Diana Cordoba

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Queen's University

Este capítulo apresenta questões acerca dos conflitos com violência lenta (Nixon, 2011) associados à água no município de Tailândia, no nordeste do estado do Pará. Mais especificamente na sub-bacia do Rio Auí-Açu, que ocupa aproximadamente metade do município de Tailândia, a porção oeste do município, concentrando a maior faixa demográfica ao largo...

Sociotechnical imaginaries of gene editing in food and agriculture reflect and shape culturally particular understandings of what role technology should play in an ideal agrifood future. This study employs a comparative media content analysis to identify sociotechnical imaginaries of agricultural gene editing and the actors who perform them in five...

The question of how to generate development while preserving the environment is central to the history of the Brazilian Amazon. Many decades of top-down state interventions conceived and executed under a developmentalist framework have resulted in a socio-environmental crisis. In response, the Sustainable Oil Palm Production Programme (SPOPP) was l...

This study examines how state mechanisms for water allocation and enforcement shape patterns of injustice in water management among various actors in the Brazilian state of Par´ a, particularly in the context of palm oil production expansion. Our aim is to broaden the analysis of agribusiness expansion and its impact on water resources beyond agric...

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is a prominent neoliberal, market-based environmental policy tool to promote conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) that has been applied since the late 1990s in both industrialized and developing countries. Recent studies have documented how PES programs do not actually function as market-base...

The question of how to generate development while preserving the environment is central to the history of the Brazilian Amazon. Many decades of top-down state interventions conceived and executed under a developmentalist framework have resulted in a socioenvironmental crisis. In response, the Sustainable Oil Palm Production Program (SPOPP) was laun...

Maps produced during the saga of European ‘discovery’ were shown to erase local forms of spatial knowledge of colonised populations to serve domination interests. This paper explores the continuation of this colonial erasing logic in local planning practices in Jamundí, a municipality where Black peasants’ traditional farms persist in a sugarcane d...

This paper examines how local institutions and family farming labor relations shift and reconfigure in response to The Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm (RSPO) certification in Brazil where demanding state regulations exist in a context of uneven enforcement. We use the concept of politics and practice of grounding to explore the Contract Farming...

As plantações de palma de dendê em grande escala (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) têm se expandido progressivamente em todo o mundo nas últimas décadas devido ao seu uso crescente nas indústrias de alimentos, cosméticos e biocombustíveis.9 Essa expansão trouxe visões contrastantes e polêmicas sobre as mudanças ambientais e sociais nas comunidades rurais.

Although renewable energy holds great promise in mitigating climate change, there are socioeconomic and ecological tradeoffs related to each form of renewable energy. Forest-related bioenergy is especially controversial, because tree plantations often replace land that could be used to grow food crops and can have negative impacts on biodiversity....

Discussions on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Andean region highlight authoritarian visions and economic interests taking advantage of the pandemic to profit and to reorganize dynamics of exploitation and accumulation. Less visible are the grassroots, organizational initiatives based on reciprocity that emerged across the region in res...

Scholarship on payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs have often overlooked the role of culture to explain important variations in local PES governance. This paper is a first stab at introducing Cultural Theory to analyze how different cultural worldviews for natural resource management (NRM) influence PROSAPIX, a local PES program, in Mexic...

Payments for ecosystem services have become common policy tools used by governments to mitigate the damaging impacts of threats to natural systems. Our transdisciplinary, international research team encompassed 35 interdisciplinary scientists, students, and non-academic partners who collectively studied the impacts that the Mexican government’s pay...

In this policy review, we analyze two payments for hydrological services matching programs operating in the Antigua water basin in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Mexico’s Matching Program was created to transition from the national payments for hydrological services program to programs that would be financed by local governments, local water users...

Fairtrade (FT) is one of the most well-known Alternative Trade Organizations (ATOs). The FT movement intends to develop mutually beneficial partnerships, support organizational capacity building, guarantee prices higher than market prices, and provide a social premium to finance community projects (Wunderlich, 2011). Millions of smallholders and fa...

This paper analyzes the politics of oil palm expansion and state intervention in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará. The Workers' Party (PT) envisioned moving away from previous neoliberal policies by using state support to facilitate the coexistence and synergetic nexus between the state, family farmers and agribusiness, through the Sustainable...

Scholarship on neo-extractivism agrees that this ‘post-neoliberal’ model of development is founded on an inherent contradiction between the commitment to continue natural resource extraction and the need to legitimize these activities by using their revenues for poverty reduction. Using the cases of the national biofuel policies of the ‘post-neolib...

Agricultural History, vol. 91, no. 3, 2017, pp. 442–444.

Using the case of agricultural research in Bolivia during the neoliberal period, this paper argues that there is a need to bring politics into science, but differentiates between two levels: politics as a mode of governance or a political project that shapes the scientific process (macro-politics), and politics as an eternal process of contestation...

Development cooperation between the “New Left” governments in Latin America and the World Bank shows the paradoxical and complex nature of social transformation processes initiated by these governments. Using the case of Bolivia, we analyse how the government of Evo Morales seeks to realise its political goals while introducing elements of neoliber...

This article engages with critiques of development intervention as de-politicizing, and with viewpoints that argue that politicization often neglects technological aspects. We examine how particular definitions of the political and technological field play a role in the growing conflict between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the so-calle...

The election of Morales – an indigenous and cocalero leader – and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party became the most important political milestone in Bolivia’s recent history. The MAS promised to represent the most excluded sectors of the country, challenging the foundations of liberal democracy and the economic development model promoted du...

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post-neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization...

Fungal disease epidemics have the potential to bring about drastic innovations. However, in the case of the Black Sigatoka (Mycosphaerella fijiensis) fungus in bananas, producers and international traders are still awaiting a breakthrough in crop protection research. Using the cases of Brazil and Colombia, this paper examines different agricultural...

Sweet cherry production is a newly developed and promising activity in Argentinian South Patagonia. Together with a rapid increase in area (from 176 ha in 1997 to 635 ha in 2009), problems related to productivity and commercialization have threatened its sustainability. To gain a collective understanding of the complexity of the cherry sector, a pa...

Sweet cherry production is a new activity in South Patagonia and its development has carried out profound changes in the local agrarian structure and in the regional economy. New actors, such as growers or investors, have emerged and specific demands of labour and services (with different degrees of specialization) have been brought out. Adaptation...

The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party promised to break with neoliberal politics when it rose to power in Bolivia in 2006. Using the concept of neocollectivism to characterize MAS agrarian politics, this paper examines one of its key instruments for achieving rural development: the state enterprise EMAPA. This state company, which supports sma...

Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a practical approach to planning, monitoring and evaluation, developed for use with complex research-for-development projects. PIPA begins with a participatory workshop where stakeholders make explicit their assumptions about how their project will make an impact, and produce an ‘Outcomes logic model...

An EU funded research project lead by INTA proposed a different approach to study and mitigate the un-sustainability of cherry production systems in Argentina. The approach denoted as`coas`co-innovationát farm level combined hard and soft systems approaches in a project management setting with continuous monitoring of project impact on and with sta...

The rise to power of the MAS government in Bolivia in 2006 clearly exposed the conflict between two participatory approaches for rural development. The first, a "new collectivism" approach led by the MAS government, favours a starring role of the State and the direct relation with grassroots organizations for social transformation. The second, led...