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Ikat textiles (kewatek) from Adonara, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, are still seldom researched by textile specialists (Vatter 1984 [1932]; Barnes 1989). This article is the first account by a descendant from the island that builds on these studies to describe the social and cultural organization and taboos concerning ikat-dyeing and the weaving of kewatek in the twenty-first century. It also discusses recent government intervention and the actions of local NGO s to sustain Adonara textile identification and to stimulate the weaving of these sarongs for economic household purposes.

"The local turn in good governance theory and practice responded to critiques of the ineffectiveness of state management and the inequity of privatization alternatives in natural resource management. Confounding expectations of greater effectiveness from decentralised governance, including community-based natural resource management, however, critics argue that expanded opportunities for elite capture have become widely associated with program failures. This overview of theoretical controversies on leadership, patronage and elite capture is part of a themed section in this issue that challenges assumptions across a wide range of current policy literature. It introduces a set of Indonesian case studies that examine practices of local leaders and elites and seek to account in structural terms for appropriations both by (‘elite capture’) and of (‘captured elites’) these key figures. These studies explore the structural factors and co-governance practices most likely to promote effective participation of the full spectrum of local interests in pursuit of better local natural resource governance."

Despite the fact that the government of Ghana imports the bulk of its industrial palm oil needs, it still fails to give assistance to about 80 percent of small-scale producers to enhance development in the industry. To design interventions that will be sustainable for and beneficial to these producers, it is important to understand their perspectives first, so as not to "fix development" for them. This case study in the Kwaebibirem District of Ghana uses an actor-oriented approach to understand the dynamics in the palm oil enterprise (kramer). Improvements in the kramer evidently evolve from the actors' own agency. Any intervention for development should therefore first understand the dynamics of the kramer as a social field, and take this perspective as a bottom-up starting point. This article is divided into six sections; the first section is an introduction, while the second describes our methodology. We next outline our conceptual approach, followed by an analysis of experiences of actors and their interactions. We then describe the resource flows and their interrelationships, including the power relations at play in the kramer networks. Finally, we conclude by drawing lessons on the relevance of an actor perspective in designing a learning intervention for processors, scientists, and extensionists.

Ensuring sustainability of livelihoods for communities residing in coastal environments of the Global South has gained considerable attention across policy making, practice and research fields. Livelihood enhancement programs commonly strategize around developing people's resilience by diversification of income and subsistence activities, but are criticised for inadequate appreciation of local contexts. This in part results from the application of theoretical approaches in practice which are informed disproportionately by dominant science-based narratives and utilised by actors in higher level political arenas. This leads to the prioritization of objectives that do not necessarily reflect local livelihood conditions. There is an urgent need to address the multiple challenges that limit the possibility for sustainable livelihoods in spatially and temporally dynamic environments. This paper presents an analysis of the policy landscape in which intervention strategies for sustainable coastal livelihoods emerge. It examines how livelihood improvement approaches take shape in the context of conservation, rural development, and regional resource governance. Drawing from analyses of broader regional policies and an extensive literature review, a conceptual framework is presented. It details various influences that can flow up or down multi-scaled governance structures to affect policy and management - from agenda-setting narratives of policy makers to the dynamic and changeable nature of livelihoods. Case studies from the Arafura and Timor Seas region are introduced to illustrate some of these trends. The discussion highlights challenges encountered in the pursuit of sustainability for coastal and marine-based livelihoods, and suggests directions for more effective long term policy, management and strategic interventions.

This paper documents how the implementation of forest tenure policy affects the decision-making of farmers in mangrove-shrimp farming systems with regard to their access to and management of mangrove forest in Ca Mau, Mekong Delta, which is the largest remaining mangrove forest in Vietnam. Policies on land allocation, land tenure and use-rights are important since they potentially promote sustainable mangrove-shrimp management. Forest management policy in Vietnam has been changed to promote equality of benefit sharing among stakeholders and devolved State forest management to the household level. However, to what extent its implementation can stimulate both mangrove conservation and livelihood improvement is still being debated. We use access and its social mechanisms to investigate how State Forest Companies (FC) and farmers can benefit from mangrove exploitation. The study was conducted from September 2008 to August 2010 using both qualitative and quantitative methods and using a participatory approach. After group discussions and in-depth interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, we interviewed 86 households in four communities using structured questionnaires. Results show the imbalance in access to finance, markets, and differences in authority between the two actors, farmers and FC. The discussion focuses on the possibilities of “win–win” outcomes, i.e. land tenure regimes promoting the devolution of sustainable forest management to farm households to balance benefits of both mangrove conservation and livelihood improvement.

Resolving contestations over resource management rights around coastal villages remains a focal challenge for co-management initiatives in remote coastal zones. Contemporary socio-political settings increasingly see local people having to negotiate between local long-standing (horizontal) relationships and new emerging (vertical) relationships which involve collaborations with outside actors who try to assume neutral mediating positions. Using two conflicts, this article examines the rise and fall of a participatory coastal resource management program in eastern Indonesia involving a fishing community engaged in a co-management arrangement with a conservation non-government organisation (NGO). An actor-oriented approach is applied to analyse how these conflicts shape, drive and direct collaborations across the community–NGO interface. We discuss how these impact the implementation of the conservation ethics and sustainable natural resource management practices, and show how particular mediating capacities of an NGO may overcome, and even build forth on, conflict in some contexts but fall short in others. We argue that local resource user groups and conservation teams operate according to strong local relationships that are entrenched in cultural–historical hierarchies of power. We moreover note that these local relationships significantly influence the extent of neutrality of external groups in their mediating, coordinating and technical advisory roles. The effectiveness of co-management partnerships hinges on the ability to balance actors’ mediating capacity with their local dependence for operation.

This article takes the existence of power networks of local elites as a social fact of fundamental importance and the starting point for the study of patronage in the governance of the coastal waters of East Kalimantan. We address the question of how to capture the elites for project implementation, rather than assuming the inevitability of elite capture of project funds. We analyze the multiple-scale networks of local power holders (punggawa) and the collaboration and friction between the political-economic interests and historical values of local actors and the scientific motivations of international environmental organizations. We describe how collaboration and friction between members of the elite challenge models that categorically exclude or co-opt local elites in foreign projects. In-depth ethnographic study of these networks shows their resilience through flows of knowledge and power in a highly volatile coastal environment. Results indicate the need for inclusion in decision making of local entrepreneurs, and – indirectly - their dependents in decentralized coastal governance.

Ghana produces about 2,000,000 metric tons of oil palm fruits annually, and small-scale processors contribute about 60% of crude palm oil production. The country is not self-sufficient in the fats and oils needed for industrial use and home consumption. A large percentage of the palm oil produced by small-scale processors cannot be utilized by the larger scale industries in Ghana or abroad because of its poor quality. There is an urgent need to explore the causes and to identify ways to address the situation. We carried out a diagnostic study in the Kwaebibirem District using key informant interviews, focus group discussions and surveys based on a semi-structured questionnaire to assess the processing practices of small-scale oil palm fruit processors, and to analyse the rationale behind these practices and their effects on the quality of palm oil produced. The processing practices identified included storage of loosened fruits for long periods before boiling, disposal of effluent into drains, use of spent tyres for boiling fruits and no clarification of the oil. About 54% of the processors store oil palm fruits for 1–3 weeks before processing, possibly allowing some fermentation, to increase extractability and reduce labour costs. This practice may reduce the quality of palm oil by increasing the levels of free fatty acids. The effects of the storage period on the quality and quantity of palm oil, the seasonal oil content of oil palm fruits, and the types of linkages and interactions amongst actors in the oil palm industry were identified together with stakeholders as issues for further research. Innovation in small-scale oil palm fruit processing is revealed as a multi-stakeholder, multiple-scale, and interdisciplinary process.

The concept of wellbeing is gaining popularity in the study of quality of life and cultural significance of living. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of objective and subjective wellbeing by exploring the perceptions of women left behind by out-migrating husbands on their quality of life in a transnational social field. The paper uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Its primary focus is on the life stories of the four women left behind by their migrant husbands, complementing by quantitative data obtained from a survey among 277 households. Taking an example from Nepal's eastern terai, the paper shows that additional income from remittances has increased the objective wellbeing of the women left behind, but it may not have increased their subjective wellbeing. Hence, it is concluded that improved objective wellbeing of a woman does not necessarily translate into her (improved) subjective wellbeing. The subjective experiences are rather complex, multi-faceted and context specific depending on the family situation, socio-cultural disposition and prior economic situation of the actors involved.

This article is the outcome of an empirical study of technical training of women and men through Farmer Field Schools in rural Nepal during the last decade. When the Farmer Field Schools started in Nepal as part of the FAO Integrated Pest Management project in 1997, this was also the year that the Maoists declared the People’s Revolution. The article describes the increased participation of women in FFS and its positive effect on food security of their families. After initial failure of FFS to include gender in its policy and activities, the article discusses the gradual acceptance of gender issues in the training. Empowerment is seen as a developmental process rather than as a product somebody or a group can gain access to or own. Different forms and objectives of empowerment of both women and men are discussed, and the unintended outcomes of FFS intervention in the context of rapid social-economic and political change during the Maoist revolution in Nepal.Keywords: Farmer Field Schools, gender, empowerment, Maoist revolution

Walau belum dilaksanakan, pengaruh dari perubahan administrasi pemerintahan di tahun 1999 telah mempengaruhi pemerintah daerah di Papua dalam pengelolaan sumberdaya alam, dan dampaknya pada perkembangan sosial-ekonomi di tingkat desa. Penelitian di Kabupaten Sorong menunjukkan bagaimana keputusan politik, seperti aturan-aturan pengelolaan hutan disertai dengan kebebasan politik yang lebih besar, menyajikan kesempatan-kesempatan baru bagi pemimpin-pemimpin lokal yang seringkali berasal dari keturunan raja atau bobot/nakohok untuk mengembangkan ketrampilan ekonomi dan kewirausahaannya. Tetapi, hal itu jelas bukan untuk kepentingan 'umum Papua'...[...] Kesenjangan terjadi di antara sesama elit,dan di antara elit dan penduduk. Sebagian besar penduduk pun semakin terpinggirkan. Kesenjangan ini dikategorikan mereka sebagai pelanggaran HAM yang ditujukan pada 'biropatologi' dari aparat pemerintahan propinsi. Bertolak dari hal ini, masa depan tanah Papua yang 'berkelanjutan' merupakan hal yang patut disimak secara seksama.

