Options to Support Sustainable Trajectories in a Rural Landscape: Drivers, Rural Processes, and Local Perceptions in a Colombian Coffee-Growing Region

Abstract

Trajectories of many rural landscapes in Latin America remain unsustainable. Options to support sustainable rural trajectories should be comprehensive and rooted in the interests of rural actors. We selected a municipality in a coffee-growing region in Colombia with an increasing urban–rural nexus to describe interactions between rural processes and their drivers while identifying and contextualising the perceptions of local actors on major constraints and opportunities for more inclusive and sustainable rural trajectories. We described these interactions by combining secondary data on main drivers, agricultural census data, and interviews with different local actors. Changes in population structure, volatility in coffee prices, in-/out-migration, deagrarianisation, and rurbanisation, among others, are reconfiguring the rural trajectories of the study area. Despite not being a major coffee region, farmers in the study area have developed different strategies, including intensification, diversification, replacement or abandonment of coffee production, and commercialisation. The perceptions of local actors and the multiplicity of agricultural households, food/land use systems, rural processes, and drivers described in this study suggest that more sustainable rural transitions need to be supported by inclusive, integrated, and transformative landscape planning approaches that align with local priorities. However, this transformation needs to be accompanied by changes at a systemic level that address the fundamental bottlenecks to real sustainability.

Las familias rurales en Colombia: discusiones en torno a las posturas familistas y no familistas

“…A pesar de lo anterior, las investigaciones desde ambas concepciones coinciden en que la ruralidad colombiana sigue siendo un contexto permeado por la desigualdad de género y la pobreza (Acevedo-Osorio & Martínez-Collazos, 2016;Parada, 2017;Valbuena et al, 2021).…”

“…Las anteriores consideraciones derivan del hecho de que la familia nuclear se ha diluido entre nuevas formas familiares caracterizadas principalmente por la diversidad (Román & Padrón, 2010). Las razones para ello son múltiples, entre las cuales se encuentran los avances médicos, que potenciaron la toma de decisiones femeninas respecto a cuándo y a cuántos hijos tener (Rodríguez, 2009), la inserción de las mujeres en los ámbitos educativo y laboral (Garrido & Chuliá, 2021), el desplazamiento de comunidades rurales a las urbes por la demanda industrial y el conflicto armado (Acevedo-Osorio & Martínez-Collazos, 2016;Arboleda-Muñoz et al, 2020;Bello, 2007;Salinas-Arango & Sanmartín-Gaviria, 2020;Valbuena et al, 2021) y el nacimiento de movimientos feministas (Flores & Tena, 2014).…”

Revealing the Governance Dynamics of the Coffee Chain in Colombia: A State-of-the-Art Review

“…Many studies of our selection are focused on establishing the effectiveness of these tools in ensuring sustainability from an ecological, social, and economic point of view [4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The results are contradictory.…”

What drives local communities to engage in climate change mitigation activities? Examining the rural–urban divide

“…The engagement of cities and counties in climate protection depends not only on their specific environmental and climate change‐related problems (Zeigermann et al, 2022). More importantly, their adaptive capacity is influenced by their socioeconomic and political context as well as the prevalent settlement structure (Abel, 2021; Schulze & Schoenefeld, 2022; Tobin, 2017; Valbuena et al, 2021; Wieliczko et al, 2021). The combination of the three factors provides local actors with more or fewer resources to tackle climate change mitigation (Böcher, 2016b; Bulkeley & Kern, 2006; Zeigermann & Böcher, 2022).…”