Search

Contains fulltext : 287534.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Abstract: 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. 17 januari 2023

We respond to two rejoinders to our review article “Science for Success,” which proposed fuller contextualization of epistemological approach, researcher position and interests in conservation research. This way readers—including reviewers and journal editors—can better understand and interpret findings. We suggest this contextualization is particularly important when conservation and development professionals undertake research about programs they are involved in, as this can potentially create a conflict of interest. Both rejoinders follow an extended process of complaint about our article that included academic and legal threats, and ad hominem attacks, with little engagement with the points made about researcher positionality. We consider this to be a form of “discursive violence” deployed to silence unfavorable perspectives, confirming our argument that positionality in conservation (research) begs self-reflection and transparent disclosure.

Dominant agricultural and food systems lead to continuous resource depletion and unacceptable environmental and social impacts. While current calls for changing agrifood systems are increasingly framed in the context of sustainability transitions, they rarely make an explicit link to transition studies to address these systemic challenges, nor do transition scholars sufficiently address agri-food systems, despite their global pertinence. From this viewpoint, we illustrate several gaps in the agri-food systems debate that sustainability transition studies could engage in. We propose four avenues for research in the next decade of transition research on agri-food systems: 1) Crossscale dynamics between coupled systems; 2) Social justice, equity and inclusion; 3) Sustainability transitions in low- and middle-income countries; 4) Cross-sectoral governance and system integration. We call for a decade of new transition research that moves beyond single-scale and sector perspectives toward more inclusive and integrated analyses of food system dynamics.

Livestock owners, elites and non-elites alike, from different parts of Namibia fence in land that belongs to the indigenous San people who collectively manage their land as a conservancy. Fencing violates the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002. The conservancy started a lawsuit in August 2013 with reference to this Act to remove the fences and end the illegal occupation of land. The High Court ruled in 2016 in favour of the conservancy, but the fences have not been removed and more illegal settlers have settled in the conservancy. We conceptualize and analyse the act of fencing as land grabbing but argue simultaneously that the legal battle of the conservancy is more than a struggle for justice. The case unfolds as an ontological struggle between actors, their institutions and respective policies and discourses, pivoting on conflicting visions of modernities of (rural) development in Tsumkwe West. The wider significance beyond N≠a Jaqna is that the core of struggles about land and rights in situations of land grabbing is whose modernity counts. The court case has also paved the way for conservancies and other resource communities to become involved in dealing with land issues and contesting the multiple meanings of land.

This paper emphasizes the importance of researcher position and reflexivity for professionals in the ecological and development sciences. We draw on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze a selection of scientific papers written by Namibian Community-based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) professionals and their relationships with public discourse regarding this conservation and development program. These papers mainly show “success” whilst disregarding “failure” of elements in the program that elsewhere are highly criticized (especially trophy hunting and ecotourism). In addition, they seem to disregard questions concerning researchers’ conflicts of interest that bear on the papers’ “objectivity.” We argue that such positions beg more transparency and epistemological accountability. In particular, we propose greater disclosure and reflexivity regarding researcher positioning as an important methodological response for illuminating when and how researchers have an interest in specific outcomes of their research, so as to enhance interpretation of the knowledge produced by such research.

The functioning of markets is premised on the creation of collaborative relationships and networks. Food markets in Zimbabwe are evolving in response to state interventions that aim to restructure the marketplace and the flow of produce. This article explores Mbare Musika, the oldest and largest marketplace in Harare supplying the city with fresh fruit and vegetables. We analyse Mbare Musika from the perspective of the interactions among farmers and retailers, vendors, transporters, intermediaries, officials, and customers, in creating and sustaining a specific enduring market. We use actor narratives to understand the ordering and (re)ordering of people and produce in the context of informalization, shifting polycentric relationships, and market infrastructure to sustain livelihoods anchored on the circulation of large volumes of diverse fresh produce. The market is overtly economic in outlook but, intrinsically, it is a social arena where discourses are continuously reconstructed, reproduced, and expressed through daily interactions. We situate Mbare Musika in past and present sociopolitical processes of transformation in Zimbabwe.

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.

