4. Drivers of rural livelihood decisions

Question 1

A positive take on smallholders as flexible and adaptive farmers.
E.g. terracing in mountains is highly suited to the production system and independently invented where needed
Family unit enables transmission of knowledge and developing a work ethic
Links to Boserup’s innovation theory
Also, smallholders have always been linked to external economic institutions

Answer 1

Netting (1993)

Question 2

HUGE SEMINAL TEXT ESTABLISHING PE.
Not necessarily Marxist but concerned with material structures (not so much historical)
Proposed the chain of explanation linking rural livelihood decisions to a broader set of factors
Co-production: households can change their landscapes
Critiqued for treating actors as pre-given socio-spatial black boxes, always seeing causation as top-down and potentially leading to capitalocentrism and a view from nowhere

Answer 2

Blaikie & Brookfields (1984, 1987)

Question 3

A review of more sophisticated PE that focuses on gender, ethnicity, knoweldge, identity etc
PE is characterised by a commitment to contributing, not just analysing, issues of social and envtl justice
It is increasingly moving away from a detached voice with academics actively involving themselves in social movements

Answer 3

Rocheleau (2008)

Question 4

An early intervention into portrayals of swidden as backwards.
Outlines the process of swidden.
The oldest agricultural system on the planet, taking many forms and under a wide range of conditions
Key social element of moral economy and reciprocity with the environment
Avoids problems with soil fertility, pests and plant disease

Answer 4

Mortimore (1998)

Question 5

A contemporary overview of how swidden is changing in SE Asia.
Farmers are responding to agricultural developments which drive further change
At the household level, swidden is both being abandoned and increasingly adopted; cash crops are being grown; household labour is being deployed towards non-rural income
At the community level, institutions are being developed to manage the land and either resist or participate in govt programmes
Swidden still provides an important buffer e.g. when market fluctuations mean that cash crops are less profitable than expected

Answer 5

Cramb et al (2009)

Question 6

Tandroy migrants from s Madgascar cutting down forest to sell cash crops for cattle as status - cultural consideration of swidden unaddressed by conservation policy. Realities of diverging local views on nature that don’t translate

Answer 6

Reau, 2012

Question 7

Govt attempts in Madagascar to end swidden have failed because of ignoring cultural values
No farmers interviewed could explain what they would do if forced to halt tavy - linked to their identity

Answer 7

Hume (2006)

Question 8

Burning is cultural and political as a form of protest, resistance and resource management
Fire has always been used as a form of resistance, since pre-colonial times
It was in fact criminalised from the C18 onwards when royalty saw fire as a threat to valuable timber supplied but local officials to today often turn a blind eye

Answer 8

Kull (2002, 2004)

Question 9

Scientific overview of swidden. It is capable of maintaining forest cover and plant diversity as long as fallow periods are long enough to allow for regeneration, and fields are protected from cattle browsing.
Swidden cultivators have vast ecological knowledge of fallow dynamics.
Swidden has been practiced for more than a thousand years in mainland SE Asia. It is a rational economic choice, minimising risk, using minimal labour and 0 inputs
Population growth and policy changes exert increasing pressure. Intensive cash cropping has shorter fallow periods and is depleting the soil
Cite this when explaining how swidden works.

Answer 9

Wangpakapattanawong (2001)

Question 10

Illicit crops in the frontier margins of Peru case study.
Coca crop cultivation has progressively occurred deeper into the Amazon rainforest
Frontier is not empty but actively produced and embedded into wider capital processes
Swidden - Ashaninka communities combine this with the sale of their labour and small-scale coca production to earn money
Coca plots are small, enough to earn income but not so big that they would need to hire another labourer - this is also cultural as they don’t believe in using up land for using’s sake
Farmers integrate into economies but find their own ways of understanding this

Answer 10

Paredes & Pastor (2023)

Question 11

Feminist theory in PE emerging in the 1990s. Gender is crucial and so is intersectionality. Identities are constituted through changing environmental practices - explains why denial of women’s access to resources is maintained over space and time

Answer 11

Sunberg (2016); Elmhirst (2015)

Question 12

Early feminist PE overview calling it a ‘promising sub-field’

Answer 12

Elmhirst (2011)

Question 13

FPE still relegated to the margins.
PE largely produced within, and remains bound to, colonial spaces of knowledge production and consumption.
Still debate over whether FPE is really an epistemic community.

