Suchergebnisse

AbstractIt is widely acknowledged that agriculture in Europe is going through a process of great change at the economic, social, political, and environmental, as well as the cultural, level. Pride may be considered as the fit between the farmers' identity (and hence their expectations and aspirations) and the daily reality of being a farmer in this constantly changing environment. Based on qualitative interviews with farmers in three Flemish villages and grounded theory analysis including coding and scoring the interviews, the research described here unravels the complex notion of pride into 24 concepts combined under individual, social and external categories. The semi‐quantitative analysis of the interviews clarifies the positive or negative impact of these concepts on the farmers' pride. The positive impact is derived from the concepts that the farmers can control themselves. On the other hand, external concepts that are beyond the control of the farmers influence their pride in a clearly negative way, while the concepts in the social category are less influential. The data show some remarkable differences between men and women.

Meeting the aims of sustainability is becoming increasingly difficult; at the same time, the call for culture is becoming more powerful. This book explores the relationships between culture, sustainability and regional change through the concept of 'territorialisation'. This new concept describes the dynamics and processes in the context of regional development, driven by collective human agency that stretches beyond localities and marked-off regional boundaries. This book launches the concept of 'territorialisation' by exploring how the natural environment and culture are constitutive of each.

Introduction : The role of culture in territorialisation / Lummina G. Horlings, Elena Battaglini and Joost Dessein -- Sustainable Places : Place as a Vector of Culture : Two cases from Mexico / Michael Redclift and David Manuel-Navarrete -- Territorialisation and the Assemblage of Rural Place : Examples from Canada and New Zealand / Michael Woods -- The Worldview and Symbolic Dimension in Territorialisation : How Human Values Play a Role in a Dutch Neighbourhood / Lummina Horlings -- Nature and Culture in Territorialisation Processes : Challenges and Insights from a Case-study in Serbia / Elena Battaglini and Marjia Babovic -- Territoriality as Appropriation of Space : How Engaging with Space Frames Sociality / Leonardo Chiesi -- Exploring Culture and Sustainability in Rural Finland / Mari Kivitalo, Kaisu Kumpulainen and Katriina Soini -- Territorialisation in Practice : The Case of Saffron Cultivation in Morocco / Joost Dessein -- Is There a Place for Place? : How Spaces and Places are Included in the Measures of Sustainable Development and Wellbeing / Annalisa Cicerchia -- Making Territory through Cultural Mapping and Co-Design : How Community Practices Promote Territorialisation / Leonardo Chiesi and Paolo Costa -- How to Scale a Territory? : Experiences from the U.S. / Frans Padt -- Culture matters : Planning Processes and Approaches towards Urban Resilience in European Cities and Urban Regions : Two Examples from Brussels and Ljubljana / Jenny Atmanagara -- Re-Creating and Celebrating Place(s) in Designated Space(s) : The Case of Wales / Eifiona Thomas Lane, Siân Pierce, Arwel Jones and Ian Harris -- Local Maize Practices and the Culture of Seed in Luoland, West Kenya / Paul Hebinck, Nelson Mango and Hellen Kimanthi -- Les Jardins Partagés in Paris : Cultivating Space, Community and Sustainable Way of Life / Monica Caggiano -- A European Valley in South America : Regionalisation, colonisation, and environmental inequalities in Santa Catarina, Brazil / Luciano Félix Florit, Lilian Blanck de Oliveira, Reinaldo Matias Fleuri and Rodrigo Wartha -- Conclusions : Territorialisation, a Challenging Concept for Framing Regional Development / Elena Battaglini, Lummina G. Horlings and Joost Dessein.

AbstractIn 2011, a Belgian field trial with genetically modified crops triggered fierce public protests and debates. Opponents of the trial protested against its performance and some advocated its destruction, in response to which scientists and the government defended a scientific freedom to perform the trial. This article investigates why the different stakeholders came to occupy such mutually exclusive positions towards the trial. Based on analyses of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, document analyses, and field observations, the article argues that the different stakeholders were involved in an ontological politics. This politics centred on the question of which ontologically different, co‐existing versions of the trial should be attended to in institutionalised scientific and political appraisals of the trial. The article concludes that the institutional handling of the trial as if it represented a single reality that merited only epistemological struggles contributed to turning a multifaceted debate into a dichotomous one, figuring field trial proponents and opponents. As such, the opposition between the different stakeholders was not antecedent to the institutional handling of the trial – as different stakeholders claimed – but rather an outcome of it.

