Abstract
To address the twin pressures of land degradation and climate change in communities of agriculturalists, agro-pastoralists and pastoralists who are vulnerable to acute and chronic food and livelihood insecurity, we review emerging resilience approaches to agricultural development and present a resilience framework for agriculture and resource management at multiple scales and social-ecological interfaces. The paper draws on academic literature, field observation, insight from development researchers and practitioners, and agency reports to build a framework for guiding investment in initiatives that stand to sustainably improve the livelihoods of rural populations whose livelihood security is at risk from a combination of poverty and drought, deforestation, over-grazing, forced migration or other shocks. We suggest how working at landscape scale to link interventions in agroecological, livelihood, ecological and institutional dimensions of resilience, and integrating the four dimensions through stakeholder-engaged, adaptive collaborative management enables synergies to be captured and trade-offs reduced. We use the insights from development practitioners, political ecologists, and rural sociologists to highlight the need to historically, politically, and culturally situate this framework, and to emphasize the importance of participatory methods in successful resilient landscape management projects.
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Notes
In the low scenario, sea levels are expected to rise between 28 and 60cm, and for the high scenario they are expected to rise between 37 and 72cm by 2100.
This geographic region refers particularly to Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia.
Cultural ecologists subsequently used a similar term in describing cultural adaptations. Problematically, early conceptions of cultural adaptation were premised on Darwinian notions of survival. Thus, cultural survival, or success, was considered to be dependent on the ability of communities to adapt to social change (usually entailing cultural and economic assimilation into the dominant culture) (Smit and Wandel 2006). While much of the evolutionary framing underpinning adaptation studies has been eschewed, cultural ecologists largely agree that cultures (or societies) which are able to respond to or cope with change quickly and easily are considered to have high “adaptability”. Indeed "adaptive capacity" increasingly is viewed as strategic to understanding linkages between vulnerability and resilience (Engle 2011). In Adger’s conceptualization, adaptive capacity is an element of vulnerability associated predominantly with governance, civil and political rights, and literacy (2013).
Agricultural, pastoral, and fishing communities are the most apparent or commonly cited examples of coupled social-ecological systems (or human-nature systems). Social-ecological systems in these communities are considered tightly coupled because of the direct relationships between livelihoods and ecosystem services—in these cases social-ecological dynamics, including adaptation, transformation and feedbacks are clear.
Some of the more extreme examples can be seen in Australia, the American west, India, the Amazon, and many places in the middle east and Africa.
For instance, Weis (2010: 319) notes, “an array of industrial dynamics have dramatically increased the magnitude and pace of soil degradation, such as: the use of ever larger and faster machines in ploughing, planting, spraying and fertilizing; the over-irrigation of land; the reduction of ground cover between rows; and declines in practices of fallowing, as time horizons shorten and livestock is moved from pastures into factory farms to expand and intensify its production”.
Weis (2010: 320) describes the technological treadmill as follows: “Biological simplification and standardization also increase vulnerability to the spread of pests, weeds, fungi and disease, which are most efficiently overridden by insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, many derived from petrochemicals. The chemical fix for industrial agriculture has routinely led to a treadmill of dependence as resistance develops, natural controls diminish and more or new inputs are applied. It is also connected to the loss of much localized and shared biological knowledge in farming, and its displacement by the intellectual property of agro-input TNCs”.
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Bailey, I., Buck, L.E. Managing for resilience: a landscape framework for food and livelihood security and ecosystem services. Food Sec. 8, 477–490 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-016-0575-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-016-0575-9