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Agroecological farming has long been described as more fulfilling than conventional agriculture, in terms of farmers’ labour and sense of autonomy. These assumptions must be reconsidered with adequate theoretical perspectives and with the empirical experience of recent
studies. This paper introduces the concept of channels of labour control in agriculture based on four initiatives in Senegalese agroecological horticulture. We build on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to elaborate a framework that articulates multiple channels of labour control with the type of capital or surplus values structuring power relations during labour processes. Although each of the four agroecological initiatives place a clear emphasis on improving farmers’ well-being, various top-down channels of labour control exist, maintaining most farmworkers as technical demonstrators rather than agents of transformation. These constraints stem from dependence on foreign funding, enforcement of uncoordinated organic standards, and farmers’ incorporation of cultural values through interplays of knowledge and symbolic power with initiative promotors. Pressure on agricultural workers is exacerbated by the context of the neo-liberalisation of Senegalese agriculture and increasingly difficult climatic conditions. A more holistic approach of agroecological initiatives is needed, including the institutionalisation of protected markets for their products, farmers’ inclusion in agroecosystem governance and inclusiveness in the co-production of agroecological knowledge, taking cultural patterns of local communities into account. Recent attempts to scale-up and politicise agroecology through farmers’ organisations, advocacy NGOs, and municipalities may offer new perspectives for a just agroecological transition in sub-Saharan Africa.

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In semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa, farming populations face harsh climatic
conditions but also very unequal and dynamic social processes that affect their resilience. This study addresses aspects of power and social justice related with the social-ecological system of the Niayes coastal region of Senegal, and examines the potential of agroecology to improve the adaptive capacity of smallholder farmers. We performed a knowledge co-production process with a local farmer union to identify the main social-ecological nexuses that matter for smallholder farmers, their dynamics and the influence of powerful actors and institutions on them. We also look at the potential actions of the farmer union under the banner of agroecology to transform these dynamics. We found that social-ecological dynamics involve reinforcing feedback loops that undermine
the resilience of smallholder farmers and that powerful actors such as
agribusinesses have a strong influence on these processes. Union actions
promoting agroecology have enhanced system thinking and related solutions, but observed social justice claims are very recent and have a limited scope. Our findings expand the notion of resilience grabbing, understood as the undermining of resilience through the loss of commons, to include systemic degradations due to direct and indirect actions of involved stakeholders. We also propose to expand the notion of resilience justice vertically, integrating procedural and recognition justice, and horizontally, integrating linked social-ecological issues. We conclude that agroecology can become a transformative bridge from resilience grabbing to resilience justice, but must be more sensitive to power relations, in particular around labour.

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Food insecurity remains a major concern for numerous rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa who rely on agriculture as their main source of livelihood. The assessment of the links between food security and  livelihoods is central for overcoming widespread food insecurity. However, assessments of food security remain challenging, due to its multi-dimensionality and the challenge of finding indicators that are comparable and applicable to various contexts. This study addresses this challenge by adapting a food security index (FSI) and use it to assess the livelihood drivers of food security. The index captures the multi-dimensionality of food security using the conventional food security indicators. The assessed indicators include measures of “food consumption score”, “household dietary diversity score”, “coping strategies index”, the “household food insecurity access scale” and “months of adequate household food provisioning”. The study covered 600 randomly selected households  representative of three ecological areas located closed to large scale agricultural investment of Mount Kenya region in Kenya. Linear regression was used to identify livelihood factors significantly influencing food security. Spearman’s rank-order correlation and student’s T-test demonstrated a strong and significant correlation between the composite FSI index and the each classical indicators of food security. Overall, 32% of the households were food secure and 68% were food insecure. Households’ ownership of productive hand tools, followed by off-farm income, consumption of own produced food, type of agro-ecological zone farm income and number of main crops infested by pests had a significant effect on household food security. All these factors, expect number of main crops infested by pests, were found to positively influence household food security. Household size, the size of accessible land and households’ members’ participation to large agricultural investments (as wage workers or sub-contract farmer) were not significantly  influencing food security. Households of the Mount Kenya region need alternative off-farm income sources combined with further support to improve sustainable agriculture management with appropriate hand tools.

