Category Archives: Research

Research

Afstudeermogelijkheid bij OIKOS

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De Wetenschapswinkel Wageningen heeft een opdracht van COS Gelderland & OIKOS aangenomen om een haalbaarheidsonderzoek te doen voor het project ‘Participand’. Projectleider is Margriet Goris; het onderzoek wordt begeleid door Ina Horlings van Rurale Sociologie.

Met het project ‘Participand’ wil COS/OIKOS diverse doelgroepen -migranten, (inter)nationale studenten en anderen actief op het gebied van duurzame internationale ontwikkeling- bijeenbrengen om ondersteuning te bieden, samenwerking te stimuleren en om de kwaliteit van de activiteiten door kruisbestuiving te verbeteren.

Het onderzoek bestaat uit twee delen; inzichtelijk maken van wat er op dit gebied gebeurt in Wageningen en omgeving en hoe dit functioneert. Om vervolgens aanbevelingen te genereren voor een faciliteit die de verschillende initiatiefnemers in staat stelt hun werk te verbeteren door interactie met zusterorganisaties van verschillende oorsprong en culturele afkomst.

Het project omvat literatuuronderzoek, inventarisatie van initiatieven, interviews maar ook het organiseren van groepsbijeenkomsten met de verschillende initiatieven in samenwerking met de projectleider.

We zoeken een (Nederlands sprekende) masterstudent die zijn of haar afstudeeronderzoek op dit terrein wil doen. Het onderzoek start bij voorkeur rond half september.

Meer informatie tot 12 augustus bij Ina Horlings: lummina.horlings@wur.nl of 06-51126725; of na 8 augustus bij Margriet Goris: 06-28109539 (cocreation@live.nl).

Conference Call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society

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A major demographic milestone occurred in May 2007. For the first time in the history of mankind the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will continue in an accelerated pace in the forthcoming decades: the growth of the world population from 6 billion people in 2000 to 9 billion people in 2050 will mainly occur in urban areas. By 2050 the urban population will approximately be twice the size of the rural population.

However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become of greater importance than rural areas. On the contrary, the urban and the rural have always heavily relied on each other and will do so even more in an era characterized by rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity, and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these urban necessities and desires. Hence, key questions for the next decades are how, where and by whom these urban necessities and desires will be produced and provided and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.

In recent years the concept of multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important reference in debates on the future of agriculture and the countryside and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of the agro-industry, but needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical concerns. At farm level multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for elderly and disabled people, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).

Due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture, research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, disciplinarily as well as geographically. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars of different disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc…) from all parts of the world.

Working group themes
The conference facilities allow for a maximum of 21 parallel working group sessions. The scientific committee has proposed 21 working group themes (see http://www.agricultureinanurbanizingsociety.com/UK/Working+group+themes/)   and is inviting prospective working group convenors to submit a short (max 500 words) call text for the theme they would like to convene. Proposals for a working group call text can be send to the chair of the scientific committee by email (han.wiskerke@wur.nl) before the 1st of September 2011. The deadline for submission of abstracts will be 1st of December 2011. Abstracts will have to be submitted to the convenors.

More information

Please check the conference website for more information.

Support of Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (SOLINSA): new EU-funded project

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In March we had the kick-off  meeting of the EU-funded research project SOLINSA: Support of Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture. The website has been launched recently and provides information on the project and will publish reports of findings. At the front page of the website can find a link a flyer on the SOLINSA project.

Agriculture is in transition. Among others agriculture respond to market developments, policy reforms, consumers and societal concerns and more generally sustainability issues, but in various ways.  From a rather one-sided production perspective , agriculture has become many-sided or even versatile. This has in turn has implication for Agricultural Knowledge System (AKS), i.e. the formal education, research and advice directed to agriculture and its development and is reflected in the different tasks and roles AKS can and is asked to fulfill in the support of learning and innovation practiced in often less formalised networks (i.e. the LINSA’s). AKS is in transition too, with regard to the need of building versatile expertise as well in how its is formally organised and funded (private, public or mixed funding). This is core of what will be studied in SOLINSA: how AKS can support more effectively and efficiently learning and innovation networks for sustainable agriculture. For this purpose two Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (i.e. LINSA) of various kinds in the eight participating countries will be studied in depth. In the Netherlands for example the network of sustainable dairy farmers (www.duurzaamboerblijven.nl).

The Rural Sociology Group (RSO) and Communication and Innovation Studies (CIS) of Wageningen University jointly participate as a partner in SOLINSA. For information you can contact either Laurens.Klerkx@wur.nl (CIS), Frans.Hermans@wur.nl (CIS) or Dirk.Roep@wur.nl (RSO).

Citizens and animal farming… an ongoing debate…

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Over the last years I’ve been studying the socio-cultural sustainability of animal farming by looking at citizen perceptions in the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark of  two farming systems; dairy and pig production (see former blogs). The debate is ongoing and I am happy to see that an increasing number of researchers are actively involved in this field.

However,  I’ll be moving into another – also very interesting – field… also animal farming… also sustainability, but this time in Mozambique and smallholder goat production.  Hence, this is my final blog for Rural Sociology. From the 15th of June I’ll be working as post doctoral researcher for the International Livestock Research Institute (www.ilri.org) in Africa and India.

For those of you interested in the field of citizens and animal farming in Western societies,  below is a list of my publications, including two recently published papers. One paper includes the results of pig farm visits (see former blog), the other is a very compact review paper of my PhD thesis, only 9 pages…. Two other papers are published in open access journals, so I’ve included the link to the full paper for you. You’re free to use them (with correct reference of course) 🙂  

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Torri Superiore Ecovillage: resisting the abandonment of rural marginal areas in Italy

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 MSc-thesis by Alberto Giani

Modernization of agriculture has clearly shown not to be a viable solution for marginalized areas, while a mix of retro-innovation, fantasy and passion is showing a possible novel way forward for the re-utilization of abandoned areas and the revitalization of its socio-economic life.

Torri Superiore Ecovillage is such as case, that I studied in my MSc-thesis (click here for my full thesis report), part of my Master Organic Agriculture in Wageningen Univesity.

Torri Superiore Ecovillage can be defined as a bounded space re-created by in-migrants (new-rurals) that came and establish their lives in a place out from the mainstream society, utilizing external resources (both human resources and capital) and skills to revitalize through a neo-endogenous process the economic potential of a semi-abandoned low productive rural area.

Agriculture in a marginal area can rarely be a remunerative activity. In particular if an area has been abandoned for years and offers no opportunity for mechanization. Making a living in agriculture thus demands a break with the mainstream perspective on agricultural production. A capitalistic approach to land use, based on the integration in markets, is barely impossible in these areas. However from a different rural development approach still work can be created in the production of quality food remunerating a little salary to built a decent life, allowing people to live as much as possible in harmony with the environment without depleting it from its natural resources. Patrimonialization, broadening, deepening, re-grounding, creating local outlets are all strategies that can stimulate the rebirth of a local nested economy embedded in the territory, as is the case in Torri Superiore Ecovillage. This case represents a positive experiment in the restoration of economic efficiency in a marginal rural area.

Current policies discourses do stress the importance of creating proper conditions to make people stay in or return to marginal areas, but in practice the cost of the land, the bureaucracy and the taxes make it almost impossible for anybody to stay in marginal rural areas or for people without any experiences (so called new-rurals) to return to these areas.