Answer 13

Sultana (2020)

Question 14

Landmark text establishing FPE, inviting PE to include gendered relations and intra-household dynamics.

Answer 14

Rocheleau et al (2013 [1996])

Question 15

An overview of landscape change in central Menabe, Madagascar.
* Maize as subject to cash crop booms over time
* Dominant narrative attributes deforestation to poverty driven subsistence agriculture
* However, landscape is also shaped by social/political/economic factors
* Households have changed land use decisions according to crop prices and state’s economic policies
* So we need to distinguish between land use and underlying drivers

Answer 15

Scales (2011)

Links to Hume (2006); Reau (2002) and Scales (2014)

Question 16

More detail about the underlying drivers of forest clearance agriculture from the colonial era through to independence.
Overall, swidden’s rise and fall responds to political/economic conditions.
It is not just practiced by the poor - elites also used it for rapid wealth accumulation.
Swidden is deeply cultural, embedded in ‘fady’, a set of taboos

Answer 16

Scales (2014)

Question 17

Case study: Mangrove oyster harvesting in the Gambia.

Answer 17

Lau & Scales (2016)

Question 18

Case study: material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal. Relational production of space and identity - the embodied performance of social identities (gender, class) is made material through ecological actions such as forest harvesting, food preparation and consumption.
When a woman fell ill and was no longer able to carry out ‘women’s’ agricultural tasks, such as the suffering engendered by carrying firewood, she was seen as less of a woman

Answer 18

Nightingale (2011)

Question 19

Case study: FPE of agrarian technologies.
* Digital technology increasingly common farms.
* Gap in FPE literature.
* Green Way: an app in Myanmar where users can find info about agricultural management and ask questions, framed as vehicles for modernisation that will turn impoverished rural residents into modern customers
* However, because the phone is a collective household good in the countryside, young men were often put in charge of apps, reproducing pre-existing gender roles
* Digital technology as an example of intra-household inequalities based on gender/class

Answer 19

Nelson et al (2024)

Question 20

Case study: FPE of sorghum & finger millet in N Malawi.
Millet is no longer grown because men have migrated and there is a shortage of male labour to cut the trees.
Women instead focusing on tobacco.

Answer 20

Kerr (2014)

Question 21

Women carrying wood in Burkina Faso.

Women perceive their identities through firewood collection, which provides useful income.
However, state regulations for carbon forestry mean there are new restrictions on what can be collected - only deadwood, not firewood.
The availability of these trees is falling annually, so women are cutting greenwood even though it is against the rules, to meet their household responsiblities - yet interventions assume that women need to be educated.
The adaption of ecological practices is further reinforcing gender dynamics and leading to envtl degradation.

Answer 21

Friman (2024)

Question 22

Case study: hybrid knowledges, Folk Ecology Initative, Kenya.
* A project based on ‘mother-baby’ trials of new crops/techniques
* Researchers in a central lab produced a mother, ‘ideal’ crop rotation model involving intensive cropping of Mucuna, an inedible legume
* Instead, farmers improvised on the model, intercropping with soya beans and refusing to use fertilisers
* Calculated trade-off: it was unacceptable to grow an inedible crop; Mucuna instead used to smother persistent weeds on otherwise unusable land
* So farmers are not resistant to change;
* Scientific and traditional knowledge hybridise in the field (ANT);
* Farmers have agency to disrupt ideal models developed in labs;
* We can expect farmers to appropriate new technologies in innovative ways.

Answer 22

Ramisch (2011)

Links to Wats & Scales on ANT (2015) and parallels with farmers using GMs for their own ends (Herring, 2007; Scoones & Thompson, 2011)