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Flooding disasters in urban and suburban Dakar have been prioritised in various policy actions over the last two decades. Our research aimed to generate a historical overview of the progressive transformations of flood governance in Dakar. We found that flood governance policies have gone through three main phases, each representing a paradigm shift: the ‘emergency-relief’ phase, the ‘water-pull-out’ phase, and the ‘live-with-water’ phase. We argue that the second phase, which began in 2012, was supported by an engineering approach, where fresh water was literally pulled out using large-scale drainage infrastructure. This can be considered the ultimate stage of the conquest of urbanisation over nature. The resulting situation was a clear reduction in flood exposure, giving rise to smaller disasters. A new form of land competition also developed in the areas that were drained of water. These areas required the inclusion of local stakeholders into flood management processes. Although both the government and international partners have invested efforts in trying to coordinate flood management, the distribution of competences across several ministries and a lack of cooperation is provoking a “vertically divided authority”, leading to overlapping mandates and competition among state and non-state agencies. From 2014 onwards, what we called the ‘live-with-water’ phase supported the greater inclusion of local stakeholders and a change in articulation, which tried to consider water not as a threat but as a resource. The conclusion of this paper calls for the development of locally centred flood management bodies (including grass-root organisations and municipalities) as well as a more elaborate and complex articulation of the physical and institutional temporalities and scales of flood management.

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Neoclassical economic interpretations of Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which assume that participants weigh up costs and benefits, are making room for more complex analyses. However, there is still little evidence of how PES programmes interact with existing motivations to conserve, the extent to which funded conservation is additional, and the likely permanence of changes. We categorized the outcome of contracts aiming to reduce cattle grazing in riparian forest (n = 428) and deforestation (n = 912) by Bolivian farmers in terms of whether they were unsuitable, non-compliant, non-additional, or additional (the holy grail of PES programmes) and explored the relationship between farmers’ reported motivations and the extent to which the conservation funded was additional. Up to 39% of contracts to exclude cattle, and 14% to prevent deforestation appear to be additional. Where participation is motivated by the instrumental values of nature (such as provision of clean water) contracts to exclude cattle from riparian forest are more likely to represent additional conservation. We suggest that the programme is partly acting as what we term ‘payment for environmental self-service’; i.e. the external incentives enable changes in behaviour motivated by farmers’ perceptions of environmental benefits they receive from the management changes incentivized.

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In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically measure the impacts of the “Live with Water” (LWW) project on suburban households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and absorptive capacity—considered as structural dimensions—with the concept of transformative capacity—considered as a temporal reconfiguration of the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and 4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both improve projects’ results and their evaluations.

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This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.

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The aim of this paper is to explore possible links between forest cover change and characteristics of social-ecological systems at sub-national scale based mainly on census data. We assessed relationships between population density, poverty, ethnicity, accessibility and forest cover change during the last decade for four regions of Bolivia and the Lao PDR, combining a parcel-based with a cell-based approach. We found that accessibility is a key driver of forest cover change, yet it has the effect of intensifying other economic and policy-related underlying drivers, like colonization policies, cash crop demand, but also policies that lead to forest gain in one case. Poverty does not appear as a driver of deforestation, but the co-occurrence of poverty and forest loss driven by external investments appears critical in terms of social-ecological development. Ethnicity was found to be a moderate explanatory of forest cover change, but appears as a cluster of converging socio-economic characteristics related with settlement history and land resource access. The identification of such clusters can help ordering communities into a typology of social-ecological systems, and discussing their possible outcomes in light of a critical view on forest transition theory, as well as the relevance and predictive power of the variables assessed.

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Lands inhabited by indigenous peoples often have low population density but abundant natural resources. For those reasons, many actors have historically attempted to occupy those lands or use the resources in them. Increasing pressures over lands occupied by indigenous peoples have resulted in the awakening of indigenous peoples over their rights to land and resources generating many debates over indigenous peoples’ rights to land and self-governance. In this article, we provide a historical and geographical overview of territorial and governance issues among the Tsimane’, an indigenous group native to the Bolivian Amazon. We examine how the Bolivian state economic policies implemented during the 20th century affected the Tsimane’ ancestral lands, and how – over the late-20th century – the Bolivian state accommodated Tsimane’ claims to lands in between multiple interests. We show how national policies led to the reconfiguration of Tsimane’ territoriality and to a fragmented institutional representation. Current indigenous territories and indigenous political representation are an expression of conflictive policies that have involved multiple actors and their specific interests on indigenous lands and its resources.

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Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community‐level institutions regulate the trade‐offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio‐cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off‐farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market‐based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio‐ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation.

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