This chapter explores the Etosha ancestral land claim by the Hai||om San. It exposes the limitations of litigation. Not only socio-political difference among the claimants hampers the litigation process. The chapter elaborates that the legal and political space in which the case unfolds, did not create a level playing field for the claiming Haiǁom to seek to exercise their rights. The legal arena In Namibia is constituted by multiple legal norms and values. Statutory law operates next to customary laws and rights. The Etosha ruling, however, makes clear that legal positivism as manifested in statutory law and common law remains the predominant legal and political interpretative framework in Namibia. Other acceptable legal remedies that are available to indigenous peoples under both Namibian constitutional law and international law are ignored.

Illegal grazing and the fencing of land by livestock owners, elites and non-elites alike is endemic in Namibia. Fencing violates the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002. Court cases are held to stop the illegal use of land. The institutions that according to the Act have the authority to stop these practices do not perform accordingly and their authorities frequently overlap. The legal battle to remove fences or stop illegal grazing evolves as more than a struggle for justice. The case unfolds as an ontological struggle between actors, their institutions and respective policies and discourses, pivoting on conflicting visions of modernities and interpretations of the meaning of land.

Indigenous people are engaged in legal battles to restore their rights to their land. They are not only seeking to undo the injustices of the past, but also ways to improve their livelihoods. Finding a legal way to address their rights to their ancestral lands has evolved as an important politico-legal instrument. Backed by litigators, international treaties, concerned scholars and funding arrangements litigating on ancestral land rights matters has emerged as an important ‘weapon of the weak’. Reclaiming their land appears not so easy and is not so straight forward. We address the recurrent issues, the pitfalls, the challenges that emerge during and after litigation which is only one of the many steps in restoring rights.

This collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The importance of street trading for urban food security and urban-based livelihoods is beyond dispute. Trading on the streets does, however, not occur in neutral or abstract spaces, but rather in lived-in and contested spaces, governed by what is referred to as ‘street geographies’, evoking outbreaks of violence and repression. Vendors are subjected to the politics of municipalities and the state to modernize the socio-spatial ordering of the city and the urban food economy through restructuring, regulating, and restricting street vending. Street vendors are harassed, streets are swept clean, and hygiene standards imposed. We argue here that the everyday struggle for the street has intensified since and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility and the use of urban space either being restricted by the city-state or being defended and opened up by street traders, is common to the situation in Harare and Kisumu. Covid-19, we pose, redefines, and creates ‘new’ street geographies. These geographies pivot on agency and creativity employed by street trade actors while navigating the lockdown measures imposed by state actors. Traders navigate the space or room for manoeuvre they create for themselves, but this space unfolds only temporarily, opens for a few only and closes for most of the street traders who become more uncertain and vulnerable than ever before, irrespective of whether they are licensed, paying rents for vending stalls to the city, or ‘illegally’ vending on the street.

In this article we reflect on the discussions as to whether breeding and seed system development should proceed along its current well established route of developing varieties with a higher agricultural productivity or if the diversity of farmers, their contexts and rationales requires broader approaches. We make use of data from a recently held survey (2018) in West Kenya. The data show that some 80% of the households in the survey planted both local and hybrid maize varieties. The choices that people make about which variety to plant are many. Apart from rainfall, the availability of cash, the promise of a good yield, the presence of projects and programs and the culture of seed also influences these choices. We argue that an inclusive demand-oriented maize breeding and seed system needs to include a range of varieties and seed sources and to develop and support different delivery pathways to fit farmers’ diverse use of seeds and varieties. Our findings also indicate the need for more systematic study of the diversity of farmers’ rationales and the performance of crop varieties. This would provide useful information for all the actors involved.

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.

