Laura Cerrato recently completed her M.Sc thesis entitled “The role of civil society organizations and system relationships surrounding participatory organic nutrient waste cycling.” The following post is a summary of her case study evaluation of the urban De Zuiderhof Voelkstuin community composting initiative (Compoststraat) and its relationship to the city of Rotterdam and the Netherlands.
De Zuiderhof allotment
Examples of urban agriculture at the De Zuiderhof allotment garden in Rotterdam.
Part 3: Dispatch on M.Sc. thesis results
Florian Neubauer has been working on a M.Sc. thesis with RSO titled `New opportunities and new constraints – Understanding changes in land tenure and livelihoods among the pastoral Maasai in southern Kenya´. In his third and last post, he shares some of the thesis` main findings. Florian’s second post can be found here.
Localized coping strategies increasingly gain in importance: Here, cattle which has accessed a fenced area where grass is preserved for stressful times.
Background
Pastoral livelihoods in Africa are characterized by a high reliance on strategic migration and livestock keeping as a source of social and economic wellbeing. However, over the past decades pastoral livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa were increasingly exposed to various pressures like a progressing privatization of land. The experiences of the Maasai in southern Kenya provide an illustrative example for livelihood changes due to land privatization. During the 1970s, a transformation from land held in trust to individual ‘group ranches’, as land communally owned and managed, took place in the Maasailand. During the 1980s, title deeds were privatized and group ranches subdivided into smaller, individually owned ranches. Focusing on Maasai households, this research analysed – with specific regards to impacts and implications on food (in)security – how these changes in land tenure shape the livelihoods of Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya.
Main results – Summary
The research suggests that changes in land tenure – notably, the privatization of title deeds and the commodification of land – shape Maasai livelihoods and can contribute to increase a household`s food security. It suggests furthermore that Maasai actively adapt their livelihood strategies as a result of these changes and use(d) the new land tenure system to develop new livelihood strategies. However, these new or changed livelihood strategies impact Maasai pastoralism both as a production system and as a socio-cultural way of life.
A new and exciting RSO thesis opportunity: Stakeholder analysis for regional sustainability analysis in urbanizing landscapes in Central Mexico
Introduction
Around Mexico-city, rural landscapes have changed significantly – and continue to do so – due to the growth of the city into these rural landscapes. This so-called peri-urbanization occurs in many places in the world and is accompanied by a specific sustainability challenges regarding water management, the role of agriculture in rural communities and the cultural changes that result from this. This MSc thesis will be part of a study of how peri-urbanization has affected the sustainability of three case study regions or watersheds. Regional assessment of the sustainability of natural resource management is complicated by the large range of stakeholder priorities and perspectives. Obtaining an accurate idea of the existing stakeholder’s priorities with regard to the state of the region’s natural resources, the main challenges and their management, is thus an important first step. This gives a basis for the definition of indicators for the sustainability assessment. However, it does not yet enable giving weights to each indicator. A proposed answer to this challenge is to first distil a list of possible sustainability indicators from semi-structured stakeholder interviews, and subsequently ask those same stakeholders to attach a weight or value to these indicators, using pairwise comparisons. The resulting ranking can then be used as an important input to a regional sustainability assessment. Another challenge, still to be resolved, is how to weigh the perspectives of different actors, perhaps according to each actor’s influence and/or importance.
Objective: To define a list of regional sustainability priorities with quantitative weights attached to them, based on the analysis and integration of stakeholder perspectives.
Activities
Requirements
Contact details
This MSc thesis will be jointly supervised by Dr. Jessica Duncan (Rural Sociology) and Leendert van Wolfswinkel (Farming Systems Ecology).
The project will contribute to the PhD project of Leendert van Wolfswinkel, who will also be the daily supervisor in Mexico. The PhD project is a collaboration between Farming Systems Ecology (WUR), CIMMYT and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.
For more information contact jessica.duncan@wur.nl with a statement of interest and a CV.
On Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 11:00 am in the Aula (General Foulkesweg 1a, Wageningen), Rose Omari will defend her PhD thesis titled: Fast Food in Ghana’s Restaurants: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Relevance, an interdisciplinary perspective.
The defence will include a public presentation which will explain why it is impossible to achieve an universal definition of fast food because of its continuous re-contextualization in time and space. The thesis also addresses questions related to health, technology and the environment, and reflects on these questions in the context of developing countries.
Everyone is welcome.
The proceedings will also be streamed online at this site: https://wurtv.wur.nl/P2G/cataloguepage.aspx
Next Monday, September 22nd, Humble Harvest will organise the ‘Eat It All Food Market’ in the Leeuwenborgh canteen! Super-local, organic, delicious foods which otherwise would have been wasted, will be sold at the market for very low prices.
The food comes directly from a farmer from the other side of the river Rhine and would have been thrown away because it does not conform to supermarkets’ standard for shape and size.
The market will be held from 12.00 to 1.30pm in the Leeuwenborch canteen. Bring some coins, your own bag and sustainable it is!!
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 