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Institutional analysis is used to identify common scalar categories for examining policy-making processes from local to supranational scales. This method is applied to agricultural ecology implementation in Spain, and clarifies territorial representation, knowledge flows, and power exchanges between multiscalar policy-making entities.

An overview is presented on the incorporation of environmental concerns in Spain's agricultural policies, along with the origin of these concerns and the relative number of policies adopted that have been founded on them. Topics include responses by farmers and agricultural trade unions to such policies, implementation challenges, and factors influencing resistance to the policies.

This article examines the reasons why emigration from Spain was so low at the end of the nineteenth century. The subject literature argues that one of the major impediments to the mobility of Spanish labour was the tariff imposed on agriculture. Within a Heckscher-Ohlin model it can be shown that tariffs impeded trade and stimulated labour mobility. However, this article argues that the depreciation of the Spanish currency at the turn of the century was the major obstacle to the emigration of labour. For income-constrained emigrants in Spain currency depreciation increased the cost of moving, so few emigrants could leave the country and finance the moves of others.

Farming systems are often complex elaborations of the human societies to which they belong, with many traditional and social implications. Untangling the main social and structural constraints may improve productivity without an increase in environmental costs. Integration of cereal and sheep farming throughout the Mediterranean basin has been traditional. Mutually beneficial relationships between the sheep industry and cereal farming, and the vital role of forage legumes in meeting the modest needs of sheep for nitrogen, are stressed. This agropastoral system, however, is endangered in central Spain mainly because the pastoralist (sheep owner) is land-less, while the cultivator (land owner) has little interest in enforcing the law; fees for grazing rights are very low. Farmers, particularly young farmers, reject the current sheep operation because of the harsh working conditions. Restructuring of the grazing system would require a new policy scenario that would link European Union farm subsidies to structural reforms and would stress cooperative behavior.