In Ghana, most oil palm fruits are produced by smallholders and processed by female artisanal processors. However, the ensuing crude palm oil (CPO) is high in free fatty acids and therefore cannot be sold in remunerative local or export markets. An earlier diagnostic study indicated that two main factors cause the poor quality: the processing practice of leaving harvested fruits unprocessed for up to 21 days and the use of lorry tyres as fuel to cook the fruits. Furthermore, the tyre-burning practice affects the health of people working and living around the processing facilities. This study describes the effect of action research undertaken with processors and the creation of a stakeholder platform in which Chiefs, the District Assembly, and a Concertation and Innovation Group collaborated to address the issues. The emerging institutional changes are assessed against baseline information. Awareness was raised about the dangers of tyre-burning, and CPO quality was improved by establishing the optimal time to leave fruits before processing. However, the prevailing market circumstances led producers to opt to produce greater quantities of oil rather than better-quality oil.

Conservation of marine space is a new frontier in environmentalists’ involvement with resource governance in Indonesia. The coastal and marine area of Berau was established as a District Marine Conservation Area (MCA) based on District Head Regulation No. 31/2005. The total MCA of 1.27 million ha was expected to become part of the wider MCA networks of the East Borneo Seascape and the Sulu Sulawesi Marine Ecoregion, as well as of the Coral Triangle international network of conservation areas in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The Berau MCA was developed in collaboration between the Berau district government and international environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). They claimed to use a new concept of partnership with the decentralised district government as the principal institutional partner. However, the governance framework is full of legal disconnects due to decentralisation of resource management, and its implementation faces the real-life challenges of political-economic and historical valuations of the marine environment producing conflicts of interest between the multi-scalar actors involved. Following the very process of establishing the Berau MCA over a five-year period (2005–2010), this paper shows why it is necessary to understand how collaboration and contention are constructed and in turn construct actors' perceptions and perspectives on marine conservation and resource extraction in decentralised coastal governance.

‘Integration’ was one of the most frequently used words at the San Feliu Euroconference but the participants did not always use it in the same way. Integration is one of the key notions discussed in the subsequent papers bySalz, Green & Penning-Rowsell, Kohn & Gowdy andDavos. A short introduction to these papers is presented, where some of the views expressed by the authors are compared with related conceptions which can be found in social sciences literature.

Taking related concepts of friction and a simplified value chain analysis, this article focuses on interaction of three regulatory networks and their influence over sustainable shrimp aquaculture in East Kalimantan. The results show that while government and nongovernment organization (NGO) regulatory networks have focused on the standardization of best practices, it is artisanal trade networks, controlled by local patrons (or ponggawa), that hold most influence over production. By exploring the influence of these ponggawa over production and trade we demonstrate how patronage is key to regulating the conduct of farmers and constitutes a vital, but poorly understood element in the shrimp value chain. We conclude that while ponggawa hold a central position in these value chains they remain systematically ignored by state and NGO-market-led regulatory networks. As a result, many of the frictions inherent to local–global interconnections of shrimp aquaculture limit any externally led attempt to create change.

Around 1990, when in other countries mangrove protection took off, massive conversion of mangrove forest into shrimp ponds started in the Mahakam delta. To identify constraints to and options for sustainable management we analysed institutions and constraints with stakeholders. In 3 sites we used participatory tools and a complementary survey to assess the livelihood framework. Since 1970, ponds for shrimp farming gradually replaced 75% of mangrove forested area. After 2004, recovery of mangrove took off, as, mainly due to low shrimp yields, ponds were abandoned. In 2008, 54% of the delta was dedicated to ponds for shrimp production. Around 80% of livelihood activities of pond-farmers, pond caretakers, and fishermen was related to mangroves. The involvement of men and women in these activities varied between sites and types. Poor households depended more on mangroves. Most activities resulted in seasonal income peaks; only a few activities resulted in a full daily livelihood. Ponds, on the other hand, provide 50% of households’ livelihood, but this remains vulnerable in the context of the risky shrimp production. Skewed land holding, unequal sharing of benefits, competing claims and vested interests of stakeholders pose a great challenge to a transition to a more sustainable use of the mangrove area. In particular, ponds located on peat soils are non-sustainable and would require full restoration into mangrove; ponds on other soils could best be transformed into a mixed mangrove-pond system using a ‘green-water’ technology.

The designation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Indonesia has been accelerated over the past two decades in line with international biodiversity conservation commitments and to secure a basis for decentralised fisheries resources management. The Berau MPA of northeast Kalimantan is one of them. This paper shows how the establishment of the park boundaries and zoning affects local fishers' livelihoods. Particular attention is paid to the position of outsider fishers or andon, who have a legal right to access the resource rich fishing grounds. Decentralised district government legitimises outsider fisheries activities because andon fishing permits bring in fees as a contribution to the regional income (PAD or pendapatan asli daerah), while international environmental organisations and local fishers regard the outsider fishers as illegitimately entering the MPA to access resources they regard as their own. Thus, MPA boundaries appear to be highly permeable, with both local fishers and environmental NGOs seeing the presence of andon as illegitimate and illicit, despite being legal.

This paper presents the results of a survey of the livelihoods of people living in the eastern part of the subtropical plains of Nepal, known as the terai. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used in the survey and further data were obtained through focus group discussions, in-depth interviews with key informants and participant observations. Changes were recorded both in the perception of agricultural and residential land for a secure living and the meaning given to food security. The principal drivers causing these changes were voluntary out-migration for remunerative employment, urbanization and the reluctance of members of the younger generation to farm, which they regard as a “dirty job”. In consequence, people’s livelihood practices and access to food are gradually shifting from an agriculture-based economy to an economy that is based on other sources of income, including remittances from out-migrants. This development threatens not only the role of agriculture in rural livelihoods but also the food security of the country.

This is an introductory chapter to Governing New Guinea , to construct a broader and more inclusive picture of the everyday practices of the governing of New Guinea during a period of forty years, 1950-1990, through the temporal and spatial variation and differentiation of the individual contributions. Particular attention is given to the period between 1961 and 1969. It stands out in the personal memory of all indigenous Papuan civil servants interviewed almost as one continuous period of destitution, political insecurity, and anger. Keywords:anger; destitution; New Guinea; Papuan civil servants; political insecurity

In Nepal, male out-migration is an important factor to contribute to GDP through regular remittances. This paper looks at the effects of male out-migration on the women left behind in relation to labour participation and decision-making in agriculture. The literature speaks of feminisation of agriculture as a positive development for women’s empowerment. A distinction is made between labour feminisation and managerial feminisation. As the two concepts indeed refer to two different roles, power positions and managerial practices, the paper separately explores these practices and actors involved. Data were collected for a doctoral study in Jhapa District, Eastern Nepal; a lowland area from where much male out-migration is taking place. The study shows a higher level of feminisation in a situation where de-facto autonomous female heads-of-household are decision makers and less in case of women who stay within the patrilineal household of their parents-in-law. Moreover, feminisation in the first case has the unexpected outcome that women seem to be moving away from agriculture. An interdisciplinary approach using anthropological in-depth interviews and demographic survey data shows that a concept like feminisation of agriculture needs to be considered and understood in the wider social and cultural context of an expanding rural space

We contend there are currently two competing scenarios for the sustainable development of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas of South-east Asia. First, a landscape approach where farming techniques for small-scale producers are integrated into intertidal areas in a way that the ecological functions of mangroves are maintained and disease controlled. Second, a closed-system approach where problems of disease and effluent are eliminated in closed recirculation ponds behind the intertidal zone controlled by industrial-scale producers. Moving towards either scenario requires a better understanding of the scaled interaction between the ecological, social and political dynamics underlying processes of change and possible threats to the resilience of mangrove forested coastal ecosystems. We discuss how the analytical concepts of resilience, uncertainty, risk and scale can contribute to a social-ecological system understanding of decision making related to shrimp production by exploring their use in the empirical research areas of coastal ecology, shrimp health management and epidemiology, livelihoods and governance in response to the two scenarios. The challenge for the science-policy divide is to ensure that the complexity of social and ecological change in coastal areas, as understood from these empirical areas, is simplified but not made so simple that management becomes ineffective in steering production to rebuild resilience and maintain social and ecological stability. The discussion leads to a transdisciplinary research agenda that can contribute to sustainable shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas. Other chapters from this book

"We contend there are currently two competing scenarios for the sustainable development of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas of Southeast Asia. First, a landscape approach, where farming techniques for small-scale producers are integrated into intertidal areas in a way that the ecological functions of mangroves are maintained and shrimp farming diseases are controlled. Second, a closed system approach, where problems of disease and effluent are eliminated in closed recirculation ponds behind the intertidal zone controlled by industrial-scale producers. We use these scenarios as two ends of a spectrum of possible interactions at a range of scales between the ecological, social, and political dynamics that underlie the threat to the resilience of mangrove forested coastal ecosystems. We discuss how the analytical concepts of resilience, uncertainty, risk, and the organizing heuristic of scale can assist us to understand decision making over shrimp production, and in doing so, explore their use in the empirical research areas of coastal ecology, shrimp health management and epidemiology, livelihoods, and governance in response to the two scenarios. Our conclusion focuses on a series of questions that map out a new interdisciplinary research agenda for sustainable shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas."

