A MSc student interested in an academic career can opt for a research practice in stead of an regular internship and thus gain relevant work experience at an academic level. Below the Abstract. The report also includes a Summary in both English and Dutch.
Abstract After 140 years of absence, the Netherlands is once again housing one of Europe its largest predators, the wolf. This has caused human-wolf conflict to reemerge, of which the main cause is the depredation on livestock. To mitigate this conflict between farmers and wolves, the Dutch government has implemented a compensation scheme. Compensation schemes are one of the most common ways through which policy-makers try to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, but remain controversial. This research aims to create a deeper understanding of the perspectives, experiences and attitudes of Dutch farmers towards wolf damage compensation payments and thereby, wolf management more broadly by studying this tool through the Environmental Justice framework. A case study has been adopted on the South-Eastern provinces of the Netherlands, for which 15 semi-structured interviews have been conducted with the organization handling compensation payments, farmers organizations, an ecologist and livestock owners from this region. The findings suggest that the arrival of the wolf to the Netherlands has created new insecurities for farmers’ livelihoods, which are caused by wolf presence itself and the system that has been set up to manage this presence and its impact. By analyzing farmers’ experiences with compensation payments in a framework of environmental justice, this research demonstrates that only focusing on compensation is insufficient to create a sense of environmental justice among farmers, and thereby mitigate human-wolf conflict, since compensation payments alone are unable to address all challenges that cause insecurity among farmers. This study concludes that while compensation payments continue to be an important focus point of wolf policy, it can be understood as only a last step in building a supportive base for wolf presence in the Netherlands. Instead, more emphasis should be given to improvements at the beginning of the process, before damage has occurred.
Autonomy has been a word that has been rolling off the tongues of leftist activists and academics for decades and has been the subject of countless articles and books. It has been theorised from Marxist, Anarchist, Post-Marxist, Foucauldian and Feminist perspectives. Historically, the term autonomy has often been used to express the ability of individuals or collective subjects to escape, in one way or another, the rule of capital or the control of the state. More recently, academic interventions on autonomy have been fundamentally about assessing how global capitalism operates and what kinds of subjects, spaces, and practices can resist it and build alternatives to it. Within agrarian studies and peasant movements, the concept has referred to the ability of peasants to mount collective responses to the dominant actors in the globalised market or within the state, while remaining independent from political parties or politicians. For indigenous movements, the term autonomy has been associated with a struggle or a project to take back control over their ancestral territories by challenging the nation-state. Discussions about autonomy are thus necessarily about the collective agency of social subjects within capitalism.
The idea of a special issue on autonomy in agrarian studies, politics and movements then was triggered by discussions within the Agrarian Change Working Group at the IIPPE annual conference in Lisbon and Pula. We followed this up with a workshop with contributors, hosted by Kees Jansen, at Wageningen University in the Netherlands in December 2019, just before the pandemic. This was a unique workshop where we debated, as social scientists, ontological and epistemological questions: the current nature of capitalism, its different manifestations in rural settings across the world, the ways different rural groups are inserted within it, and the struggles that different agrarian movements have led to resist it economically, politically and culturally. Coming from different theoretical traditions or positions, we had different understandings of markets and market relations, the role of collective action as well as the dialectical relationship between agency and structure.
This lack of consensus has been preserved in the Special Issue as well, which we hope can contribute to an inter-paradigm debate within agrarian studies on this topic. At the same time, in keeping with the tradition of the Journal of Agrarian Change, the different uses of the term (and the perspectives on) autonomy have been critically discussed from a critical agrarian political economy approach and placed within contexts of contradictory and complex class, ethnic and gender relationships.
The contributions critically analyse and assess different experiences of autonomy (peasant, indigenous, women, and guerrilla) by focusing on the varying spheres from which autonomy is sought (the market, the state, development, patriarchy) and on the type of collective action adopted by the different groups (economic, political, ethno-cultural). It includes contributions covering Latin America, the Middle East, and South-East Asia that are organised around the following four themes:
i) Capitalism in the Countryside and in Agricultural Production: The first discussion of autonomy revolves around a critical assessment of the type of agency that emerges around the demand and search for autonomy and the conditions that make it possible. Characterisations of contemporary capitalism in the countryside, the nature of small-scale farming, and the class position and consciousness of subaltern agricultural producers are central to this discussion. Natarajan and Brickell engage with feminist scholarship on women’s reproductive labour and combine it with Henry Bernstein’s critique of the notion of the autonomous ‘peasant’. They explore how the deeper market integration of women in rural Cambodia, through distress sales of land or use of land as collateral for microfinance borrowing, simultaneously renders women more dependent on markets whilst also constituting a temporary path towards an aspirational autonomy. Jansen, Vicol, and Nikol, on the other hand, develop a critique of van der Ploeg’s book The New Peasantries which presents the struggle for autonomy as central to the peasant condition. They dissect the book’s peasant bias, the usefulness of the notion of autonomy in a human society saturated with social relationships and the neglect of the complexities of agrarian class formation and differentiation at the local level.
