While Fair Trade has promoted premiums for social development for participating producers and strengthened the institutional capacities of the cooperatives involved, its ability to enhance significantly the working conditions of hired coffee laborers remains limited.

Ⅲ This article takes a critical look at the various approaches representing local knowledge as a scapegoat for underdevelopment or as a panacea for sustainability, these two representations characterizing the conventional environment-development discourse. The static oppositions of local versus universal knowledge are challenged by establishing more diversified models to analyse the relationships of heterogeneous knowledges. The study emphasizes the complex articulation of knowledge repertoires by drawing on an ethnographic case study among migrant peasants in southeastern Nicaragua. Knowledge production is seen as a process of social negotiation involving multiple actors and complex power relations. The article underlines the issue of situated knowledges as one of the major challenges in developing anthropology as an approach that subjects fixed dichotomies between subject and object, fact and value, and the rational and the practical, to critical reconstruction.

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We systematically reviewed current climate change literature in order to examine how multiple processes that affect human vulnerability have been studied. Of the 125 reviewed articles, 79 % were published after 2009. There are numerous concepts that point out to stressors other than climate change that were used in reviewed studies. These different concepts were used interchangeably and they illustrate processes that act on different scales. Most widely used concepts included non-climatic (40% of the articles), multiple stressors (38%) and other factors (37%). About 75% of the studies either acknowledged or carefully analyzed the social and environmental context in which vulnerability is experienced. One third of the studies recognized climate change related stressors as the most important, one third argued that stressors other than climate are more important and the rest of the studies did not analyze the relative importance of the different processes. Interactions between different stressors were mentioned in 76% and analyzed explicitly in 28% of the articles. Our review shows that there are studies that analyze the social context of vulnerability within climate change related literature and this literature is rapidly expanding. Reviewed studies point out that there are multiple interacting stressors, whose interlinkages need to be carefully analyzed and targeted by policies, which integrate adaptation to climate change and other stressors. In conclusion, we suggest that future studies should include analytical frameworks that reflect dissimilarities between different types of stressors, methodological triangulation to identify key stressors and analysis of interactions between multiple stressors across different scales.

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