Category Archives: General

General issues.

Unpacking legitimacy in regional development

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In 2018, Yasmine Willy came as a visiting fellow to the Center of Space, Place and Society at WUR. Two years later, the fruits of this visit have been published in the journal Territory, Politics and Governance. The article focuses on an issue widely discussed in academic literature: the lack of legitimacy of regional development agencies.  Following Hannah Arendt’s distinction between legitimization and justification, the article argues that the main problem regional development agencies struggle with is not procedural rightfulness (legitimization) but means–end coordination (justification). The abstract of the article writes: “In recent years, policy-makers and researchers have identified regional development agencies as the most suitable actors to carry out public tasks. One of these tasks has been the coordination of regional development processes. Both practitioners and researchers argue that legitimacy is a prerequisite for these regional actors to function properly. Although legitimacy is a key issue, little is known about the challenges that arise while producing it. Selecting six regional development agencies in Switzerland and applying an interview-based research method, this explorative study analyses how regional development agencies deal with legitimacy issues. The findings indicate that the main problem with which regional development agencies struggle is not procedural rightfulness but means–end coordination. By proposing a clear distinction between legitimacy and justification, we aim to stimulate the debate on how to operationalize legitimacy and further the discussion of the functioning of regional development agencies. Consequently, we introduce the concept of ‘asymmetric justification’ to the debate on regional development processes in order to shed a light on the functioning of regional development agencies.”

If you are curious, you can access the article under this link
https://rsa.tandfonline.com/eprint/FVR9SKRQMMXG8GMVRZ5S/full?target=10.1080/21622671.2020.1805352


Thesis opportunities | Foodscapes in times of uncertainty

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The CSPS Foodscapes cluster is looking for BSc and MSc students interested in researching emerging foodscapes in times of uncertainty.  

Covid-19 has displayed many of the vulnerabilities and externalities of our current corporate food regime, such as unequal access to food, the dependence of our food supply on global supply chains, the exploitation of (migrant) workers in agricultural and food sectors and the fragility of the ‘just-in-time’ supply logistics. While the current crisis displays these vulnerabilities, also food practices and initiatives are arising that might provide seeds for ‘other futures’.

What foodscapes are emerging during Covid-19? What seeds do those emergent foodscapes provide for more sustainable, equitable, inclusive and fair foodscapes? And how can we potentially build on those seeds to make ‘other futures’ more real? 

If you are interested in researching these, or related, questions, please contact Anke de Vrieze (RSO), anke.devrieze@wur.nl or Mustafa Hasanov (BMO), mustafa.hasanov@wur.nl. We welcome multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives and see opportunities for both offline research (e.g. in the Netherlands) and online research.

For more thoughts on the effects of the current pandemic on Foodscapes, see also this series of rapid responses published by Agriculture and Human Values.

Rural Uproar: Corona Proof Thesis Opportunity

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So you want to do your thesis, but as corona-proof as possible. Than read the this call for a student interested in making a sociological analysis of rural uproar.

Unrest has brought tractor blockades to The Hague, Berlin, Paris and many other cities as a cocktail of grievances boil over. Yet rural uproar is not new. In his Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Eric Wolf examined the histories of peasant involvement in rebellions and revolutions in the twentieth century. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude examined the rebellion and arson attacks by a rural population at a time capitalism swept from the cities to the countryside in England.

In this thesis opportunity you will be asked to study rural uproar, identify characteristics and grievances of protests and revolts, and its economic and political causes. For this thesis, you will do a systematic literature review in combination with archival work. When more recent uproar is taken into consideration, interviews are possible.

More info: joost.jongerden@wur.nl


Picture: Captain Swing, mythical figure whose name appeared on series of threatening letters during the rural Swing-Riots in the UK now 190 years ago.

Outdoor psychology and coaching for adults with psychological complaints (three thesis topics)

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Do you want to contribute to an ongoing Science Shop project focusing on outdoor psychology and coaching for adults with psychological complaints?

Evidence supporting the beneficial effects of nature on our health and wellbeing is accumulating. These insights are being used increasingly for the treatment of people with psychological problems, such as outdoor psychology and coaching. On the one hand, using nature as a ‘treatment room’ is suggested to be more effective than receiving treatment indoors, whereas, on the other hand, psychologists and coaches themselves report being more vital and healthy providing treatment outdoors. However, the use of nature in mainstream practices is far from accepted.

We offer three assignments:

  1. Understanding the experiences of clients who participate(d) in outdoor psychology interventions;
  2. Exploring the image of outdoor psychology among key stakeholders in the mainstream healthcare sector, and underlying motivations of outdoor psychologists;
  3. Exploring the motives and practices of outdoor coaches, perceived barriers and opportunities, and experiences of clients who participate(d) in outdoor coaching.

See the project page for more information and the first report based on an Academic Consultancy project: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Nature-Assisted-Therapies-Nature-as-a-treatment-room-for-adults-with-psychological-complaints.htm

Interested or want to know more about the project? Contact Esther Veen (esther.veen@wur.nl)

Start Date: Fall 2020 or spring 2021

Neither Poor nor Cool: Practising Food Self-Provisioning in Allotment Gardens in the Netherlands and Czechia

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A new open access article co-written by Lucie Sovová and Esther Veen compares urban gardening in Czechia and the Netherlands. The comparative case study concludes that despite diverging framings in the literature, allotment gardeners in both countries are ‘doing the same thing’.

Urban gardening is a shared interest of both authors. Esther wrote her PhD thesis about the role of Dutch community gardens in fostering social cohesion; her recent research deals with urban green infrastructure and urban food growing as prosumerism. Lucie studied Czech allotments in her MSc thesis, and she later expanded on the topic of food self-provisioning in her PhD project co-supervised by Esther at Rural Sociology. Together, Esther and Lucie supervised the MSc research of Kylie Totté, who looked at allotment gardens in Utrecht using the methodology previously designed for the Czech case study. The comparison of the two data sets facilitated a critical engagement with existing interpretations of urban gardening, which often frame this activity as an activist endeavour in the Western-European context, or as a reaction to economic need in Central and Eastern Europe. Below is the abstract of the paper, the full text is available here.

While urban gardening and food provisioning have become well-established subjects of academic inquiry, these practices are given different meanings depending on where they are performed. In this paper we scrutinize different framings used in the literature on food self-provisioning in Eastern and Western Europe. In the Western context, food self-provisioning is often mentioned alongside other alternative food networks and implicitly framed as an activist practice. In comparison, food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe has until recently been portrayed as a coping strategy motivated by economic needs and underdeveloped markets. Our research uses two case studies of allotment gardening from both Western and Eastern Europe to investigate the legitimacy of the diverse framings these practices have received in the literature. Drawing on social practice theory, we examine the meanings of food self-provisioning for the allotment gardeners in Czechia and the Netherlands, as well as the material manifestations of this practice. We conclude that, despite minor differences, allotment gardeners in both countries are essentially ‘doing the same thing’. We thus argue that assuming differences based on different contexts is too simplistic, as are the binary categories of ‘activist alternative’ versus ‘economic need’.