This thesis explores how people live amphibiously in dynamic land-sea environments. It is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2011 – 2013) in the Makassar Strait maritime region in Indonesia: a complex and amphibious land-sea interface. In Western science little attention is given to how people live at sea. There is a general land bias, by which people are seen as primarily belonging to the land. Yet people do live at sea, or rather: in these dynamic land-sea environments. Engaging with these mobile and sea-based ways of life of maritime people provides not only a fuller understanding of how people relate to their environment, but , essentially, it also enables a critical reflection of land-biased assumptions in science and society. Anthropology, with its qualitative research methods is particularly suitable to do such in-depth and long-term engagement with other worlds. The research on which the thesis is based was carried out as a mobile ethnography, following people seawards, travelling with them for days to visit close family on faraway islands or joining them on their fishing and diving trips, including illegal fishers using bombs and cyanide poison on coral reefs. Also followed were the practices of marine conservation staff, as they organised field trips to fishing communities. These travels – described in the thesis – show how islands and marine spaces that are remote from the land, turn out to be regional hubs of oversees trade and family relations. From a sea-based perspective the Makassar Strait is a continuity of relations and movements flanked by land masses. This inverts the land-based perspective of the sea as an extension of the land by putting the sea centre stage. The Makassar Strait figures in this thesis as an active and moving world – or worlds – of human-marine relations to learn from and theorise about the notion of ontological flow: fluidity of being and moving in relation. Flow is both movement as a pattern of activity – the flowing – and that what flows; elements, matter and meaning in motion. The notion of worlds in flow has infused recent ontological debates in anthropological theory in which reality is assumed contingent, fluid and multiple – thereby revitalising the philosophical work of earlier thinkers, among whom Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze. This way of thinking complexity and ontological fluidity is central to literature that has emerged out of the cross-fertilisation of Science and Technology Studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Despite differences, these studies share the objective to follow, engage with and translate how, in practice, material and semiotic realities come to be and matter – instead of developing a way to ‘access reality better’. The concept of ‘amphibiousness’ is mobilised to refer to living in and moving between different worlds that can intermingle but that cannot be reduced to each other. The concept is used to describe the human capacity to live in different worlds at the same time. This amphibious capacity is further elaborated 1) in terms of living in a hybrid land-water interface, 2) in terms of being able to move along with different understandings of the world, of reality, and 3) It refers to the methodology of the anthropologist who also needs to move in these worlds bodily and cognitively, to develop a sensitivity to and understanding of these different worlds. Amphibiousness captures the anthropological engagement with flow, multiplicity and otherness by way of moving between worlds in order to explore the moving interface between worlds, realities or ways of life that partly interact. The research question: How to grasp flow – the fluctuations of and between bodies, things or worlds in the making - conceptually and methodologically without reducing its vital mobility and fluidity? is elaborated in a methodological Chapter 2, and three research chapters (Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5) that each focus from a different angle on human-marine relations. The research exposes fundamentally different, and sometimes conflicting, ways in which people understand and experience their relation to the sea. These were not just different perspectives on one maritime reality, or world. These were inherently different understandings of reality, and different ways in which this reality is put into practice, in which worlds – plural – are being created and sustained. In anthropology we speak of ontological difference, because it concerns with (radically) different notions of wat exists, what is real, what matters and what entities participate in the reproduction of the world. Although these worlds are different – they cannot be reduced to each another - they are also not separated in any clear-cut way. They do flow into each other, as people, objects and ideas can amphibiously move in between. It is argued in this thesis that such amphibious translation is essential for more effective and equal collaboration in marine conservation. International environmental organisations insufficiently acknowledge (radically) different ways of doing and thinking human-marine relations. Disregarding these undermines the viability of conservation programs as it repeatedly leads to clashes between different ways in which maritime worlds are understood and organised in practice. To be effective, marine conservation needs to become amphibious; attentive to fundamentally different ways of understanding and experiencing the relationship between people and the sea, as well as the mobile practices of trade, fishing, travel and family affiliations through which these worlds are shaped beyond the borders of marine reserves. Chapter 2 intends to answer the question how to grasp environmental otherness – radically different ways of understanding and experiencing human-marine relations – in and through ethnography. Chapter 3 serves to provide some empirical grounding to show the relevancy and urgency of a paradigmatic shift in conservation thinking, finding ways to engaging mobile maritime people like the Bajau. The solution to the ‘participation problem’ in conservation will not lie in developing ways to make local people participate more in Western conservation schemes. What is needed is an ontological shift in conservation thinking itself. Chapter 4 describes a conservation outreach project that attempts to educate and convert local people into coral protectors. Both coral and the sea-dwelling Bajau people appear to be amphibious beings, moving between a changeable land-water interface, and between different, fluidly interwoven ontological constellations. Failure of conservation organisations to recognise the ontologically ambiguous nature of ‘coral’ and ‘people’ translates to a breakdown of outreach goals. Chapter 5 provides a case study of a dangerous and destructive fishing practice (cyanide fishing) by which fishers dive beyond the limits of what their body can take – and spirits allow, a practice that generates feeling of both fear and enjoyment as they experience a process of becoming permeable to fluids, spirits and currents penetrating or leaking out of their bodies. This chapter exposes how cyanide fishing sustains as a way of life, involving and producing affective relations. In Chapter 6 it is concluded how ontological multiplicity is of a heuristic and political relevance to social science, and anthropology in particular because it allows us to engage with radical difference – or the real on different terms – instead of explaining it away in our own terms. Engaging with such radical different is important because it allows to see the realities that systematically escape (scholarly) attention, yet affect the world nonetheless. This requires translation – the practice of relating different worlds, reals, repertoires or ways of life and bringing them into interaction – which is a process of, and a condition for, dialogue. The notion of amphibiousness has practical and political value, in particular for reconsidering conservation and development outreach and how it may be reframed as a process involving ontological dialogue. Providing room for ambiguity, thinking with amphibiousness furthermore encourages suspension of the (Western) tendency to explain the Other, to fix what does not add up.