© 2018, The Author(s). This introductory paper to the special section argues that there are now significant signs and opportunities of real transformations of food systems in which to create new synergies between sustainable consumption and production, and which can potentially shift agri-food into more secure and sustainable sets of conditions. With reference to empirical research in Europe, the paper assesses the transformative potential of a series of mobilisations associated with: sustainable city networks, community cooperative and share schemes, and regional agro-ecological, seed, plant and livestock schemes. Not denying the significance of countervailing intensive and industrialised food regimes, the paper introduces a set of conceptual building blocks, which emerge as ways of both assessing and progressing these mobilisations. It is argued that to succeed they need elements of at least four conditions: (i) a significant and lasting reconfiguration of governance and regulatory conditions; (ii) an ability and capacity to both promote sustainable production and food access and diet through the development of new assemblages; (iii) develop new social and physical and distributional infrastructures which can scale out their impacts; and (iv) be embedded in a more reflexive governance context which is both supportive and spatially sensitive to their diverse conditions. The succeeding papers in the special issue will deal with these transformatory factors in comparative and empirical depth. Here we outline how and why such a ‘re-building’ has become so critical at this current juncture. ispartof: FOOD SECURITY vol:10 issue:6 pages:1301-1309 status: published

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.

This contribution draws on original data relating to a land settlement case in Araponga, an administrative area in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The settlement of the land and subsequent building of robust, more self-dependent, land-based livelihoods have followed a joint experimentation trajectory in which the agro-ecologicalisation of agrarian production practices to regenerate and enrich the resource base has been coupled with effective institutional reform and the creation of a favourable institutional setting. Key to this grassroots transformation process has been the enrolment of various strategic actors in a collaborative support network by a mediating change agent. The paper argues that the Araponga case represents a particular expression of re-peasantisation. The Araponga project has evolved without the involvement of landless peoples' social movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). This has been crucial to its character and impact.

Risks and hazards associated with climate change and geological factors, especially in the world's youngest mountains, are inevitable and may have been exacerbated in recent decades. However reports about increased landslips and landslides in some areas are being presented as examples to argue that most natural hazards in mountain areas are due to climate change. Based on a field study in the Yourjogh area of Chitral District in Pakistan, we argue that this discourse is based on generalized conclusions that do not hold in all cases and for all types of disasters. Our study challenges the climate change discourse as disregarding the political dimension of water management that also contributes to landslides and landslips in Pakistan's mountainous regions. The climate change discourse has taken the politics out of external-donor-led development interventions that replaced traditional irrigation management practices and institutions with an arrangement in which external development agencies and the state control crucial economic and social processes that shape the distribution of water. This not only depoliticizes disasters and their effects but also leads to further mismanagement of abundantly available irrigation water, contributing to the frequent occurrence of landslips in our study area. We conclude that attributing hazards only to climatic or geological factors leaves little room to promote locally appropriate solutions for locally created hazards.

Village dogs are important for households in coastal Mexico, yet they are seen as out of place by etic stakeholders (public health and wildlife experts, and animal welfarists). Caregivers of village dogs are considered irresponsible, a view that is reinforced by Mexican policy. We describe two contrasting etic discourses in this article that have emerged from ideologies based on human-dog relation theories. The article is part of an ongoing shift in the social sciences that has seen attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and to explore human-animal relations outside the parameters of the traditional nature-culture dichotomy. Local narratives hinge on different experiences with dogs. Villagers perceive their dogs as adults, capable of and subject to judgment. Etic discourses are currently the basis for dog management policies. Attaching the label of “irresponsible owner” to the caregivers of village dogs prevents their inclusion as legitimate participants in policy processes.

Transformations inherently involve systems change and because of the political nature of change, are subject to contestation. A potentially effective strategy to further transformative change that builds on interdisciplinary, multiactor, and multiscale-practices and values is the use of foresight. Foresight covers a wide range of methods to systematically investigate the future. Foresight exercises offer collaborative spaces and have the potential to conceptualize and even initiate transformative change. But there is no clear understanding of the possibilities and limitations of foresight in this regard. This explorative paper builds on foresight and sociology and interrogates the role of foresight in transformative change, building on four cases. These cases are embedded in different contexts and characterized by different organizational approaches and constellations of actors. Nevertheless, they share the common goal of transformative food systems change. By reflecting on the processes that play a role in foresight workshops, we analyze what created conditions for transformative change in these four empirical cases. We have operationalized these conditions by distinguishing layers in the structuring processes that influence the impact of the foresight process. Based on this analysis, we conclude that there are three roles, ranging from modest to more ambitious, that foresight can play in transformative change: preconceptualization of change; offering an avenue for the creation of new actor networks; and creation of concrete strategies with a high chance of implementation. Furthermore, contributing to future design of foresight processes for transformative change, we offer some crucial points to consider before designing foresight processes. These include the role of leading change makers (including researchers), the risk of co-option by more regime-driven actors, and the ability to attract stakeholders to participate.