ii) Autonomy from the Market or via the Market: The second discussion of autonomy has to do with the different ways of conceptualising markets, especially the relationship between capitalist relations and non-capitalist relations. Sankey shows how different histories, levels and types of market integration within Colombia lead to different kinds of exposure to the imperative of the market and responses to the crisis of small-scale agriculture triggered by neoliberalism. Using the case of O Circuito, an extended market in Brazil constructed by a peasant movement and its urban allies, the paper by van der Ploeg and Schneider develop the notion that autonomy is a political collective project that can rest on the construction of ‘nested markets’.
iii) Social Movements, Autonomy in State and Non-state Politics: All the contributions address questions of class, state and politics, but these questions are the central focus of the contributions by Bretón et al., Guimarães and Wanderley, and Jongerden. Bretón et al. draw from four emblematic cases of peasant and indigenous autonomy in Latin America (the MST in Brazil, the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the indigenous and Afro-descendants in the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, and the peasant movement in Mexico) to critically analyse the promises, achievements, and contradictions of projects of autonomy during the era of neoliberalism across four dimensions: political independence, economic relations, ethno-cultural goals, and the internal politics.
Following a fundamentally political understanding of autonomy inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis, Guimarães and Wanderley build a Polanyian analysis of the different forms of organisation and struggles that indigenous peasants adopted in Bolivia. Still another approach emerges in the paper by Jongerden who argues that agricultural development by the Kurdish movement in Rojava and North and East Syria is better seen as a third, self-constituting, or autonomous mode of ordering. He traces the influence of Murray Bookchin’s autonomist thought on Kurdish intellectuals and discusses the recent Kurdish agrarian policies in Rojava to rebuild the war-ridden agrarian economy on the principle of autonomy.
iv) Autonomy and Technological Revolutions: While several other papers discuss this theme tangentially, for Stone, the question of autonomy is centrally one of technology and knowledge. He shows how the emerging surveillance farming seems to be replicating earlier phases of agricultural development. Stone also raises concerns about how the big data revolution in agriculture could lead to agricultural deskilling and loss of farmer’s autonomy.
A deeper understanding of autonomy in political theory and practice, as developed through this Special Issue, sheds new light on how to conceptualise class within the continuum of a basically economic category or the outcome of a political process. It asks what makes certain social subjects, be it peasants, indigenous peoples or revolutionaries develop an ideology and political projects that present autonomy (from the market, the state or development) as a desired horizon.
Read the full introduction by the Special Issue editors here.
Read the full Special Issue here – Free access for three months.
On 13 May 2022, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University with a public event entitled “Rural Sociology: past, present and future”. The event took place in Akoesticum in Ede and was attended by approximately 130 people: current and former staff members, current and former MSc and PhD students, and current and former collaborators in (inter)national research projects. In addition to this event we wrote and edited a book entitled ‘On Meaningful Diversity: Past, present and future of Wageningen rural sociology’ and a group of (former) PhD students put together a PhD magazine. Both are open access publications.
The entire anniversary event was filmed and a 16 minute compilation video of the day can be found here:
Compilation video of the 75th anniversary event of the Rural Sociology Group
In addition all presentations and talks are available online in order of the program of the day:
Opening by Arthur Mol (Rector Magnificus of Wageningen University)
Keynote by Han Wiskerke: Meaningful diversity: Past, present and future of rural sociology
Keynote by Haroon Akram-Lodhi: From peasant studies to critical agrarian studies
Rural Talk Show: Interactive session including invited guests and audience participation. The Talk Show was chaired by Matt Reed, with Jan Douwe van der Ploeg as a permanent table guest, and changing table guests around the following three themes:
Session 1– Societal engagement or academic distance; with Jessica Duncan, Aya Kimura, Han Wiskerke
Session 2 – Discussing the rural-urban dichotomy; with Henk Oostindie, Sally Shortall, Esther Veen
Session 3 – A continuing debate: agency and structure; with Bettina Bock, Bram Büscher, Mark Vicol
Keynote by Hannah Wittman: Bridging rural and urban through agroecological networks: cultivating agrarian citizenship in a climate crisis
Presentation of Research Agendas: Imagining the next 25 years of rural sociology. Interactive session around three research agendas, briefly pitched by RSO staff, followed by an open floor exchange of ideas and discussion:
Examining urban agriculture projects in Rotterdam between 2008 and 2018, my research looks at the practice of urban food planning, its strategies, the actors involved and their roles and relations. Central to the research is the observation that in Western European society today, the increased participation of civic initiatives confronts planning with challenges related to governance, decision-making and representation. Sustainable urban food planning can be seen as a laboratory for planning concepts that deal with these challenges.