Seasonal floodplains are water bodies that retain water for 5-6 months during which they are suitable to grow fish and other aquatic animals. Out of 2.8 million ha of medium and deep-flooded areas, about 1.5 million ha are estimated to be suitable for Community-Based Fish Culture (CBFC). WorldFish had undertaken a five-year interdisciplinary action research project from 2005-2010 with the overall aim of enhancing the productivity of seasonally occurring floodwaters for the improved and sustained benefit of the livelihoods of the poor. My involvement in this project was as PhD Scholar from 2007-2009 for understanding the different and complex institutional arrangements and its overall impact of governing Community-Based Fish Culture in seasonal floodplains for the sustainable use and maximization of benefits to the targeted people of Bangladesh. Six seasonal floodplains in different areas of Bangladesh were selected under the action research project implemented by the Department of Fisheries in collaboration with the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council and the Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute. For the action research which is the subject of this thesis, three seasonal floodplains were selected in the Brahamaputra, the Padma and the Teesta River Basins located at Mymensingh, Rajshahi and Rangpur districts, respectively. Another three floodplains were selected as control sites in the same river basins located near to the projects sites. The control sites were included in the economic study (Chapters 4 and 5) only. All the six floodplains belong to two types of ownership categories: public floodplains surrounded by private lands. My thesis is broadly divided into a sociological and an economic part, mainly because of methodological differences. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 discuss the institutional arrangements and the power and decision-making process of Community-Based Fish Culture management. Chapter 4 addresses the overall economic impact of technical and institutional arrangements of fish culture at both floodplain and household levels. We here employed a random effects model to estimate the impact of participation on fish income. Finally, in Chapter 5 the economic impact of community-based fish culture on expenditure inequality was measured at household level. In the sociological part, three project floodplains covered the different institutional arrangements for managing the floodplains and maximizing their benefits to different classes of beneficiaries. Power relations between the various key actors or stakeholders were assessed who were directly or indirectly involved in the floodplain, and decision making processes in co-management practices were also studied at different institutional levels. Sociological research methods and techniques including semi-structured interviews, Focus Group Discussions, informal discussions with key informants, and quantitative surveys were applied to gather data from Floodplain Management Committees, villagers and institutional stakeholders to investigate the use of the floodplain as a common property resource (CPR) and the processes of the formation of local institutions and organizations. For the economic analysis of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, three project floodplains and three control floodplains were selected for comparing the impact of the intervention at beneficiary level and also community level. Household survey data includes a baseline survey on socioeconomic information, three months monitoring on seasonal and monthly basis at community and household levels, as well as an assessment of the floodplains’ natural resource systems. The seasonal survey covered the changes in input use for crop production, changes in quality of output from the agricultural land and the effects of the intervention on crop production. A monthly survey on the 1st and 15th day of the month was conducted to capture the household consumption pattern, especially the frequency and quantity of fish and meat consumption. Chapter 2 improves our understanding of the complex institutional relationships governing Community-Based Fish Culture in seasonal floodplains in Bangladesh. Formal institutional linkages between DoF, WorldFish Center and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) played a key role in ensuring success. DoF is a government institution with establishments at different administrative levels. Institutional embedding of DoF through the Fishers Cooperatives (FMC) as implementing institutions appeared highly instrumental. Large numbers of people, including landless poor seasonal fishers, professional landowning fishers, and non-fishing landowners benefited from the successful implementation of the CBFC activities in the floodplains. The outcomes demonstrate a significant increase in income to all classes of beneficiaries through income sharing derived from their involvement in the fisheries cooperatives and fish culture. In case 2 and case 3 the floodplains under private ownership privately owned land is inundated during the monsoon season; these floodplains are similar in size, with comparable percentages of beneficiaries and similar numbers of communities surrounding the floodplains. However, the distribution of beneficiaries among the classes differs with more landowners than landless seasonal fishers benefitting. FMCs normally allow these non-members to access the floodplains, but only to harvest un-stocked fish using local gears, considering the importance of fishing to their livelihood. This means that the CPR character of the management by the FMCs shows a certain permissiveness or permeable boundary regarding landless non-members under strict spatial and temporal conditions. Regulation and conservation thus guarantee the availability of un-stocked small fish in the floodplains with a high catch by artisanal gears which results in higher incomes and related benefits to the poorer households. Households who own land or ditches in the floodplains do not depend on un-stocked fish as they can have ponds to trap and harvest fish obtained in the wild. Additionally, during the dry season, they may use land in lowland areas for crop production. Case 1 of the public floodplain surrounded by private lands differs most from the private floodplain cases. Here, the public area is leased out to fishers during the monsoon, including the private land owned by the affluent and politically influential stakeholders. The floodplain is larger than in the other two cases, but both the percentages of landless fishers and of landowners are lower, making the class of the landowning professional fishers the majority among the beneficiaries. Generally, the rules and regulations that apply to public and privately owned floodplains are written down in a Memorandum of Understanding between DoF and the individual FMC’s in a non-judicial construction. In their regular meetings the FMCs also document the everyday practices of the rules related to fish culture and management in the minutes that are distributed among its members. It appears that in the three cases, comparable rules and regulations for fish culture are applied to the public and to the private floodplains in operational rules, collective choice rule and constitutional rule. Benefit sharing of the fish production from the floodplains was agreed at the start of project activities by all stakeholders, but their commitment varied between the classes of beneficiaries and across the cases. A significant increase of income for different stakeholders was derived from their involvement in fish culture. In the public floodplain fishers received around 40% of net income increase and the landowners received almost 38% of net income increase, as they had to pay the lease money for the floodplain. But in private floodplain all classes of stakeholders deposited around 25% of their net income in a revolving fund. The fishers group got their income from the final harvesting of fish as they received 50% of the price of the harvest of un-stocked fish and 10-15% of the stocked fish. The landowners received 45-50% of income according to their land. The landless seasonal fishers had open access to the non-stocked fish during the monsoon. Finally, the users of the public as well as the private floodplains contributed a small portion of their income to social work, like the building of a mosque or a Hindu temple. Chapter 3 firstly assessed the power relations between the various key actors or stakeholders who were directly or indirectly involved in floodplain fisheries in the three sites. Secondly, their shifting power relations and decision making process in co-management practices were studied in the different institutional contexts of the three research sites during WorldFish project intervention. Instead of merely listing the institutions involved, we studied the actual power practices and decisions making processes between the stakeholders in the three cases to gain insight in the different governance models used in CBFC in Bangladesh. Existing co-management arrangements are characterized by unequal power distribution among the different actors, often resulting in the marginalization of the professional fishers and the landless poor fishers. I differentiated between two types of power in the management of floodplain aquaculture and stakeholder involvement, namely a) the power to create rules and decision making procedures, and b) the power to resolve disputes and ensure compliance. The Floodplain Management Committee (FMC) reviews the rules and regulations formulated by the government to complement the vision and roles of the institution, and if there is a need, modify them. Rules and regulations governing access to the public and privately owned floodplains were developed by the Department of Fisheries (DoF) and the FMC. A similar set of rules and regulations was applied to the public and the privately owned floodplains for fish culture. Most of the rules were derived from the national fisheries law. The rules and regulations that were applied to the floodplain were written down in a Memorandum of Understanding between DoF and FMC. Examples are rules and regulations about membership, leadership, boundary and access, allocation, penalties, input, and conflict resolution that were enforced for the management of community based-fish culture. Magistrate courts at local level in Bangladesh have the power to decide on penalties for offenders in case of violation of the Government Fisheries Act of 2010 (DoF 2013) in the management of fisheries and aquaculture including the floodplain; a range of penalties is stipulated in the Offences and Penalties paragraph of the Act. In addition, in the case of both public and private floodplains, leaders of customary organizations have the authority and power to confiscate illegal nets and penalize offenders by charging monetary fines. Governance in the context of Community-Based Fish Culture (CBFC) management addresses the dominancy of the land-owning group, informal sets of norms and traditions, and the social network and power relationships between stakeholders. In the public floodplain governance processes resulting in the formation of a responsive, accountable leadership and representative membership appeared vital for the success of CBFC. But, the establishment of successful CBFCs in public floodplains demands continuous institutional support from agencies such as the Department of Fisheries, because an increase in production and income also increases the risk of elite capture, and the possibility of an exploitative. In the private floodplain, there was no specific governance system in place to manage access and use of the floodplains during the wet season, as opposed to the dry months when the lands of the floodplain could be used by individual households for crop production. Thanks to greater accountability of the leaders, and more equal representation of the different stakeholders including active leadership and a supporting role of DOF, leadership problems were few and easily solved. Downward accountability was well established in addition to many efforts by the project. Chapter 4 examined the overall impact on households involved through the WorldFish project in community-based fish culture in seasonal floodplains, particularly with respect to fish production, consumption, and income generation. Qualitative as well as quantitative methods were deployed to examine the impact of Community-Based Fish Culture starting with a conceptual framework as to how positive impacts take effect. The overall fish production in the floodplains of the project appeared to have increased 274%. Due to project intervention introducing fish culture, 43% of the farmers used floodplain water to meet up irrigation needs instead of ground water and rice production increased by 18.9% for dry-season (Boro) rice and 28.9% for wet-season (Aman) rice in the project floodplain areas. Increased income is an important economic incentive for the expansion of community-based fish culture in Bangladesh. Over that period, average income from fish production increased to USD 240 for all beneficiaries involved in the project, which is 237% higher than the income of beneficiaries in the control group. Results of the random effects model show that project-involved households significantly increased their fish income compared to the households of the control sites. Furthermore, total household income increased to about USD 175 per household for those who participated in the WorldFish project. Fish availability increased in the project area from July to December. During these months approximately 68%-75% of the total fish consumption needs of the project beneficiaries could be fulfilled by the newly introduced fish culture in the floodplains. The consumption of nutritional food shows that per capita fish consumption of households in the project sites increased from 1.26 kg per capita per month in the baseline year to 2.31 kg per capita per month in 2009. Apart from the direct effect on household income and food consumption, CBFC intervention also created the opportunity for employment, backward linkage, and access to market to sell harvested fish. Indirect benefits of the community based fish culture include reduced conflict; improved social capital and greater cooperation in the community. Expenditure is a better measurement of welfare than income where most of the people are poor and struggle for food. In this study I therefore used data on expenditure instead of income. The results in Chapter 5 show that the CBFC project had a positive and significant impact on food expenditure, as well as on non-food (other basic needs) and overall total expenditure. The impact of CBFC on household expenditure and expenditure inequality was measured by using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method and Gini decomposition. Results revealed that the overall average food expenditure per year per household (for panel estimation) increased due to participation in the CBFC project from USD 93 to USD 141. Project participants were able to spend significantly more on food compared to non-participants. In addition, expenditure on food was increasing year by year. Moreover, participant households were capable to spend more compared to non-participants on non-food items like cloth, health, education, housing, transport etc. (from USD 45 to USD 74 per year). This non-food expenditure also gradually increased per year. Finally, total household expenditure of CBFC project participants was between USD 134 and USD 215 per year higher than the total expenditure of control households, which implies a better livelihood of the households involved in the project. Gini index of total expenditure was found to be 0.34 and 0.40 for the CBFC project and control households respectively, which indicate that expenditure was equally distributed among households, but that it is more equally distributed among the CBFC households as compared to the control households. The expenditure inequality difference between the CBFC project and the control sites was 0.06, which implies that the CBFC management system helped to distribute total expenditure more equally among the surrounding communities. Policy advice For better management of the floodplain beels, the government may apply a similar policy for better utilization of the resources and for the economic benefits of the beneficiaries. Accountability, sustainable management of the floodplains, proper marketing of fish and equity in the distribution of benefits of the floodplains have proven to increase the productivity and ensure the accessibility of the poor and landless farmers, as long as elite capture is controlled. Taking all CBFC project lessons into consideration, the Bangladesh government could indeed make some changes to their floodplain /wetland policy in order to accommodate the poor fishers and the landless poor. Policy (re)formulation may be needed for the dissemination of the CBO-based fish culture approach to scale-up its impact. In order to establish the rights of the CBOs (under the leadership of fishers) there is a need for modification of the policy of leasing of public floodplains. The major issues to be included are to bring private and public floodplains under CBO management; to secure government support for the registration of the CBOs and the strengthening of the institution; to guarantee that CBOs obtain long term (10-15 years or more) lease of the public areas of the floodplains as priority; to support small infrastructure constructions in the outlet and inlets of the floodplains; and to develop a functional model for the scaling-up (influencing policy) and scaling-out of the CBO fish culture approach in Bangladesh. Future research To assess the effectiveness of the scaling-up of the innovation in Community-Based Fish Culture in public and private floodplains, using a CBO to CBO approach will have to be developed with the support and facilitation from formal institutions. This will be considered as the subject of future research.

Interest in Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) has grown with increasing awareness of tropical forest deforestation and amplified recognition for the need to add value to forest resources. However, NTFPs continue to be regarded by many as marginal goods incapable of competing with timber as a viable economic alternative use of tropical and subtropical forests. In Mexico, several NTFPs are exploited in various ecosystems helping conserve forested areas, providing “the poor” access to cash in moments of uncertainty and relieving pressure on timber resources. Nonetheless, the benefit for conservation is highly debated and remains undecided as yet. NTFP proponents suggest that the development of commercial enterprises can be of significant benefit for forest users by providing a direct link between producers and markets, organizing markets as well as the development of infrastructure. This thesis explores actors’ practices to understand the different forms of organization, processes of interaction and negotiation between actors involved in the use and commercialization of NTFPs. The analysis of these practices seen through observation and accounts of the actors’ life-histories, everyday practices, the arrangement of individual actions within different production and commercial activities, serve to elucidate the multiple facets/aspects of different actors in the market for NTFPs in diverse commercial, social, economic and political arenas. By doing so, this thesis captures the experiences of actors in the Chamaedorea market; an important NTFP product marketed worldwide. These experiences are fundamental in answering the main research question: How are Chamaedorea palm commercial initiatives built in Veracruz, Mexico, and what are the main limitations for their consolidation and access to the markets? Focusing primarily on the analysis of key actors in the Mexican market, from production up until the export market, this thesis offers a detailed account of how diverse efforts to access markets are constructed and argues that it is important to focus on organizing practices and problem-solving capabilities of actors, needed to circumvent bottle-necks in the design and development of NTFP firms, a point often ignored or taken for granted in the literature on NTFPs. Taking on an actor-oriented perspective, detailed ethnographies and actor’s life-stories introduce actors’ struggles and various arrangements/strategies in establishing firms, yielding an interesting insight that would be unnoticeable if these processes developed smoothly. The contribution of this thesis to the debate on how NTFPs firms are constructed and maintained, proposes a reconsideration of NTFPs policy initiatives in developing markets and enhancing benefits to forest users, a major nuisance of current NTFPs policies worldwide.

