Category Archives: Research

Research

DERREG – Final conference and proceedings

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Two weeks ago, from October 12-13, we had our final conference of the EU-funded research project DERREG (www.derreg.eu)  in Murska Sobota, Slovenia. Here the major findings of the project were presented.

DERREG coordinator prof. Michael Woods first presented (see presentation) an overwiew of the project and an interpretative model (see below) on how regions are affected by and respond to forces of globalisation mediated by various catalyst and he ended with a typology of regional responses based on the research done in the 10 case study regions. See also the DERREG Summary Report by Michael Woods.

 

Successively the coordinators of the four Work Packages presented the main findings along four themes:

  1. Rural Businesses, Global Engagement and Local Embeddedness (presented by Andrew Copus)
  2. International Migration and Rural Europe (presented by Birte Nienaber)
  3. The Global Environment and Rural Sustainable Development (presented by Joachim Burdack & Michael Kriszan)
  4. Rural regional learning (presented by Dirk Roep and Wiebke Wellbrock)

Each overview was illustrated with findings for two case study areas presented by the respective partners.

A separate session was dedicated to policy perspective on globalisation and rural development in Slovenia and in particular the Pomurje region in the north of Slovenia were Murska Sobota is located and the Final conference took place.

At the end, guest speakers from the Goriška region in Slovenia, the Övre Norrland in Sweden, the Westerkwartier region in the Netherlands and the Steirische Mur-Drau-Bioenergie-Region in Austria highlighted four good practices of how regions can respond to global processes and benefit from it.

All presentations can be downloaded from the DEREG website: http://www.derreg.eu/content/events/final-conference-derreg-project (at the bottom of the webpage).

At the DERREG resource-centre other proceedings are made accessible too, such as the WP reports, the case study context reports and case study summary reports. Look at http://www.derreg.eu/content/resource-centre.  Finally, a database of good practice across the WP theme’s and case study areas has been built and made accessible: look  at http://www.derreg.eu/content/good-practice-database.

Last but not least: video clips are made for each of the ten case study regions and when ready these will be published on You tube and announced at the website.

The project will finish by the end of this year. The partners are now working on several scientific publications in journals and books. By the end of this year and beginning of 2012 DERREG related articles will be published in two special issue of the European Countryside, an online journal (see the content of latest issue). Next will be an edited book published by Ashgate titled ‘Globalization and Europe’s Rural Regions‘  which will capitalise the findings for the 10 case study areas.

Publications will be announced at the resource-centre of the DERREG website, as for the video clips, and information will be posted on this blog.

A school meal in Dois Irmáos (3)

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The school meal program in Dois Irmáos is an exceptionally good example for multiple reasons. First, there is a dialogue between rural extension, family farmers, the nutritionists and the municipality. This cannot be taken for granted and the absence of mutual understanding and trust is often a barrier in other places. The state is often not trusted by farmers, governments can change. Nutritionists may think too much in terms of nutrients and hygiene whereas family farmers are often not organised enough to meet the supply requirements.  Or the cooking staff might object. In class, the example was given of a land settlement women’s cooperative baking bread which was refused by a school because the breads were too big and the cooking staff objected against having to cut the bread (instead of individual bread rolls).

Secondly, the facilities were modern, clean and spacious with lots of different activities for children. The school meal is strictly speaking not served at school but at the after-school day care center. It is normal in Brasil that children only go to school half a day. Most children go home afterwards and eat at home. A school meal is for those who need it, this can be because there is food insecurity at home, or quite the opposite, because both parents are working. In the case of the center we visited, it was aimed at children from the latter category. One of the activities is cooking lessons.

Thirdly, the scale of Dois Irmáos is that of a small town which makes it easier to localise the school meal. Not only because there are not too many mouths to be fed but also because of the logistics and coordination of getting the supply at times and intervals needed. The city of Porto Alegre is only now starting to look at possibilities to localise the school food from surrounding family farmers. Quite a challenge with the amount of children in schools and the metropolitan landscape.

Vacture PhD Sociologie bij ILVO (Vlaanderen)

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Het Instituut voor Landbouw- en Visserijonderzoek (ILVO) in Vlaanderen heeft een vacature voor een PhD (Rurale) Sociologie. Zie de website van ILVO voor nadere toelichting van de vacature. Contact persoon bij ILVO is Joost Dessein (joost.dessein@ilvo.vlaanderen.be).

Conference call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society (new deadlines)

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In June I published a post about the upcoming conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations’, which included a call for Working Group proposals. The deadline for submitting Working Group proposals was 1 September 2011. This post is to announce that the deadline for submitting Working Group proposals has been postponed to 15 september 2011. If you would like to convene a working group but don’t have time to write a proposal, you can also express your interest by sending me an e-mail (han.wiskerke@wur.nl). Have a look at the conference website for an overview of the working group themes that have been proposed by the scientific committee. The deadline for abstracts will also be postponed by 2 weeks to 15 December 2011.

Notes from the ESRS conference (5)

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Back in Wageningen, I am still digesting all the inspiration, material and knowledge that was floating around freely last week at the ESRS conference in Chania, Greece. For example, related to the earlier blog on the conference (2) the Working Group “New forms of citizen-consumer engagement in food networks: diversity, mechanisms and perspectives” had much to offer in addition to our own working group. Indeed, of all the types of consumer driven initiatives, such as food coops, CSA, consumer purchase groups, adoption schemes and landshares, the grow-it-your-own was largely absent. We concluded that a fusion of self-provisioning strategies and consumer driven engagement initiatives are necessary to understand the full spectrum of engagement with food growing.  Another conclusion of the Working Group was that the driving force behind an initiative does not need to correspond with the nature of the initiative. Examples from Czech Republic showed how citizens had set up a farmers market, which is usually seen as a producer initiative. Also here, new terms and definitions were considered such as “civic food networks” or “pro-sumers” to move away from the consumer – producer dichotomy, a distinction which obscures more than it reveals.

The enormous differentiation in initiatives was another key finding when one looks across the presentations in this Working Group. We concluded that it is difficult to discover ‘hidden realities’ and that we most likely underestimate the number of alternative food networks around. Initiatives have different names across countries or sometimes do not want to be known in statistics and databases as they deliberately try to operate outside ‘the system’. The last point includes a tension. We would like to show and make visible the size of the alternative food networks, also to show its significance. But it also reminded me of a paper which I use in a course on political sociology on “Governmentality and territoriality” by Jonathan Murdoch and Neil Ward (1997). Statistics are a useful instrument to govern at a distance and one of the technologies of government now widely used and abused, but which we take for granted now. The paper, however, showed how the collection of statistics of Britisch agriculture from the 19th century onwards failed “not least because of a relunctance on the part of many farmers and landowners to cooperate, based on their belief that the exercise was an interference in their private affairs” (1997: 314). All governments depend on modes of representation by which the domains to be governed become visible. Freedom, according to Foucault, is “the art of not being governed quite so much” (Oksala 2008). A careful approach to visibility sounds healthy to me.