The purpose of my research is to investigate which conceptualisations of planning are relevant when 1) planning in and for a pluralistic, participative society and 2) planning for sustainable goals related to an unknown future. As there is no consensus in the planning field on what planning is or what it should do, conceptualisations of planning can range widely, from systems planning to advocacy planning and from collaborative to complexity planning. I work with a primary hypothesis that these concepts of planning are complementary rather than mutually exclusive and that in a complex, pluralistic society, different concepts of planning can be relevant in different circumstances.
The main research questions are as follows: What concepts of planning are effective in spatial planning for a common sustainable future when including multiple actors and stakeholders with a variety of frames and perspectives on sustainable food systems? How are different actors, their respective roles and action perspectives included in the decision-making process? What is the role of the planning practitioner in this, and what is the role of governmental planning at different levels?
The research is informed by my own position as a practitioner. Undertaking a professional PhD as an external researcher at RSO allows me to reflect upon and put in perspective my personal experiences in the field of spatial planning and design. Fifteen years of experience with promoting, researching, designing, planning and practicing urban food production in Rotterdam left me (and colleagues from the field) with many ideas and hypotheses on what municipal planners and urban food initiatives should and should not do when planning urban food production. Can municipal planning include the initiatives of societal actors (like myself and fellow urban farmers and activists) in their planning agenda? Would it be possible to do this in a way that respects the diverse world views of these actors? And can societal actors themselves operate in a way that aligns them with governmental planning agendas without losing sight of their own goals?
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Civic urban food initiatives represent a diversity of approaches to what a sustainable food system should be and how planning can contribute, but planners at different government levels struggle to facilitate and include these initiatives and their diverse approaches in their planning efforts. This has become apparent in Rotterdam but is also exemplary of a more general gap between bottom-up societal initiatives and top-down governmental planning in the Netherlands. Through a study of the Rotterdam urban agriculture movement – and taking the role of participant-observer – I examine this gap and address the questions above.
The case study of Rotterdam considers projects in which urban food production has been realised and focuses on the people involved in the planning process and their agendas and strategies, with a special emphasis on spatial planning. To avoid any bias due to my personal involvement in the object of study, I use a range of sources, including grey literature and interviews with different planners and societal actors. In terms of method, I combine this sociological approach with plan analyses (of the projects) derived from the discipline of urban planning. In combining different sources and methods from different disciplines, I try to incorporate the views of different actors and gain a more complete picture of what has happened during these past years and what lessons can be learnt for planners and urban food initiatives..
While the PhD is designed as a retrospective, transdisciplinary case study, it inevitably involves and interacts with my own practice as a designer/planner and, more recently, urban food forester. Interviewing planners about their ideas and influences and writing down their accounts of events has already provided insights that are informing my current work in urban agriculture and food forestry (including advocacy, design and realisation). Although this can sometimes be problematic, the meeting of practical experience with academic and applied research is developing a relevant knowledge base. A professional PhD makes knowledge from practice available to academic research and offers a place of reflection to practitioners.
Lisette Nikol, PhD candidate at the Rural Sociology Group
How do small farmers in the Global South secure their livelihoods? How do capitalist dynamics and agrarian movements striving for alternatives shape these livelihoods? How can agrarian transition pathways address possible tensions between the needs of rural development, sustainable agrarian futures and a growing world population? What role do and should farmers play in imagining and realising these transition pathways and agrarian futures? How do we analyse and explain agrarian transitions in general and the farming systems realised by agrarian movements in particular?
These abstract questions summarise my research interests. My interests are motivated by a concern for an agrarian future that is socially just and environmentally sustainable, in which our farming populations and natural environment can thrive rather than be exploited.
In my PhD research, I investigate diverse facets of an ongoing agrarian struggle in the wake of agricultural modernisation and the development of agrarian capitalism, paying particular attention to the concept of peasant autonomy. Peasant autonomy locates core critiques of modern agriculture with the commodity nature of production relations (Jansen et al. 2021). While the critiques alone are relevant, I find that research into agrarian movements is more interesting and useful if it examines how different agricultural systems promote distinct production relations and transition pathways that entail different dependencies on wider production relations, agro-ecosystems, social relations and agrarian movements. As a sociologist concerned with theory, I find it relevant to inquire into how various conceptual ideas of peasant autonomy, varying dependencies on diverse production relations and socio-material relations of farming systems can help us both explain ongoing transitions and imagine and realise future transitions .
Specifically, I am investigating an organic agriculture movement in the Philippines that is responding to the challenges posed by decades of Green Revolution-oriented agricultural policies. Providing alternatives to the agricultural modernisation programmes of the state, this farmer network facilitates a farmer-led rice breeding programme, trainings on organic cultivation and complementary livelihood-related aspects, and a Participatory Guarantee System to market organic produce locally.
