assemblage are relevant to women's agency within the cultural boundaries. Gender essentialism in development practice has been criticised for more than three decades with little effect. We use gender and intersectionality within the framework of assemblage to analyse the relations, practices, and intersections of both human and nonhuman elements within the context of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in Luoland in western Kenya. This framework permits us to tease-apart essentially categorised 'women' revealing changing dynamics of senior and junior women within the Luo polygamous homestead, dala, and their implication for food security within. This insight reveals the inadequacy of essentialising representations of Luo women and the relevance of their recognition as social beings who differently construct themselves and their actions, in interaction with both human and nonhuman elements. Gender and intersectionality from an assemblage perspective makes visible the involved human and nonhuman intersecting elements and the changing dynamics within an ongoing process in a specific socio-ecological context that better support development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Analysis of policies for urban greening and forestry. [•] Household interviews revealed widespread tree planting and use. [•] Respondents valued trees for both direct use and indirect use benefits. [•] New housing developments ignore policies and residents’ appreciation of trees. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although there has been increasing research on the adoption of agroforestry technologies over the last decade, few such studies have assessed uptake over a long period and many are based on a single snapshot in time. Furthermore, most of these studies have mainly looked at non-adopters and adopters: only recently have social scientists considered testers. A further category of users neglected in adoption studies has been re-adopters of technologies. Studying this group provides an interesting and more nuanced understanding of adoption and re-adoption. Methodologically, most adoption studies use quantitative methods and fail to link their findings to wider socio-economic, political and institutional settings. This paper presents a study of the dynamics of improved tree fallow use by farmers in Siaya and Vihiga districts of western Kenya over a period of eight years. It uses both qualitative and quantitative data to critically discuss the motivations of adopters, testers/rejecters and re-adopters. The results show that the process of adoption is highly dynamic and variable with farmers planting improved fallows and discontinuing or re-adopting them due to a whole range of factors, of which soil fertility improvement is just one. These factors included incentives from projects, the tying of adoption to credit programmes, prestige, participation in seminars/tours and the availability of a seed market from projects promoting improved fallows. Farmers planting improved fallows for such reasons may be termed ‘pseudo-adopters’. There were significant differences in adoption between the two districts, with more farmers in Siaya planting improved fallows than in Vihiga. A majority of farmers in Vihiga (53%) who were given seed never planted improved fallows, even though they had been exposed to the technology. Some 40% of farmers in Siaya and 38% in Vihiga planted improved fallows but later rejected them. This has some important implications for research and development. For improved fallow technologies to be attractive to farmers, they must provide other tangible economic benefits besides soil fertility improvement. This presents a challenge to researchers who must better attune themselves to the needs and demands of farmers if they wish to see their research findings widely adopted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This article addresses the methodological complexities inherent in researching poverty, examining how to differentiate the poor from other social groups, and how to assess the relationships between poverty and technology adoption and impact. The use of specific types of quantitative and qualitative methods, the degree to which their integration was achieved, and the benefits of integration are analyzed. Qualitative and quantitative methods are both necessary for understanding the relationship between poverty and technology adoption, but significant interactions between the scientists at all stages of the research is required for the benefits to be fully achieved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]