This paper addresses water-related issues in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Irrigation development and providing water for human consumption have been key factors in the country’s rural development planning, notably during the post-apartheid era when the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Water Services Act and Free Basic Water of 1997 became effective. By exploring the use of water in rural villages in the central Eastern Cape, the paper addresses the conceptual and practical limitations of the provisioning of water for human consumption and irrigation, in particular, and how this is being handled by various implementing agencies. The paper draws attention to the importance of ‘irrigation by night’ which refers to unplanned and ‘unlawful’ water-use practices. People in villages ‘unlawfully’ re-appropriate piped water for irrigation purposes to produce food and generate some income. The paper proposes a shift away from the rigid conceptualisations that currently form the backbone of planning to instead adopt a multiple-use system (MUS) approach which is more in tune with local practices currently observed in rural villages of South Africa.

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.

This paper is about mining under communal ownership which makes this kind of mining a new mining frontier. The newness of the frontier is that it has introduced a series of institutional complexities that is uncommon to artisanal and large-scale mining. Mining companies have to negotiate deals with communities and their leaders to be able to prospect for mineral resources. We also argue that the state’s environmental legislation is poorly harmonised with the prevalent conditions in communal areas where mining is gaining greater importance. Legislation remains silent on the rights of those living on communal land. These rights remain in a state of confusion with often negative effects on the local communities who are exposed to a number of duplicating development programmes and legislative structures. The aim of this paper is to explore the dynamics communal mining in the Kunene Region in north-western Namibia

The dry-salted trade of Nile perch or kayabo is important for many along the shores of Lake Victoria. The kayabo trade started in the 1990s and has been increasingly restructured due to changing regional and global trade relationships. This shift has led to the emergence of hierarchical trading relations, which create an exploitative network in which powerful middlemen control the access of trade for women from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and marginalizes the Tanzanian women, changing the organization from a poly-centric to a more centralized trade organization in the hands of a small group of powerful business men. We show in this paper that whereas the women traders from the DRC manoeuvred themselves in positions from which they could manipulate the network through bribery and conniving to derive substantial capital gains from the kayabo trade, their Tanzanian counterparts however are excluded from the decision-making processes, access to fish resources, financial capital, and negotiation power. They persevere by operating in increasingly competitive markets, relying on illegal fish that they sell with little profit at local and domestic markets. They survive in jobs that are insecure and risky by nature.

This paper explores how pump irrigation has evolved along the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria. Over the past two decades access to petrol pumps has allowed small-scale horticultural enterprises to start up and then transform the size, intensity and nature of their production. We analyse the spread of petrol pumps as the assimilation and wider use of a modern device along a mutated trajectory of change. We argue that it was not led by external actors but is a local and self-organised process driven by actors who negotiated interfaces between themselves and those operating at the macro level. The assimilation unfolded not as a temporally and spatially linear process but through its embeddedness in complex and dynamic social relationships that structure access to the key resources required for vegetable production. This in turn has given rise to a range of strategies in which the pumps' performance is adjusted to fit with various socially differentiated contexts.

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.

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.

The food system’s decreasing ability to deliver food security has led to the emergence of food assistance initiatives. Food assistance is highly contested; as some argue, it is a “failure of the state”, while others regard food assistance to be an “extension of the welfare state”. Either way, research suggests that actors within food assistance are rethinking their role in the food system. In this paper, we study three food assistance initiatives, in the Netherlands, Italy and Ireland, that perform new food assistance practices while embedded in specific institutional contexts, and analyse their potential to transform the food system, drawing on Transformative Social Innovation theory. Building on transition and social innovation theory, this recently developed theory distinguishes different levels within systems, named “shades of change”, that are associated with societal transformation. By exploring these “shades” of change in the analysis, we describe aspects of the initiatives’ novel practices, and in relation to the initiative and institutional relations their motivations and expectations. We compare the three cases and discuss how food assistance practices relate to and change (or do not change) the food system. In particular, we elaborate on how these three food assistance initiatives contribute in various ways to local food and welfare system innovation. In doing so, we offer a novel perspective on food assistance initiatives. We argue that they show dynamics that have the potential for more substantial transformation towards food security over time, by building momentum through “small wins”.