This thesis is an inter-paradigmatic exchange between political ecology and post-structuralist interpretations of actor-structure relationships. The study is founded on multiple discourses where different interpretations of a particular phenomenon by various actors have been analysed. The thesis is meant to show that relationships between society and nature are dynamic, entail multi-sited struggles among many actors at several terrains and are deeply rooted in earlier history.The study transpires that the forest is shaped by a loosely knit network of actors that are linked together by a kaleidoscope of rights, claims and social relationships which seem to determine the fate of the forest in a village. Chapter 2 elaborates the theoretical foundation and methodological trajectory of this thesis. The concept of arena is central and analytically useful for this study as it connotes and involves social actors, their social relationships, practices and struggles between them. The notion of social arena is a metaphor for the site or place where action takes place between social actors. These places are not limited by geographical, natural or administrative borders. Arenas are social locations in which contests over issues, resources, values and representations take place. These are either spaces in which contestation associated with different practices and values of different domains takes place; or they are spaces within a single domain where attempts are made to resolve discrepancies in value interpretation and incompatibilities between actor interests. I argue that the forest as a social arena stretches beyond its natural and physical borders.The arena as the site of the struggle is not just geographically confined within natural (e.g. forest) and/or administrative (e.g. political) boundaries but it stretches beyond the locality. These arenas are diverse, they overlap and co-exist, and the boundaries at a given time are defined by networks of relationships between forest users and consumers, relationships between the State, bureaucrats, forest owners, dwellers, and so on. Chapter 3 gives a detailed account of history of Haripur and how forests were legally categorised and distributed. History helps understand the political alliances and the power struggles in the region, the district, and (sub district) Khanpur. The State, during British rule introduced a new management regime for natural resources which changed the entire social landscape of Khanpur by attaching private property rights to the trees as well as forest lands in the region. The government authorities, notably the Forest department have most often seen forest dwellers destructive for the forest, depleting its resources and interfering with nature. This premise lays foundation of mistrust between people and the government. Contrary to this, the initiatives to introduce people in forestry governance are based on the realisation that the ownership, or at least management control over forests, is critical to responsible management by the people. Chapter 4 provides a detailed account of how the Forest department operates in relation to people and forest resources. There are multiple scales of articulation, alliances and struggles within and around the department and these positions are changeable from time to time with several internal and external factors. The case of Forest department manifests that the State is to be seen as a multifaceted organ and not as an individual actor. Structural changes were introduced in the department but the core on which the foundation of the department was laid, was never changed. Many women firmly believe that the department must continue to use authority to control local people who cause degradation. Each reform initiative taken in the name of participation ended up with basically continuing the same centralised system. Forests were never handed over to the community along with management responsibility (e.g. Guzara forests). Only joint management of forests was enacted – yet not implemented. Trust remained a major issue in all these struggles. The subject of forest fire, which I perceive and have experienced as a strong manifestation of resistance and also as a tool to manipulate natural resources, has been dealt with in different places in this thesis, but particularly in Chapter 5. Burning forests is an old practice for clearing land for agriculture.Fire therefore had a significant role in defining farmers’ territories. Gradually these practices changed but grazers continued to light up forests to produce lush green grass for their livestock. This led to a persistent discourse based on appropriating every fire incident to the grazers’ practices. This study highlights that fire is now increasingly used as a management tool for manipulating the resource. Firewood collectors and big owners use fire for obtaining dry firewood or build the case for felling dead / dry trees which is allowed in the policy after ban on green felling. Even if fires may occur due to the will of the forest owner, the policy blindly holds grazersresponsible for their wasteful and damaging practices. The collectors of Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP), mostly women, are not happy with fire since their resources are burnt down due to the productive fire requirement of Chir pine (Pinus roxburghii). There is an incline in the graph of forest fires, decreasing self initiative among people to control fires, along with the Forest department’s management bias towards Chir pine trees in fire control operations; these concerns echo in various voices from the field. The chapter also highlights a form of connivance between the owner and the occupants of lands (peasants / tenants) and also the owners and Forest department staff. Chapters 6 deals with actors in their struggle to secure their rights to the forest through acquiring forest land title deeds. This initiative from the side of the new owners can be understood as a response to what is explained in Chapter 5. No forests have been handed over with management responsibilities to non owner forest users in nearly one and a half centuries. Non owners have resorted to buying forest lands in little parcels in creating private forests. This way, new meanings are given to the forest and new spaces are created through tactical networking among various actors. Field evidence and opinions from several actors suggest that Reserved forests are frequently being accessed by people for their needs in a de facto manner. Several new owners have acquired land entitlement comprising small pieces of lands which do not have a huge timber value in future. Followed by this, it is also visible that the nature of power in the contemporary society of Khanpur (and beyond) is changing. Power, which was once measured through landholding, is now measured through other symbols, such as political connectivity and affiliation. Regular access to NTFP by non-right holders for the sake of earning an income (Chapter 7) is an illustration of their struggle, or more strongly put, an in-between expression of resistance. Poor women remain invisible in their daily practice to access NTFPs. They use spaces that are considered undesirable by other forest actors. These spaces cannot be completely separated within the social arena, but they are knitted into the day to day practices of people. State intrusion into women’s customary and de facto practices concerns them. They fear that this will only reduce their chances of earning a modest livelihood from the forest. However, the women are also highly creative in reshaping their practices and relationships with every change that takes place around them. Firewood collection is the most visible, uninterrupted and non-compromising activity for women. In their daily struggle to feed the family, they virtually manage and control the forest. Contrary to this, women are not part of any dialogue on forestry reform. They need to be part of the negotiation process in which their spaces remain secure. The most important challenge is to create the mechanisms for discussion, negotiation, and arbitration of gendered access regimes under a variety of circumstances.

The farmer cooperative sector in China has experienced rapid development in the past two decades, in particular after the implementation of the Famer Cooperative Law in 2007. Farmer cooperatives are considered important to mediate between farmers and other actors in the wider social, economic and political environment. Farmer cooperatives also can provide relevant services to improve production and marketing and enhance agricultural and rural development. This thesis investigates how Chinese farmer cooperatives coordinate production and marketing activities of farmers and act as intermediaries in relation to external actors. Central to the research are both the processes and outcomes of intermediation.

Ajijic is a Mexican town that during the 1990s experienced its biggest social, economic, and physical transformation of the last 50 years. This transformation was mainly triggered by two factors: 1) a significant increase in the number of foreign retirees moving into Ajijic (effect of a global phenomenon identified as international retirement migration); and 2) the consequent increase in the construction of residential developments and infrastructure (mainly retiree-oriented). In this thesis the author argues that the international retirement migration phenomenon in Ajijic provoked the emergence of different projects of shaping the physical characteristics of this town. Through these projects, social actors shape Ajijic according to their different interpretations of what the town of Ajijic is, and what local development and modernisation mean to them. The transformation of the physical characteristics of Ajijic, through these projects, has also transformed the social life of this town.