I locate my work within a contemporary body of agrarian political economy that critically reflects on the broader effects of the capitalist dynamics in agriculture and the countryside (see e.g. Guthman 2004, Kloppenburg 2004, Bernstein 2010, Jansen 2015). Another body of theoretical work that informs my research agenda is an anthropology of technology development that looks at technological change in the context of agrarian development and transformation as contingent, society-technology relations (e.g. Bray 1986, Almekinders 2011, Jansen & Vellema 2011). Combining these two approaches allows for an interesting set of questions capable of addressing both social and material aspects that are vital to an overall understanding of agrarian movements and transitions.
An important part of my research looks at peasant autonomy and food sovereignty questions as concerning farmers’ relations to their means of production. Agrarian movements seemingly aim to reverse the separation of farmers from their means of production, such as seeds and the wider agro-ecosystem, as achieved by agricultural modernisation and development following a capitalist, industrial model. But how do efforts to mend this situation play out in particular empirical settings? In this question, I centralise the material dimension of farming and agro-ecosystems in interaction with social relations and farmers’ practices. I address two important sets of production relations.
First, I analyse the sorts of relations around seed that emerge in situations where seed activist initiatives are realised. It is important to understand how these relations are caught between agrarian capitalism and seed activism. Second, I focus on soil fertility management – a core of organic approaches often presented as key to realising an autonomous agro-ecosystem – as a site of tension and performance. How does a view on farming as ‘performance’ (cf. Richards 1993) or simply ‘making do’ to survive relate to views on farming as performing political farming narratives?
Another aspect of agrarian movements I find intriguing is their functioning as organisations, themselves firmly embedded in relations with and among farmers. When the work of agrarian movements gains importance for the livelihoods of rural and agrarian peoples, how should we understand the relation between movements and members, or the movement’s practical work in the context of agrarian livelihood strategies? Additionally, movements take on emancipatory roles, organising farmers politically and advocating on their behalf at various levels of government (Nikol and Jansen 2020). How do their narratives of agrarian futures and rural development relate to the narratives of its differentiated constituency, as well as those of the government?
A last avenue of my inquiry looks into the dynamics shaping and participation of farmers in national organic sectors. Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) are promoted on a global scale as a cost-efficient and trustworthy alternative to third-party certification. Interestingly, the development of organic agriculture is caught in a tug-of-war between capitalist dynamics prompting its ‘conventionalisation’ and committed pioneers promoting values that critique the industrialised agricultural model (Nikol and Jansen 2021). I further investigate dynamics in the development of organic agriculture, specifically how PGSs seem a tool modelled after and complying with demands from conventional agriculture, as well as a tool to organise farmer participation, reclaim the narrative of organic agriculture and reorganise the relations that compose this sector.
How to explain ongoing agrarian transitions, and how to imagine and realise agrarian transitions in the future? In researching seed systems and plant-breeding, soil fertility management and integrated farming systems, the organisational and advocacy work of social movements and tensions between capitalist dynamics and ‘pioneer’ approaches in organic agriculture development, I aim to contribute relevant insights grounded in lessons from an agrarian movement in the Global South. These questions and the experiences of the Philippine organic movement, will no doubt continue to engage me in the future and inspire future contributions to the literature.
Almekinders, C. (2011). The Joint Development of JM-12.7: A technographic description of the making of a bean variety, NJAS-Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 57(3): 207-216.
Bernstein, H. (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
Bray, F. (1986) (1986). The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies. Oxford [etc.]: Blackwell.
Guthman, J. (2004). Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Oakland: University of California Press.
Jansen, K. (2015). The Debate on Food Sovereignty Theory: Agrarian capitalism, dispossession and agroecology, Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(1): 213-232.
Jansen, K. and S. Vellema (2011). What is Technography? NJAS-Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 57(3): 169-177.
Jansen, K., M. Vicol and L.J. Nikol (2021). Autonomy and Repeasantization: Conceptual, analytical, and methodological problems, Journal of Agrarian Change (special issue on Autonomy in Agrarian Studies, Politics and Movements).
Kloppenburg, J.R. (2004). First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nikol, L.J. and K. Jansen (2020). The Politics of Counter-Expertise on Aerial Spraying: Social movements denouncing pesticide risk governance in the Philippines, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 50(1): 99-124.
Nikol, L.J. and K. Jansen (2021). Rethinking Conventionalisation: A view from organic agriculture in the Global South, Journal of Rural Studies, 86: 420-429.
Richards, P. (1993). Cultivation: Knowledge or performance? In M. Hobart (Ed.), An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance,pp. 61-78. London:Routledge.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 