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.

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.

Steering the EU food system towards a sustainability transformation requires a vast and actionable knowledge base available to a range of public and private actors. Few have captured this complexity by assessing food systems from a multi-dimensional and multi-level perspective, which would include (1) nutrition and diet, environmental and economic outcomes together with social equity dimensions and (2) system interactions across country, EU and global scales. This paper addresses this gap in food systems research and science communication by providing an integrated analytical approach and new ways to communicate this complexity outside science. Based on a transdisciplinary science approach with continuous stakeholder input, the EU Horizon2020 project ‘Metrics, Models and Foresight for European SUStainable Food And Nutrition Security’ (SUSFANS) developed a five-step process: Creating a participatory space, designing a conceptual framework of the EU food system, developing food system performance metrics, designing a modelling toolbox and developing a visualization tool. The Sustainable Food and Nutrition-Visualizer, designed to communicate complex policy change-impacts and trade-off questions, enables an informed debate about trade-offs associated with options for change among food system actors as well as in the policy making arena. The discussion highlights points for further research related to indicator development, reach of assessment models, participatory processes and obstacles in science communication.

Cities and towns can be conceptualised as complex social-ecological systems or landscapes that are composed of different spatial elements. Trees in urban landscapes provide a variety of tangible and intangible benefits (ecosystem services) that may be valued differently across diverse households and individuals. Here, we consider how the benefits and values of trees to urban residents vary across public and private spaces in three low income neighbourhoods in two medium-sized towns in northern South Africa. We find that the most asset poor residents in informal settlements derive significant benefits from the provisioning services offered by trees in natural green spaces on the ‘urban periphery’; in particular they value supplies of wood for energy, whilst also recognising the importance of regulating services such as shade. Trees in such spaces help these immigrants cope with a lack of infrastructure, services and disposable income after their move to the city. In new, low-cost housing neighbourhoods, the importance of trees in providing shade and shelter in gardens is emphasised due to the hot and dusty nature of these settlements, while residents in older township neighbourhoods make more mention of the aesthetic value of trees in private spaces as well as the fruits they provide. In all neighbourhoods, attitudes towards trees in public spaces were mixed because of their perceived association with crime, although low income households did make extensive use of tree products from natural areas. The relevance of the results for urban planning and greening in low income areas is discussed.

Rural people’s livelihoods are intimately linked to the landscapes in which they live and are particularly vulnerable to changes in these landscapes (Suich et al [...]

This chapter discusses the dynamics brought about by privatising land ownership. Changes in land tenure are analysed here from a socio-relational perspective. Changes in land tenure do not just concern ownership but also transform the properties of land space as a result of which new forms of land use emerge. Moreover, this chapter argues that the Maasai are not passive receivers of new land tenure policies enacted by the Kenyan state. They accommodate land tenure changes in many different and unexpected ways. The case discussed here involves the (further) space subdivision of once communal land to group ranches and to individual Maasai families. The further subdivision of land creates space for new practices such as cultivation of crops, notably by women. Men on the other hand build alliances to aggregate smaller pieces of land to allow continuation of a pastoral lifestyle. The chapter also draws attention to land leasing which initiated unsustainable land use practices