This thesis argues that Farmer Field Schools in Nepal contributed to agriculture and rural development and to gendered empowerment. The Nepalese government, but also NGOs involved in FFS applied a rather technocratic approach towards development (Li, 1999) and assumed that will well-defined plans, agricultural development and other objectives are products that can be rationally transmitted to farmers to produce desired outcomes. They considered development as a product that could be delivered to the farmers. This technocratic approach did not address political (Ferguson, 1998) and economic inequities or gender differences of farmers. Neither did it incorporate the multi-rationality of actors involved in the intervention (Grillo and Stirrat, 1997; Büscher, 2010). Drawing on the experience of active involvement in FFS at the start of the project in 1997, and consequently by collecting data during a mid-term project evaluation in 2002 and as a part of a PhD research project in 2009 this has become a longitudinal study of the institutional, social-cultural and political changes that have taken place during more than a decade. I have collected measurable data such as yield increase and I used survey data from 2002 and 2009. I have also collected qualitative information through Focus Group Discussions and in-depth individual semi-structured interviews with male and female farmers, project staff and government officials and NGO staff. Additionally I have gathered information from relevant project documentation and participatory observation among a wide range of actors in and around FFS. By looking at the different stages of FFS in Nepal, I reflect on its contribution to rural transformation and gendered empowerment. The Farmer Field School was first developed in 1989 Indonesia as a response to problems associated with the failure of the Green Revolution and particularly with the misuse of pesticides. FFS follows a participatory approach to agricultural extension and research, and aims to bring about change in rural areas. FFS has been implemented all over the world by various organisations. FFS was introduced in Nepal as an integrated pest management project in 1997 with concrete output oriented goals: the increase of agricultural production and the reduction of pesticide use. Despite the on-going debate on the impact of FFS, this thesis shows a rather consistently positive picture of short- and medium–term impact, with farmers able to improve their yield, reduced pesticide use and a better balanced fertilizer application system. Changing donor paradigms as well as a growing insight that farmers’ realities and needs were different and more complex than initially assumed during the planning of the project, made FFS more outcome and process oriented, focusing on empowerment and capacity-building of farmers. After more than a decade FFS indeed did contribute to rural development in Nepal not so much because of careful project planning, but rather in a complex way with largely unintended consequences, embedded in a socio-cultural context. When FFS started it was designed as a project, with a clear start, written documents in which the project duration was indicated, starting in 1997 and ending in 2002. I found that ten years after FFS was conducted, farmers still continued with some of the practices they learned in their FFS training. FFS has developed from a project into a continuous process of change. Although it might not be exactly the way project planners had envisaged in their documents, a fact is that farmers still apply agronomic practices as introduced in FFS. Farming practices have changed, yields increased. Fewer pesticides are used, less rice seedlings are planted per hill, and so on. Also more farmers started with vegetable production. For many women FFS was the first training in agriculture they received. It contributed to an increase in their knowledge and skills, boosted their confidence in participation in community events and speaking in public. Women appeared to be interested to participate in FFS to learn about farming and to contribute to the food security of their family. Men, on the other hand, were interested to use FFS to increase their livelihood options, to widen job opportunities or to earn a better income. At the turn of the century one of the objectives of FFS shifted from integrated pest management and agricultural production to farmer’s empowerment. Farmer field schools are vehicles for empowerment of farmers (Ooi, 1998; Pontius et al, 2002). Empowerment is an often debated concept in the academic world but in development practice it seems to be used without much debate, assuming that it is always a ‘good’ thing having a positive impact on farmers. In the FFS programme it was assumed that everybody had the same understanding of the concept of empowerment. My data showed that male and female farmers differ in their view on empowerment and that there is a big gap between policy makers, FFS facilitators and female and male farmers regarding the perception of empowerment. This research showed that empowerment is a social process that challenges our assumptions about empowerment as a deliverable, a product. Men and women FFS participants said that they experienced empowerment, but not in the way FFS technicians and policymakers had planned it, going through a rationally designed set of steps: identifying a problem in the field, experimenting with a solution and drawing conclusions. Our survey showed that women without FFS experience saw empowerment as increased individual strength, personal growth, stretching their comfort zone. Women who took part in FFS mainly considered empowerment as self-confidence and involvement in work and group activities. Men’s idea of empowerment was much more focused on their capacity to contribute to the improvement of society, on action outside the household, which would contribute to their prestige. FFS trainers spoke about empowerment in terms of a result of technology transfer or a change in behaviour that they had facilitated among farmers. Apparently, FFS staff had a very technical and non-political approach towards empowerment, not based on male and female farmers’ realities in rural Nepal. Most FFS facilitators claimed that they could empower farmers and they did not consider farmers’ interest and agency. FFS facilitators did not see empowerment as a process that farmers themselves are actively part of. Interviews confirmed that empowerment is a complex, multi-faceted process, which is not easily quantified or measured, let alone regulated in a technical way. Through participation in FFS men and particularly women expanded their framework of information, knowledge and analysis. It enlarged their room for manoeuvre, their negotiation space. They got involved in a process that enabled them to discover new options, new possibilities and eventually make better informed decisions in farming. Several female farmers replied that they could now make choices which were previously denied to them for historical and cultural reasons. They said that this was not the result of the discovery learning in FFS like it was assumed by policy makers, but of the group participation, singing and presenting, their learning to speak in a group. Women gained confidence, gained a voice in the weekly group sessions, as a result of the social space, the FFS team spirit and solidarity that was provided in the meetings. This ‘social capital route’ of empowerment (Bartlett, 2005), is rather different from the ‘human capital’ route that men follow in empowerment in Nepal. In this thesis I contend that FFS is ‘rendering technical’ (Li, 2007) a complex social, cultural, economic and political process of rural development by defining empowerment as a non-political tool, an asset that FFS participants can be taught, that they can learn to ‘own’. Consequently, gender differentiation, experiences of women being different from men and institutional structures that surround the poor and disempowered Dalit farmers, keeping them in poverty and powerless, were not addressed. I consider empowerment as a process in which people strengthen their own power and capacities, and improve their position in society. Empowerment is a process in which several factors but also actors play a role. The actors within the FFS project but also external actors like the state, the Maoist movement, NGOs, and individual forces are involved. They all work together in changing constellations, in time and place. An actor-oriented and contextual analysis of FFS, of how the actors implement FFS in the cultural, historical and political environment of Nepal at the turn of the century creates an understanding of state-society relations and governance issues. It provides an insight in decision-making processes and the power dynamics influenced by socio-cultural factors. A closer look at FFS reveals how the state seeks to govern the farmers, and the extent to which government agencies offer the means of empowerment to farmers. It also reveals how certain social categories in society remained excluded from participation until recently, especially women and Dalit. In project documents and interviews farmers are usually depicted as passive citizens, who are poor and in need of knowledge and new technologies. Farmers, on the other hand, consider the state as responsible to look after their well-being to a large extent, as care takers. But it is a rather simplified view to consider the government or NGOs as the actors or care-takers who can decide on behalf of farmers as passive beneficiaries or oppressed citizens. In this thesis I have described how relations between state and civil actors are subject to complex power dynamics. Power is woven into social relations at different levels (Wolf, 1999) starting from individual potency, to group interaction and structural or institutional levels. The implementation of FFS took place in the context of a dynamic environment where major political and socio-economic changes took place. The contribution of FFS to the development of Nepal cannot be studied without reference to history and the wider social, political-economic conditions during the last decade. The year 1997 when the Farmer Field Schools were introduced in Nepal was also the time that the Maoists officially declared their revolution. When data were collected in 2002 as part of a mid-term evaluation for FAO and the donor AUSAID there was a revolution going on and there were heavy fights between Maoists, the army and civilians. Many men had fled their homes to escape the violence and to resist being taken by either the government or the Maoists army. In 2001 King Birendra and a large part of his Royal family were murdered and the political scene was in turmoil. Migration for jobs abroad was at a rise and female-headed households in rural villages had increased (Gartaula, 2011). In 2009 during the last series of interviews, Nepal was in a flux again; a federal government had been elected, the Maoists had become part of the government, but disputes remained. The interim constitution was developed with much attention on social exclusion of marginalized groups. These changing political-economic conditions of rural transformation have resulted in an increased awareness of ethnic diversity, rights claims by historically marginalised groups, and interventions to divert caste discrimination in the rural areas where FFS has been conducted. Despite these changes FFS project staff keep focused on a technical, non-political approach and continue to speak about yield increase, opening market linkages, cash crop opportunities, as if these local dynamics do not matter.

The main goal of my research was to analyze how the desire to affect and be affected by foreign signs relates to the commoditization of food products offered in Mexican restaurants in Amsterdam, Madrid and San Francisco. I conceive restaurants as foodscapes. Iargue that actors’ attachments to passionate networks enable their enactment. Foodscapes areintersemiotic translations of landscapes. In these translations, the commoditization of food has been based on its relationships with idealized entities from the Mexican and U.S. landscapes, giving rise to Tex‐Mex, Cal‐Mex, Mex‐Mex, Regional‐Mex and “Real”‐ Mex restaurants. The resulting foodscapes have the power to seduce consumers either by fixing their beliefs for certain foods or contaminating new passions. My approach is an innovative way to analyze the differentiation of markets in an economy that bases its reproduction in the contamination of desires and passions.

Shrimp aquaculture and fishery, the two important economic sectors in Vietnam, have been promoted by the government to reduce poverty, provide job opportunities, and to increase exports to support economic development. However, this expansion of fishery and aquaculture has also had negative effects. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of mangrove forest have been replaced by shrimp ponds and, as a result, have brought ecological risks like water pollution, causing shrimp disease outbreaks. These consequences have negatively affected the sustainability of the livelihoods of millions of coastal people who are dependent on shrimp aquaculture, mangrove forests and fishing. As a part of the RESCOPAR program of “Rebuilding resilience in coastal populations and aquatic resources” of Wageningen University (INREF), this study was conducted across four shrimp farming systems and one fishery system in two provinces of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam with a focus the different livelihoods.. The study investigates the pathways and decision-making of shrimp farmers and fishers to cope with risks and uncertainties to sustain livelihoods and enhance socio-ecological resilience. Results show that farmers in these systems exhibit remarkable social and economic resilience at household level under declining ecological conditions, particularly mangrove decline, shrimp diseases, market price fluctuations, and misguided government policies and programs. They cope with these vulnerabilities through a wide range of livelihood pathways and strategies including intensification, diversification, migration, specification, and collaboration. The pathways they decide upon at one stage do not only influence the livelihood activities in a particular environment, but they also nurture the process of learning to adapt to the changes, to self-organize and manage their lives for long-term resilience building. This study used four indicators as proxies of social resilience: economic stability, resource protection, knowledge building and the creation of relationships.. Between the two improved extensive shrimp farming systems, the extensive mangrove-shrimp system showed more social resilience and was less risky. Moreover, the system was more resilient ecologically, as it did not put environmental pressure on the mangrove forest It needed to conserve part of the mangrove forest that would serve as a nursery ground for marine shrimp and fish species. Between the two intensive farming systems, the intensive farming system where farmers chose to cluster their ponds appeared to have greater social resilience. Farmers in this system were better off, experienced a higher net return/cost ratio, and fewer farms failed due to shrimp diseases. They could also apply to advanced bio-farming technology for shrimp farming. They would build relationships with external agencies for support and they were more active, flexible, and professional in their adaptation. They were able to direct and shape the changes in order to acquire a stronger legal and equity position, thus increasing their social resilience. Small-scale fishery was less socially and ecologically resilient, so fishers diversified their gear and boats to fish more intensively to secure livelihoods and reduce vulnerability. However, this caused near- shore resource decline and ecological disturbance, and violated fishery regulations. The Vietnamese Government has established a political and institutional system to support aquaculture and fishery. However, the implementation of the current policies and institutions in the field of aquaculture and fisheries is still weak and inadequate. The institutional interventions, firstly, need to focus on balancing between household economic improvement and natural resources conservation. It is not enough to emphasize only the government’s capacities of control and enforcement to make farmers and fishers comply with the regulations for the conservation of the resources without also emphasizing the need to promote socio- economic improvement at household level. The solution could be to enhance non-farm or non- fishing livelihood diversification, improve pond farming and fishing technologies and to promote farmers collaboration and shrimp certification. Finally, the most important is to devolve the responsibilities and rights for the management of the mangrove forests and the coastal inshore resources to local individual farmers and communities.

