Suchergebnisse

Smallholder farmers are defined as key actors in the implementation of Agenda 2030, based on their importance for food security and poverty reduction, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is also true for South Africa, where smallholder farming has attracted considerable policy attention in an attempt to break the trend of rural poverty and the legacy of the apartheid era. One issue of concern is the long-term decline in arable production in fields, reflecting a wider trend of de-agrarianisation among peasantries and smallholders all over the world. In South Africa this withdrawal from field cultivation is compensated to an extent by intensification in garden cultivation. This thesis explores how smallholders perceive the role of these two different crop cultivation practices in their daily lives. The empirical data were collected during an ethnographic field study in rural South Africa in early 2020 using a variety of qualitative research methods. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of lifeworld and system world together with perspectives of livelihoods, the study shows that household agricultural production is being downscaled, with most households prioritising the continuation of garden cultivation. Garden cultivation draws upon capabilities that most households can access and is viewed as a taken-for-granted activity within the lifeworld of smallholders. Field cultivation emerges as a deliberate choice made by households who are able to access sufficient family labour and financial capital. Furthermore, arable production in fields is based on long-term experience of government involvement, resulting in a commonly shared view that a government presence in field farming is something to be expected even today. It would appear that this commonly shared view enables agricultural projects and certified seeds to be introduced that are disembedded from smallholders' local conditions, mirroring a policy belief in a New Green Revolution for Africa. This finding suggests that garden cultivation can serve as an example of crop cultivation that is attuned to local conditions, indicating the direction smallholders could take if they are to fulfil their role as promoters of sustainable development in line with Agenda 2030.

Agroforestry is considered a subsistence system that balances the urgent need for food and income of small scale farmers with restoration and conservation of ecosystem services, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. The Vi Agroforestry Program aims to implement agroforestry as a means to alleviate poverty and increase resilience among the poorest smallholders. After seven years, the Vi Agroforestry Project in the Mara Region of Tanzania had an inter-village variation in the proportion of households with tangible surviving agroforestry trees ranging from 10%-90%. Using a multiple methods approach, this variation was analysed in relation to changes and differences among administrative districts and project zones regarding perceived barriers to agroforestry adoption, project interventions, governance and the chronology of the process. In districts and zones where collaboration among the project staff, government counterparts and other stakeholders had been established at multiple levels, more agroforestry trees survived and a larger proportion of households practiced agroforestry. The established collaboration made it possible to discover and consider opportunities and barriers to agroforestry development such as diverse stakeholder interests and perceptions. As a result, potential conflicts could be avoided and socially robust solutions developed, adapted and integrated into the local subsistence systems.

This study analyses the history of a large hydroelectric scheme – the Great Ruaha power project in Tanzania. The objective is to establish why and how this specific scheme came about, and as part of this to identify the key actors involved in the decision-making process, including the ideological contexts within which they acted. Although the Tanzanian actors and the World Bank (IBRD) are discussed, main focus is on the Swedish actors on project level.Kidatu, the first phase of the Great Ruaha power project (constructed between1970-1975), became the first large-scale hydropower station in Tanzania. As such, it paved the way for Tanzanian entrance into the Big Dam Era and significant changes within the Tanzanian landscape. As well as the dry river bed at Kidatu, and the small reservoir that precedes it, the Great Ruaha power project also involved the creation of a huge artificial lake, the Mtera reservoir. The Kidatu hydropower station was the first large undertaking within Swedish bilateral aid, and implied the takeover of control of hydropower construction in Tanzania by Swedish enterprises, replacing the enterprises of the former colonial power. A hydropower plant is a complex technoscientific artefact. The construction of a hydropower plant is preceded by a large number of technological choices, scientific prestudies and estimations of costs and revenues. A hydropower plant is also a complex social creation, and is as such filled with social actors engaged in conflicts, compromises and power structures. The decision to construct Kidatu hydropower station was a result of negotiations and activities within what is called "development assistance". This brings in yet another dimension, the political one, involving export and import of technology, foreign capital, and foreign influence in decision-making processes, as well as ideas about how to bring development and progress to a people supposed to be living in "poverty and misery". The study is divided into three main parts. The first part analyses the context of Swedish development assistance in the support to the construction of hydropower plants. This part discusses Swedish state-supported hydropower exploitation of indigenous people's territory within Sweden's borders in the 20th century and the background of Swedish development assistance, from the 1950s to the early 1960s. The second part analyses the event of Swedish development assistance entering Tanzania and the Great Ruaha power project, with the main focus being on the period 1965 – 1970. The third part is an analysis of the technoscientific basis for the decisions taken to implement the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme. Main focus is on the period 1969-1974, discussed against the backdrop of precolonial and colonial studies. While focus is on the 1960s and 1970s, in both part two and three events in the 1980s and 1990s are discussed. The study shows that although Sweden was not a colonial power in Tanzania, colonial imagery, and relations to the colonial era, as well as Sweden's background of internal colonialisation, exerted an influence on the decision-making process and the actors involved in the Great Ruaha power project.The study is mainly based on archival sources, complemented with oral sources from Tanzania and Sweden. Recognizing the complexity of large-scale hydropower and the attempts to control watercourses that large scale hydropower necessitates, in the specific context of decolonisation and development assistance that the decision-making process behind the Great Ruaha hydropower scheme reveals, the analysis of the actors involved is based on feminist and postcolonial perspectives.