Browsing by Subject "Livelihoods"
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Item Determinants of Livelihood Strategies in a Marine Extractive Reserve(2015-01-23) Santos, Anna NunesThis dissertation investigates the intersection between environmental conservation and livelihoods of small-scale producers. Conservation territories have been expanding into coastal-marine environments because of processes across scales, and with this expansion is a dominant trend of community-based conservation with dual goals of protecting livelihoods and biodiversity. The Brazilian, extractive reserve (RESEX) is such a model, increasingly being established in coastal-marine environments with ambiguous outcomes. This dissertation specifically investigates RESEX governance and livelihood production; namely the institutional, material, and discursive practices of RESEX actors by applying qualitative and quantitative methods; and adapting governance assemblage and livelihoods analytics through a political ecology lens. The case of the Cassurub? RESEX in eastern Brazil is presented here and demonstrates contradictions between the RESEX instrument, and its operationalization and outcomes. The Cassurub? RESEX was established as a politicized battle between environmentalists and politicians, and resource users were pawns in the territorial game. New institutions for fisheries and land-use undermine the livelihood strategies of resource users, producing adverse effects. The abstraction of resource users as RESEX ?beneficiaries,? who can access RESEX benefits, disembodies them of their culturally embedded livelihoods rendering them artifacts of the RESEX. The focus on ?beneficiaries? veils processes of power and the specific effects of the RESEX; land has been appropriated for conservation; resource users are being accounted for as they have a new relationship with the state; and their livelihoods are being reconstituted through the RESEX instrument. These findings lead to several conclusions: RESEX are territorial instruments of control over people, resources, and relationships in a geographic space; ?beneficiaries? are an ?imaginary collective subject? produced by government actors that renders the appropriation of land, and expansion of bureaucratic state power, invisible; and more normatively, conservation and development agendas must consider the differential livelihood strategies of resource users or efforts will be undermined. The case of the Cassurub? RESEX illustrates how discursive and territorial practices of RESEX produce differentiated impacts on livelihood strategies among affected resource users. The findings also demonstrate that environmental governance and livelihoods cannot be treated as discrete elements in investigations of conservation instruments with goals of protecting livelihoods.Item Farming and resistance : survival strategies of smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico(2014-12) Avilés-Vázquez, Katia Raquel; Knapp, Gregory W.; Doolittle, William; Butzer, Karl; Torres, Rebecca; Carro-Figueroa, VivianAgriculture in Puerto Rico has declined sharply since industrialization of the island in the early part of the 20th Century. Rural towns withered as people migrated to the cities, and the landscape was transformed with forested areas increasing as agricultural land decreased. Reduction in the farming population and loss of agricultural lands in concert with increases in forested areas has led to a discourse that agriculture is a thing of the past and antagonistic to economic progress. This dissertation draws from cultural and political ecology, as well as critical ethnography and rural sociology, to analyze the present-day status of small holder farmers in Puerto Rico and ascertain some of the production strategies and tactics utilized by these farmers. I worked with agricultural organizations in order to determine the networks and adaptations that farmers employ in adapting to an increasingly difficult socioeconomic environment. The greatest threats to these smallholder farmers are a lack of access to land, loss of community networks and knowledge, and one size fits all policies designed for larger land holdings and based on antiquated economic systems that depend on “cheap”, heavily subsidized labor. To survive, small-scale farmers have: (1) redistributed their social capital, (2) diversified both the use of their farms and household income, (3) expanded the geographic reach of their networks using tools such as the internet, and (4) created new marketing chains to access consumers directly. On the landscape, smallholder farmers are intensifying their use of small plots of land while leaving larger tracts in reserve. I use the findings and observations of this research to present recommendations for breaking out of the cycle of subsistence poverty. Finally, just as small-scale farmers are adapting the ways they interact among themselves and with the land, the findings of this study suggest that the way farmers are viewed and defined must be reconsidered in order to create policies that serve the agricultural sector.Item The last llamero : development and livelihood changes in the high Andes(2012-05) Gehrig, Jonathan Andrew; Knapp, Gregory W.; Sletto, Bjorn I.; Adams, Paul C.Since the mid-2000s, the production of the pseudo-cereal quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) for export has increased due to growing demand in the United States and Europe. To meet demand, many of those living in the Bolivian high plateau or altiplano have transitioned from traditional livelihood strategies to commercial quinoa production oriented at the international export market. The following looks at how Bolivians living in the community of Pampa Aullagas have adapted to commercial production by looking at three vignettes of different actors living in the community. Looking at traditional agropastoralists, teachers, and modern producers, this thesis seeks to understand the nuances and complexities associated with integration into the global export market.