AbstractPrecision agriculture is often seen as disembodied and placeless, promised to either bring about a fourth agricultural revolution or as the start of dystopian rural futures, where farmers and their knowledge will be replaced by machines. A growing body of literature shows more nuanced ways of working with precision agriculture. This illustrates the need to investigate how, and under which conditions, precision agriculture is integrated and internalised by farmers. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews with male Dutch crop farmers, contractors, researchers, and ag‐tech developers, we develop the concept of the cyborg farmer, who embodies the use of precision technology while maintaining an intimate relationship with agro‐ecological context. This approach challenges the mind–body dichotomy in that the cognitive is not understood as primary, as emotions and the materiality of the body are taken seriously. This perspective emphasises the importance of embodied knowledge in how farmers interpret precision agriculture data. Our findings highlight the productive tension between data‐driven elements of precision agriculture and the embodied and intuitive understanding of agro‐ecological context. This productive tension consists of the successful integration of different forms of knowledge by the cyborg farmer, where embodied sense‐making and precision agriculture data are integrated into the formation of useable knowledge. The cyborg farmer maintains farmer agency and resists the dominance of algorithmic rationality over other forms of knowledge
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AbstractRecently, democratic theorists have turned their attention to political representation. This renewed attention is inspired by a questioning of the formalist interpretation of representative government that presumes a strict division between elected political elites and deliberative participation in the public sphere. Several scholars argue that the standard account of representative democracy based on residence‐based and electoral representation does not suffice to explain contemporary political practice. Representation, then, becomes a 'practice' in which the object of representation and the grounds on which it is defended, co‐determine 'who' and 'what' is considered politically legitimate and how 'interests' are to be represented. In this paper we explore how discursive interaction on political representation takes place in an 'institutional void', i.e. a political setting in which there are no clear rules and norms to which politics is to be conducted. We base our analysis on an interpretative reconstruction of the rise and fall of a sustainability governance process in the Flemish agro‐food domain called the New Food Frontier (NFF). We claim to have found several interacting political conceptions, that operated on both explicit and more tacit levels, which particularly shaped the political interventions within the institutional void of the NFF. Analysis reveals that the dominant/initial conception of the studied political process has strong affinities with Dryzek's ideas on discursive representation. Competing claims on how political representation should work were linked to neo‐corporatism and transition management. We analyze how these competing conceptions play in the organization, articulation and disintegration of the governance network. Secondly, we relate this deliberative 'outcome' to the broader political setting in which the sustainability governance trajectory was embedded. In this context, a re‐negotiation of the rules of the game within a new governance setting and the relationship with institutionalized politics proved to be important factors in explaining the discontinuity of the process of discursive representation.

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article analyses the relations between local politics and farmers' participation in rural development in Tigray (Ethiopia). It takes an actor-oriented approach and focuses on local government officials and farmer representatives, who mediate between the government agencies that undertake rural development programmes and the farmers whom they address. To reach the target numbers of programme beneficiaries, these local development brokers 'mobilize' farmers to participate. They capitalize upon the historical legitimacy of the 1975-91 revolution against the military Derg dictatorship in which the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), now heading the national government, and Tigray's rural population successfully joined forces. They revitalize farmers' collective memory of this alliance and reinvent the revolutionary grassroots institutions through which it was realized. The effects of mobilization on participation in development are most evident among farmers who are members of the TPLF. A TPLF-development nexus arises, structuring local political career opportunities along the lines of development. The case study attempts to contribute to an empirical understanding of the entanglement of local politics and local development brokerage in rural African societies. Adapted from the source document.

Food crises and ecologization have given rise to a Belgian dynamic that does not behave according to the conventional tripod of agroecology: practitioners, social movement, and scientists. Instead of simply recounting the history of Belgian agroecology, the authors trace the history and dynamics in Belgium), a journey along six strands that weave themselves into a Belgian tapestry: Genetically modified crop commandos, a scientific paradigm shift, hybrid expertise opening the Northern route that intersects with a Southern political route, an original non-institutional dynamic in the French-speaking part of Belgium and an institutional initiative that led to a rift in Flanders. In the following section, we identify, emerging from those six strands, four tensions that create a space of innovations, namely, politically differentiated discourses, land access, fair price, and epistemic tensions. We discuss then the generative potential of the 4 tensions and describe the potential of reconfigurations generated by boundaries organizations, food justice and transdisciplinarity. We conclude that the concept of agroecology continues to have transformative potential in Belgium today. However, no one can predict the course of such a largely non-institutional dynamic. ; Peer reviewed