This work deals with human sexuality in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, based on the practices performed by the actors in their everyday lives. Here sexuality is not conceived of as a spontaneous or autonomous phenomenon, nor as something that is pre-existing or established, but as the result of complex practices that go beyond the human and the sexual, which are assembled by a set of actors; that is to say, by networks. The argument is based on the construction of case studies which account for the production of complexities in human sexuality in Tehuantepec. This community was selected because of the notoriety of its women, That belong to the Zapotec ethnic group, often considered to be dominant in the Isthmus. The purpose of the research was to look beyond the superficial appearance of the Isthmus and its people and to explore in depth the critical moments, achievements and concerns of those who contribute to the enactment of a distinct region and its society. No claim is made, then, to deprive generalizations of their veracity. Instead of focusing on particularities the work concentrates on specificities, or rather, the possible connections that are produced in the interactions between humans and the various elements by which they are surrounded. The study considers five themes commonly associated with human sexuality: beauty, gendered spatiality, sexual life, motherhood and intimate violence in Tehuantepec had been chosen as axis which articulate the practices and discourses of local actors. Through them, it is argued that sexuality does not form part of something abstract but something that is produced by the interactions that take place on daily life. Methodologically and conceptually, feminism (above all in its post-structuralism guise), the Actor Oriented Approach, and Actor Network Theory all supported this task. On certain occasions, these schools of thought allowed the identification of deterministic statements and on others the recognition of the binary oppositions or dualisms upon which many of the general perspectives, stereotypes and common positions related to the Isthmus are erected. However, it was Actor Network Theory which led me to non-conventional forms of approaching and understanding the complexity of the human and the social’. The introduction, or chapter one, presents the historical, economic and cultural processes, which often characterize the region. It becomes clear just how easy it is to fall prey to stereotyped images, as well as the importance of being able to see behind the foreground in order to observe the details, or the specific nature of these traditional landscapes. The second chapter provides the theoretical and methodological reflection which supports the recognition of the importance of the diverse, the voice of the actors and their connectivity with their surroundings. The chapter arrives at the assembly of associations and the production of complexities in which concepts such as networks, bodies and enactments become keys to the recognition of the assemblages related to human sexuality. The third chapter introduces the notion of ‘enacting beauty’ in order to suggest that the different Isthmus beauties are produced through a series of dynamic, heterogeneous, multiple and hybrid associations. It also proposes the consideration of Isthmus beauty as something that is malleable and transformable. The fourth chapter covers the polemical association of spatiality and gender. Here if a link between spatiality and gender is recognized, it is nonetheless considered unstable, impure and fluid, in correspondence with the dynamics that the actors themselves succeed in assembling in their daily lives. Hence, it is suggested that both categories repeatedly crosscut, interweave and overlap; something which is captured by the term ‘entangled boundaries’. The fifth chapter focuses on some of the possible connections between the Isthmus customs and the practices of the local actors with respect to sexual life. ‘Sexual bodies’ captures these multiple and dynamic connections where the biological, ethnic, cultural and social are neither omnipresent nor exclusive when human sexual life is enacted and re-enacted in Tehuantepec. The sixth chapter questions the tendency to associate motherhood with the woman, alongside another series of diverse determinisms. The cases explored illustrate how motherhood is a battlefield, in the sense that the actors must remain in constant action, often facing struggles in order to assemble, provide continuity or disconnect from maternal networks. It also touches on additional connections in which motherhood forms part of wider and complex networks. The seventh chapter considers another of the practices associated with human sexuality that actors confront in their everyday life in Tehuantepec: intimate violence. Here the notion of ‘counteracting intimate violence’ argues for a broader conception of this topic as a complex network. It also highlights actors’ actions in order to make clear that they are not passive victims but dynamic actors who enact other networks which counteract chains of intimate violence. The eighth chapter, or conclusion, covers the trajectory followed throughout the course of this research in order to make the production of complexities associated with human sexuality visible. It recognizes the necessary shift in reference points in order to move away from a focus on commonplaces. It also identifies human sexuality as a set of practices which can, in turn, be related to different themes and links, or, in other words, as the result of associations.

This PhD thesis is a testimony of how Tzeltal peasants make milpa in the Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico. It describes how they alternate maize cultivation practices with other activities in their lives through different juggling performances. These performances show how these indigenous peasants consider maize cultivation practices not only as agronomic activities but also as political, social and cultural actions. Therefore slash-and-mulch becomes a variant of land preparation and a response to a landownership conflict. Sowing becomes a negotiation with the environmental, technological and social circumstances of living in this tropical rainy forest. Weeding and bending are control practices and postponing/delegating them become peasant strategies to cope with the lack of basic services. Finally, harvesting is cutting the cobs from plants and strengthening the reasons and meanings to continue cultivating maize. These performances show how in the making of the milpa, Tzeltal peasants are making their lives.

This thesis explores the shift from ownership to partnership policy in Dutch development aid. It is an ethnography based on participant observation during several periods between 2001 and 2006 in the Ministry’s headquarters in The Hague and the Dutch embassy in developing country Z. The aim of this research is neither to criticize nor to defend development aid. It does not address the issue of whether partnership policy is effective or if the implementation of this policy is efficient. Instead, this thesis explores policy practices to answer the question of how practitioners try to realize development through aid. It is argued that the current writings conceive development aid as a rational, instrumental policy process and ignores the practices of aid practitioners and, therefore, do not help us understand policy processes. Hence, this thesis develops a theoretical framework that pays attention to aid practitioners’ work and tries to understand how they make sense of development aid. This thesis points out that policy studies should pay attention to dreams of development, which are imaginary orders of an ideal world in which life is good. It shows that ownership and partnership policies express different dreams of development. Then, it shows how aid practitioners try to realize dreams of development through aid and, consequently, how development aid is shaped by different dreams of development. The theoretical framework developed in this thesis conceives policy processes as involving translation and purification practices. Translation is the mobilization and tying together of people, organizations, things, and interests. Purification is the keeping apart of people, organizations, and things because it is believed that they have fundamentally different interests. Hence, this thesis follows the trajectory of partnership from being a policy notion to becoming a public-private partnership project (PPP-project) with the Dutch pharmaceutical company in country Z. In this trajectory the focus is on the different dreams of development that are expressed in and aspired through partnership and the translation and purification processes that make possible or hamper the travelling of partnership. This study of partnership policy combines both the approach of ‘‘studying through”, by following the policy of partnership through time and space, and of ‘‘studying up”, by exploring the aid practices of ministerial officials as a professional elite. The studying of an elite has implications for the methodology of the study. To carry out the research, I had to sign a statement of confidentiality that says no state secrets can be made public. Therefore, this thesis does not reveal any material that is marked as classified in the ministry, but it does write about practices in the aid bureaucracy that are considered by many aid practitioners as public secrets, that is what is generally known about the practices of the state but cannot be articulated in official documents. This thesis contends that writing about the practices of the aid bureaucracy that are part of the state can make a valuable contribution to the debate on development aid. It can explain what keeps the aid bureaucracy together despite the fact that it is not a homogeneous, coherent entity and explicate what makes up development if it isn’t a well-defined, singular goal. The passages quoted in this thesis are both from official and unofficial documents and they also include e-mails between officials in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The documents and e-mails on the PPP-project were filed in the official archives of the PPP-project in the Dutch Embassy in country Z. These e-mail exchanges are used to show how projects like the PPP are discussed and how practices of translation and purification are negotiated, resisted, and justified in the Ministry. For reasons of confidentiality, all people have been given fictional names except for the Dutch ministers for Development Cooperation. Furthermore, to protect the embassy staff, this thesis talks about the country where the PPP-project should be realized as country Z. Likewise, the Dutch pharmaceutical company is referred to as Pharmaco. The organization of the book is as follows: Chapter 1 describes the academic debate on partnership in development aid. It points out the limitations of the dominant analyses for our understanding of policy processes in development aid and provides a theoretical framework that can address these issues. Chapter 2 shows that studies of development aid should pay more attention to the dreams, ideals, values, fears, and beliefs that the aid policies express. Subsequently, this chapter explores the dreams of development of the three Dutch Ministers for Development Cooperation, Jan Pronk, Eveline Herfkens, and Agnes van Ardenne, over the period of 1989 until 2005. These dreams of development can be understood from the descriptions of the key events and important encounters in each minister’s life. The dreams of development can be traced in their policies; they are expressed in the symbolic language of ownership and partnership. Pronk used the concept of ownership to express a dream that takes into account power relations, while Van Ardenne’s concept of partnership expresses a dream that aims to unite people. Then, whereas Pronk and Herfkens communicate their dream of development in a technical-scientific way, Van Ardenne uses a personal and political way of communicating her dream of development. Because officials who have been trained in academia and worked for many years under Pronk and Herfkens, they have believe that partnership is a buzzword. Chapter 3 explores the assembling of a public-private partnership project (PPP-project) with the Dutch pharmaceutical company Pharmaco. It explains how in this project various actors with different dreams of development and aspirations in life are tied together in the PPP-project. The chapter describes how a project proposal designed to realize the dream of making contraceptives available and affordable worldwide is translated and transformed by a ministerial official to fit Minister Van Ardenne’s dream of development. It is explained why the person who designed that initial project, feels that his project has been ‘‘hijacked” by the Dutch ministry and why he, nonetheless, joins the project when Pharmaco invites him. Chapter 4 analyzes the transportation of the PPP-project from the headquarters in The Hague to country Z. It explores how an assessment team of representatives of the ministerial headquarters in The Hague and of Pharmaco select a country for the realization of the PPP-project. Then, it explains that the choice for country Z is based on where support for the project is thought to be highest and opposition minimal. It is shown that the selection process goes together with the contextualization of the PPP-project. Thus, this chapter shows that a project is not implemented in a context. Rather, a context is created around a project. Then, transportation implies the transformation of both the project and the context of a project. Chapter 5 shows how ministerial officials in the headquarters in The Hague and in the Dutch embassy in country Z discuss the PPP-project. The officials negotiate whether or not this PPP is a development project and how it can be transformed into one. Thus, they debate the sense or nonsense of the translations made by a ministerial official in the headquarters and argue if and how the PPP-project should be purified from Pharmaco’s interest in profit. We see in this that besides dreams of development, career aspirations, concerns for reputation, and ideas of what it means to be a good ministerial official also play a role in the negotiation on translation and purification of the PPP-project. Chapter 6 presents the main findings of this research and their theoretical implications. It concludes that the dividing policy processes into policy making and policy implementation is a theoretical misunderstanding as this thesis shows that policy processes consists of translation and purification practices, Yet, this model of policy making versus implementation is also a used as an argument by officials to legitimize particular translations and decline other interpretations. Furthermore, this thesis claims that only when we take dreams of development seriously, we can find a way out of the current cynicism in development aid.

