Mobilizing common biocultural heritage for the socioeconomic inclusion of small farmers: panarchy of two case studies on quinoa in Chile and Bolivia

Abstract

Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. To identify the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective, an integrative conceptual framework is needed. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both cases, the "commoning" process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain recognition for their productions outside and thus reach social and economic inclusion. Despite the difference in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the priviledged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised.

Social adaptive responses to a harsh and unpredictable environment: insights from a pre-Hispanic andean society

“…Even though political centralization may have no archaeological signature (Blanton et al 1996), the lack of material signs of wealth accumulation in housing, storage capacity, and even in sepultures, either within villages or the whole Intersalar region, strongly suggests the lack of power concentration and hereditary transmission within elites. In the Intersalar, social leadership could have taken a more participatory form, as is still the case today in this region where communal functions are nonelective obligations assumed by each community household in turn on an annual basis (Winkel et al 2016(Winkel et al , 2020. This current participation in local governance is the necessary condition for the families to enjoy the usufruct of a specific part of the communal land.…”