“Who Has the Power to Adapt?” Frameworks for Resilient Agriculture Must Contend With the Power Dynamics of Land Tenure

Calo, Adam

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2020.555270

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…To assess whether agricultural diversification reduces or enhances adaptive capacity in the case of farm labor, research must grapple with considerable agronomic and socioeconomic heterogeneity (section Dignifying Labor). The challenge of land access and tenure highlights the need for regionally contextualized understandings of who has the power to implement diversifying land management pathways (see Calo, 2020, in this special issue). Geographies outside the US, for example, illustrate a wide variety of socio-legal land tenure contexts, such as communal lands and sovereign sub-territories, that demand analysis beyond landlord-tenant dynamics (section Enhancing Land Access and Tenure).…”

Section: Knowledge Gaps and Future Research Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Petersen-Rockney

Baur

Guzman

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Humanity faces a triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global food insecurity. In response, increasing the general adaptive capacity of farming systems is essential. We identify two divergent strategies for building adaptive capacity. Simplifying processes seek to narrowly maximize production by shifting the basis of agricultural production toward centralized control of socially and ecologically homogenized systems. Diversifying processes cultivate social-ecological complexity in order to provide multiple ecosystem services, maintain management flexibility, and promote coordinated adaptation across levels. Through five primarily United States focused cases of distinct agricultural challenges—foodborne pathogens, drought, marginal lands, labor availability, and land access and tenure—we compare simplifying and diversifying responses to assess how these pathways differentially enhance or degrade the adaptive capacity of farming systems in the context of the triple threat. These cases show that diversifying processes can weave a form of broad and nimble adaptive capacity that is fundamentally distinct from the narrow and brittle adaptive capacity produced through simplification. We find that while there are structural limitations and tradeoffs to diversifying processes, adaptive capacity can be facilitated by empowering people and enhancing ecosystem functionality to proactively distribute resources and knowledge where needed and to nimbly respond to changing circumstances. Our cases suggest that, in order to garner the most adaptive benefits from diversification, farming systems should balance the pursuit of multiple goals, which in turn requires an inclusive process for active dialogue and negotiation among diverse perspectives. Instead of locking farming systems into pernicious cycles that reproduce social and ecological externalities, diversification processes can enable nimble responses to a broad spectrum of possible stressors and shocks, while also promoting social equity and ecological sustainability.

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Section: Knowledge Gaps and Future Research Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Petersen-Rockney

Baur

Guzman

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…Without such attention to challenging the dominant property imaginations of the global North, the resilience concept fails, as it's critics suggest, to support processes critical to transformation, such as rejecting stable yet unequal socio-ecological systems, clarifying the role of state politics in generating adaptability for some, and analyzing how agency is formed in terms of capacity to adapt to harmful change (Olsson et al, 2014). Instead of purely technocratic calls for resilience in the agricultural sector (Walsh-Dilley et al, 2016), a focus on land tenure and property relations helps to bring the largely apolitical "resilience" framework squarely back into the realm of questions of power relations and the distribution of benefits (Calo, 2020b;Holt-Giménez et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes

Calo

McKee

Perrin

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in global North geographies, argue that a key lock-in explaining the lack of reform arises from how most food system interventions work through dominant logics of property to achieve their goals of agroecological production. Doing so fails to recognize how land tenure systems, codified by law and performed by society, construct agricultural land use outcomes. In this perspective, the authors argue that achieving food system “resilience” requires urgent attention to the underlying property norms that drive land access regimes, especially where norms of property appear hegemonic. This paper first reviews research from political ecology, critical property law, and human geography to show how entrenched property relations in the global North frustrate the advancement of alternative models like food sovereignty and agroecology, and work to mediate acceptable forms of “sustainable agriculture.” Drawing on emerging cases of land tenure reform from the authors' collective experience working in Scotland, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan, we next observe how contesting dominant logics of property creates space to forge deep and equitable food system transformation. Equally, these cases demonstrate how powerful actors in the food system attempt to leverage legal and cultural norms of property to legitimize their control over the resources that drive agricultural production. Our formulation suggests that visions for food system “resilience” must embrace the reform of property relations as much as it does diversified farming practices. This work calls for a joint cultural and legal reimagination of our relation to land in places where property functions as an epistemic and apex entitlement.

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“…Darnhofer et al 2016;Kangogo et al 2020;Sinclair et al 2014). Setting aside some of the theoretical scrutiny on the definition and usefulness of the resilience concept (for these debates see for example Calo 2020;Darnhofer et al 2010;Hall and Lamont 2013), the farm resilience literature is broadly concerned with farm systems' adaptation and transformation to maintain their function in the long-term in response to vulnerabilities in the shortand medium-term. In turn, vulnerabilities, also commonly referred to as challenges, are the specific perturbations that negatively impact the functioning of farm systems (Darnhofer et al 2016;Meuwissen et al 2019;Urruty et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While much of the farm resilience research focuses on macro-level challenges, studies tend to emphasize the micro-level variables associated with vulnerability and resilience, such as farmers socio-demographic characteristics, farm operation characteristics, farmers' actions and pre-disposition, and their adaptation strategies (Darnhofer et al 2016;Daugstad 2019;Diserens et al 2018;Greenhill et al 2009;Kangogo et al 2020). As scholars critiquing the resilience lens have argued (speaking about the application to agriculture and other topics), the de facto interpretation of this micro-level focus is to interpret resilience through an individual's deficits (Calo 2020;Cote and Nightingale 2012;Hall and Lamont 2013;Joseph 2013). Often missing are factors outside of farmer's control that affect their decision-making and shape farm resilience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Medical economic vulnerability: a next step in expanding the farm resilience scholarship

Becot

Inwood

2022

Agric Hum Values

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In recent years, the long-standing questions of why, how, and which farm families continue farming in the face of ongoing changes have increasingly been studied through the resilience lens. While this body of work is providing updated and novel insights, two limitations, a focus on macro-level challenges faced by the farm operation and a mismatch between the scale of challenges and resilience measures, likely limit our understanding of the factors at play. We use the example of medical economic vulnerability, a micro-level challenge traditionally confined to the household sphere of the agri-family system, as a way to call attention to these limitations. Focusing on United States (U.S.) farm households, we assess: (1) To what extent are they experiencing medical economic vulnerability when using objective and subjective outcome measures? (2) Which demographic and farm characteristics are associated with experiencing medical economic vulnerability? (3) What is the association between institutional arrangements and medical economic vulnerability? Our analysis of over 900 surveys coupled with a conceptual framework merging complementary insights from three bodies of literature revealed seemingly large differences in the prevalence of medical economic vulnerability across the objective and subjective measures with the subjective measure indicating a general sentiment of medical economic vulnerability in a majority of respondents. Conversely, limited variations were noted in who experiences medical vulnerability on the basis of demographic and farm characteristics, with stronger associations being connected to the households’ health insurance arrangements. We conclude with three implications of our findings for the farm resilience literature.

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“Who Has the Power to Adapt?” Frameworks for Resilient Agriculture Must Contend With the Power Dynamics of Land Tenure

Cited by 16 publications

References 45 publications

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Narrow and Brittle or Broad and Nimble? Comparing Adaptive Capacity in Simplifying and Diversifying Farming Systems

Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes

Medical economic vulnerability: a next step in expanding the farm resilience scholarship

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