This study examines the relationship between male labour out-migration and the process of sociocultural transformation in the places of origin. Taking an example from Nepal, it shows that male labour out-migration has increased women’s participation in agriculture, more significantly so in those cases where the left-behind women are de-facto household heads than in cases where they live with in-laws. Similarly, in the case of de-facto female heads of households, women’s role in agricultural decision-making has increased. Women, who in the absence of their husbands live with their in-laws, continue to remain under patriarchal control, not by their husbands but by their father-in-law and elder brothers-in-law. Women who are de-facto heads of the households can exercise more autonomy in decision-making and have more control over their own mobility. Hence, the effects of male out-migration on women’s participation in agricultural work and decision-making are also contingent upon the domestic arrangement in which they find themselves.

This thesis studies collective action and social change in indigenous rural organisations (IRO) in the Bolivian Andes. I focus on the effects and importance that these organisations have in the historical process of regional development as social spaces that encapsulate different projects of social, political and economic modernity. I reconstruct the practices and situations that turn rural indigenous organisations into significant spaces in which individuals and groups of people put into practice their life projects and their aspirations of modernity. The main question of this thesis is: what are indigenous rural organisations in the Bolivian Andes and what are their contributions to regional development? To answer this question, I argue that we need to leave aside social constructivism and rational action present in current studies of indigenous rural organisations in the Andes that use the concept social capital. These organisations are not essences, totalities, nor are they are stable. Also, they are a more complex process than mere rational and technocratic action. IRO are contextual and situational spaces of social life that contain significant elements or objects, which are material and immaterial. These spaces are heterogeneities of humans and objects united by shared significant objects that are emergent, original and intensive. In this sense this organisations represent meshworks that interweave the changeable relationships between entities (humans and objects) and practices, and encompass the possibility of social change. These meshworks have different dimensions (economical, social, cultural, political). In each one of those, the flow of practices, interactions and experiences of individuals and groups of individuals simultaneously unify and break meaning, identity, affect, materiality and also regulation. I study three kindsof indigenous rural organisations fromthe Perisalar (the Bolivian Southern highlands): communities which are based on kinship relationships, ayllus which are ethnic groups and quinoa producer organisations. Communities are social spaces that contain significant elements of modernity, such as the desire for access to State education and to enjoy citizens’ rights, the wish for agricultural machinery and to produce for the global market, the diversity of livelihoods and the affirmation of racial and class identity. Ayllus are made by community assemblages and many comunarios belong to quinoa Producer Organisations. In this sense ayllus and producer organisations are important social spaces as they contain significant elements present in the communities. I present the social life of IRO starting from the intersection of local development practices and experiences with other social spaces: the market, migratory destinations, education, social movements and institutional intervention. In order to better understand the effects of social change and IRO, I chose a long-term historical vision, considering the emerging effects of the intersection of local and external practices and experiences, before and during the quinoa commoditisation process. The study concludes that IRO in the Bolivian Andes, are meshworks made by vibrant humans and objects with social vitality and intensity. They have the capacity to actualise significant elements of an economic, social, cultural and political character, in interaction with the Nation-State and the global market. These organisations increase through global market the vibrant character of significant elements such as quinoa, and by their recognition by the State they provide semi-autonomy to their members, and a space to make recognised their citizenship and their trade union, racial and class identities, and to locally redesign the State. Memory, identity and affect reveal the potential of IRO in repositioning past reminiscences and ancestral properties, and at the same time claim for a future that does not contain the same substance of that which is “the Andean”, “the Aymara” or “the Quechua”, rather incorporates new elements that lead to multiple “(neo)Andeans”, “(neo)Aymaras” and “(neo)Quechuas” forms, present in each and every one of the partial connections. These organisations contain a variety of symbols, discourses and practices that correspond to heterogeneous knowledge and forms of socialisation and thinking of modernity that sometimes result in tension, fissure and conflict without however being fragmented. That is why structuralism, institutionalism and rationalism partially explain the agency in ambiguous and eclectic social spacessuch areIRO, whose limitsare constantly redefined by the flow of experience of its members. Development through these organisations is a social process, experiential and unpredictable, reflexive and corporeal, cognitive and performative, that contains both cohesion and tear. For understanding IRO contribution to rural development we must describe the relational and the imaginative in the wishes and processes of social change and regional developmentand grasp the relevance of its individual members’ experiences and practices in the creation of social ties. Methodologically this leads us to dissolve analytical categories and to follow and observe individuals past and present practices and their intersections with other individuals, groups, structures and significant objects. Our study underlines the significance of human-object relation as a starting point for generating new analytical frameworks in indigenous Andean organizations.

Planners of development interventions often assume that natural resource use and management problems can be addressed by applying a single model for different village communities. This perspective fails to recognize the fact that villagers are not passive recipients of interventions, but that they are actively engaged in the shaping and adaptation of external law, rules, and regulations to fit locality-specific situations. Also, most institutional studies have a sectoral approach focusing on one type of natural resources only and failing to consider the mutual dependency of different resources and their users in multiple resource systems. In order to address these issues and develop a better understanding of local dynamics and differences through time and place, we need a study that recognizes the multiple resource systems and the critical role of human agency in solving resource use problems. This PhD research focuses on the use and management of water and forest as integrated resource systems to assess the process of institutional bricolage as a result of external interventions and modernization. The study includes six cases of micro spring forests on Ukerewe main Island in Lake Victoria, Tanzania, and describes the role of resource users in negotiating, transforming and adapting the newly introduced institutions to the locally existing institutional frames. Villagers usually see the management of water sources as interrelated with the management of the micro spring forest vegetation. The study demonstrates to what extend and how changes in the institutional organisation for the use and management of water sources affect the forest vegetation. Modern resource governance is usually carried out along sector lines. Results from these cases clearly underscore the need to regard water sources and forest vegetation as integrated resource systems, and to organise structural interventions accordingly, which is along inter-sector or inter-departmental lines of intervention.

This thesis explores a sociological approach towards understanding the contemporary process by which certain territorial relations are grouped under the notion of region. The research adopts an ethnographic perspective to reconstruct the social life of regions by focusing not only on the processes and activities that have transformed territorial units into objects of intervention, but also on the practices and sites that have turned regions into meaningful fields of action through which people carry out their life projects. This argument is sustained through research findings that recorded the spread of salmon farming in the Patagonian Region of Aysén in southern Chile. Salmon farming expanded rapidly due to the increasing importance of trade networks that profited from the global demand of food commodities and the centrality given to regions as units of coordination between State agencies, trade networks, national or foreign capital and local livelihoods. The thesis shows how the practices and sites related to the expansion of salmon farming challenge the social organization and territorial functions attributed to the contemporary Region of Aysén. It argues that the regionalization of certain development processes have facilitated the emergence of new activities producing globally demanded commodities. The thesis critically examines the wide scope of social practices that over time have contributed to create regional entities and transform them into techno-political objects of intervention. This process went together with academic and managerial trends in which the main object of development shifted to regional modes of economic functionality and territorial coordination of actors. Since the 1980s, this trend that I have called the regionalization of development has become more relevant by the rising flows of global commodities, the new geographies of food production and consumption and new governmental patterns of territorial allocation of resources. The politics of regional development proposes a path to globalization based on the spatial organization of activities and the selective support of actors geared towards the production of successful exportable commodities. Despite the popularity of regional development among experts, this thesis argues that the direction and hegemony of territorial approaches are increasingly modulated through the multiplicity of social groups and organizations that are contesting, subverting or adapting some of its effects until they are transformed in meaningful parts of people’s life-worlds. In this sense, the thesis shows that the form and the extent to which salmon farming relates to a politics of regional development is, indeed, controversial. In a techno-political approach to regional development actors do not struggle over one specific resource, but over a set of territorially based interventions, objects and projects that reflect differences in values, meanings and life-worlds. To understand this process differently, this thesis introduces the concept of a regional field of action in order to show a more complex and diverse landscape of activities, projects and livelihoods that are also contributing to make a region the home of settlers and workers. This living region unfolds daily within, around and outside the salmon farming industry but cannot be reduced to it. Salmon farming is already a part of the activities and strategies of local people but, contrary to the self-sufficiency of hegemonic projects, they manifest the right of seeing and imagining things differently and, accordingly, of granting or refusing the right to others to intervene in certain domains of their everyday life. This book concludes that the existence of export-based activities and trade networks in Chile is partly made possible by the creation of a regional field of action that facilitates the re-allocation of resources and the mobilization of people, capital and materials. The concept of regional field of action allows us to unite, from a practice-oriented perspective, all the outcomes that region-making processes generate independently if they are created by rulers, entrepreneurs, workers or local people. Regional fields of action become an approach to study processes of development in a sociological sense by focusing on the effects that the formation of regions has for people’s organization of everyday life and the constitution of meaningful life projects. In sum, this thesis explores how different social groups create, dwell in, and transform a region. The narrative does not reduce the experience of constructing a region to vertical and hierarchical techno-political perspectives. It shows a multiplicity of sites that express local forms of regaining, contesting or adapting those regional fields and transforming them into places and relations that are meaningful for people’s life-worlds. I believe this book broadens the perspective of regional development towards locally constructed forms of change that can contribute to make visible and build up new livelihood opportunities and to re-think a more inclusive perspective that values the experience of regional dwellers.