In the face of increasing global population, water scarcity and the need to tackle poverty in developing countries, various projects and organisations have promoted low-cost irrigation technologies for smallholder farmers. The non-governmental organisation (NGO) International Development Enterprises (iDE) is one well-known organisation that took up the challenge to re-engineer conventional irrigation technologies with the explicit objective to meet the needs of smallholder farmers. iDE perceives low-cost irrigation technologies for individual smallholder farmers as a potential solution to rural hunger and poverty. With these goals in mind, iDE started the Rural Prosperity Initiative (RPI), implemented in Myanmar, Nepal, Ethiopia and Zambia, financed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Re-design criteria for the irrigation technologies are low investment cost, rapid returns on investment, suitability for various small plots, and simple operation and maintenance (Postel et al., 2001; Keller, 2004; Polak et al., 2007). Technologies developed include low-cost plastic tanks for collecting and storing rainwater, pressure and suction treadle pumps for lifting water, low pressure sprinklers as well as drip emitters for efficient water application. Moving away from the traditional practice of simply ‘handing-out’ technological innovation to farmers, iDE operates with a market-based or business approach. The idea is to support farmers so that they can invest in and craft their own way out of poverty by increasing crop productivity and income from marketable surpluses. In this idea, the rural smallholder figures as a (potential) entrepreneur, producer and customer, rather than as a beneficiary and recipient of aid.

One of the main objectives of the SUSFANS project is to develop a set of concepts and tools to help policy and decision makers across Europe make sense of the outcomes and trends of the EU food system. This paper proposes a set of metrics for assessing the performance of the EU food system in delivering sustainable food and nutrition security. The performance metrics have been built up through the aggregation of a wide range of variables, which together help to monitor the achievement of four overarching policy goals for the EU food system, namely a balanced diet for EU citizens, reduced environmental impacts, competitive agri-food businesses and equitable outcomes of the food system. The project decided to take a hierarchical approach to aggregating from Individual Variables to Derived Variables to Aggregate Indicators to Performance Metrics. This approach aims at marrying the notion that decision makers want only a small but powerful set of metrics to communicate the findings of the assessment, with the need to substantiate these metrics with the best available data from a large number of sources in a transparent way. In this deliverable the current set up of the performance metrics focus on each individual policy goal. In a related report, the team explores if and how the performance metrics presented here can be quantified using available data and modelling tools, and which of the models of the SUSFANS tool box can estimate which ones of the performance metrics and how (report D1.4). In a final step the SUSFANS team will bring all performance metrics together in an integrated set that will allow a view across all four policy goals and thus across all aspects of sustainable food and nutrition security (forthcoming report D1.5). Further work is the quantification of metrics using case studies and prospective scenario analysis. In addition to their use for monitoring, the proposed metrics are geared towards quantification using selected computational modelling tools. As such, SUSFANS aims to assist in foresight on and the evaluation of transformative changes in the food system with rigour and consistency.

Beach seine gear is one of the prominent fishing gears in Nile Perch fishery. Before Nile Perch was introduced to the lake, beach seines the species targeted with beach seine were Tilapia, Bagrus, Haplochromis, Protopterus and Labeo. In 1994, beach seines were banned in Tanzania and by 2004, this particular regulation and others, were harmonized and applied to the entire Lake as a result of implementation of Regional Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing on Lake Victoria. The paper describes research findings on how the Nile Perch (NP) beach seine fishery is organized in Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The paper is guided by the following research questions: How is the Fisheries Department in Tanzania trying to govern the fisheries of Lake Victoria? How the beach seine fishery is governed in reality? What are the drivers for its continuity despite the ban? What are the counter-tendencies at local level and how and why do they emerge? We argues that it is the markets and associated graft – that drives coordination between the beach seine fishery; and the networks that depend on individuals’ network motivations – to get money, that together shape the fishery’s management and governance.

This paper explores the claim whether agro-forestry is a second soil fertility paradigm. The answer to this question, however, is not unequivocal. Farmers in Western Kenya generally do not apply fertiliser and rather rely on many soil fertility replenishment (SFR) strategies. Scientists recognised that lowering the costs of restoring fertility is vital to the future of agriculture in the region and beyond. Agro-forestry emerged as an alternative strategy to replenish soil fertility and has been introduced through various programmes and institutions in Western Kenya since the early 1990s. Detailed field and case studies show that people are indeed convinced that agro-forestry helps them to replenish soil fertility and that over the years yields indeed have increased. The paper also traces the emergence of localised practices (niches) of soil fertility management. These niches stand for local ways of reproducing soil fertility. These practices coexist with improved fallows, and mutually transform each other through various kinds of interactions at field and village level as well as with technology institutions. Together they reflect the diversified soil fertility options that resonate well with the multiple nature of nutrient and other soil constraints. Low-cost technologies for supplying nutrients to crops are needed on a scale wide enough to improve the livelihood of farmers. The aim of the paper is to show whether and how externally induced improved fallow innovations resonate with farmer-produced niches in the domain of SFR in Luoland. The paper contributes in this way to a more appropriate understanding of socio-technical innovations.

This article is an analysis of the agri-food system that feeds most of the over four million residents of the fast growing city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It is based on qualitative research that has traced the sources of some important foods from urban eaters back through retailers, processors and transporters to the primary producers. Particular attention is given to the functioning of the market places and how new actors enter into the food system. These reveal that more important to the system than competition are various forms of collaboration. Of particular interest is how a wide range of small-scale and interdependent actors produce the food and get it to urban eaters at a city feeding scale without large vertically- or horizontally-integrated corporate structures. This “symbiotic food system” is an existing alternative to the corporate-dominated agri-business food system; it can and does deliver at scale and in a way that better responds to the needs of people in poverty who are buying food and the interests of food producers. It is not perfect in Dar es Salaam, but the food system is working and is a model that should be built on.

Most people in EU are food secure, but there are socio economic groups that struggle with poverty and health, making them vulnerable to food insecurity and in recent years there has been an increase in people needing food assistance in Europe. As the literature portrays, the position of food assistance in the food system is a contested one. On the one hand, critics describe it as a failure of the state, while others see it as an extension of the welfare state. Responsive policies are hindered by the lack of a universally agreed definition of food poverty, which remains in general peripheral to the work of most policy makers. There is need for an enhanced understanding of the role of food assistance initiatives in the wider welfare landscape of high income countries. This paper departs from the belief that a bottom-up approach is needed to understand the complexity of food assistance mechanisms and that no “one fits all” positions and solutions are helpful in this regard. The aim of this paper is to compare how different approaches to food assistance across Europe contribute to food and nutrition security change, focussing on case studies in Italy, the Netherlands and Ireland. By adopting a Transformative Social Innovation perspective, this comparison sheds light on differences, cross-cutting issues and suggest possible avenues for pursuing better food and nutrition security in Europe. The three case-studies were analysed by comparing them on the level of social innovation, system innovation, game-changers and narratives of changes and allowed us to theorize the transformative capacity of these food assistance initiatives. It concludes that the three diverse cases of food assistance initiatives should not be seen in isolation from the more complex food system. Some of the emerging practices aim, in different ways and contexts, to reshape food assistance capacity and as such contribute to food and nutrition security. As such, the contribution of such initiatives to transformative change in food poverty is difficult to pin down, as it is a multi-layered phenomenon that interacts with many other societal systems.

This book focuses on empirical experiences related to market development, and specifically new markets with structurally different characteristics than mainstream markets. Europe, Brazil, China and the rather robust and complex African experiences are covered to provide a rich multidisciplinary and multi-level analysis of the dynamics of newly emerging markets. This book analyses newly constructed markets as nested markets. Although they are specific market segments that are nested in the wider commodity markets for food, they have a different nature, different dynamics, a different redistribution of value added, different prices and different relations between producers and consumers. Nested markets embody distinction viz-a-viz the general markets in which they are embedded. A key aspect of nested markets is that these are constructed in and through social struggles, which in turn positions this book in relation to classic and new institutional economic analyses of markets. These markets emerge as steadily growing parts of the farmer populations are dedicating their time, energy and resources to the design and production of new goods and services that differ from conventional agricultural outputs. The speed and intensity with which this is taking place, and the products and services involved, vary considerably across the world. In large parts of the South, notably Africa, farmers are ‘structurally’ combining farming with other activities. By contrast, in Europe and large parts of Latin America farmers have taken steps to generate new products and services which exist alongside ongoing agricultural production. This book not only discusses the economic rationales and dynamics for these markets, but also their likely futures and the threats and opportunities they face.