Luis E. García-Barrios

• PhD.
• Senior Researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur

What influences individuals' decisions to adopt sustainable land-use practices? The drivers of such complex decisions are manyfold. We develop a conceptual framework of the predictors that are external (contextual), related to the innovation, and internal or intrinsic to individuals. This framework can guide the design and evaluation of policies to...

Preliminary results of my posdoctoral reseach

27 numbers of a periodical publication that visibilizes a joint effort of farmers, social organizations, government and academics to make clear that in Mexico WE DO HAVE ALTERNATIVES for ECOLOGICAL WEED MANAGEMENT and DO NOT NEED GLIFOSATE AND OTHER TOXIC HERBICIDES IMPOSED BY INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL CORPORATE BUSSINESS

Herbicide use as the main driver to control weeds is increasingly being questioned. Several countries have adopted policies to control the use of herbicides, challenging multiple actors to restore, expand, or develop alternative solutions for weed management that consider the specific needs of each agroecosystem. Testing alternative weed management...

In order to understand how indigenous communities in the Amazon make decisions regarding territory and reach agreements regulating use of natural resources in the face of extractive economies, an experimental ethnography was carried out involving design and implementation of a serious board game. “Managing the Territory” is a thematic group game wh...

Los sistemas agroalimentarios locales se caracterizan por la diversidad de actores, prácticas y conocimientos, así como por las formas en que se configuran a partir de escalas y geografías, dando lugar a múltiples expresiones y escenarios de análisis, discusión y reivindicación. Al respecto, los principales aportes y propuestas se han centrado tant...

Esta experiencia surge de la necesidad que hay en el medio rural de educar a los niños y niñas favoreciendo el desarrollo de una consciencia crítica, capaz de incorporar valores como la compasión hacia los seres sintientes, llámense animales, plantas o seres humanos, y también, del deseo de emprender acciones de cooperación para dignificar la vida...

Con el objetivo de comprender cómo las comunidades indígenas de la Amazonía toman decisiones sobre el territorio y llegan a acuerdos que regulen el uso de recursos naturales ante la influencia de economías extractivas, se llevó a cabo una etnografía experimental que incluyó el diseño e implementación de un juego de mesa. “Manejando el Territorio” e...

Resumen: En el medio rural hay discontinuidades en los conocimientos de lo que es vivir en la frontera agroforestal entre los padres, madres, hijos e hijas, algunas causas de esta pérdida, el abandono del campo por políticas neoliberales, el sistema escolarizado y la migración laboral. Por esto, analizar la recuperación y socialización del conocimi...

Resumen: min el medio rural hay discontinuidades en los conocimientos de lo que es vivir en la fronteraagroforestal entre los padres, madres, hijos e hijas, algunas causas de esta pérdida, el abandono delcampo por políticas neoliberales, el sistema escolarizado y la migración laboral. Por esto, analiza larecuperación y socialización del conocimient...

En este capítulo se ilustra cómo, a través de actividades creativas con fuerte componente científico, se diseñan e implementan, con la participación activa de la población rural, juegos de mesa serios en tanto herramientas lúdicas para la investigación ecológica, socioambiental, cultural y productiva de territorios campesinos en los trópicos. En el...

Recently, Mexico has launched policies of agroecological transition that seek to foster healthier agri-food systems. One of these policies is the reduction and eventual elimination of glyphosate by 2024. Despite being the most used herbicide in Mexico and the world, little information exists about what factors determine a greater or reduced use of...

Recently, Mexico has launched policies of agroecological transition that seek to foster healthier agri-food systems. One of these policies is the reduction and eventual elimination of glyphosate by 2024. Despite being the most used herbicide in Mexico and the world, little information exists about what factors determine a greater or reduced use of...

Sustainable farming near tropical forests can buffer ecosystems at risk of biodiversity loss. In mountainous forest frontiers however, many smallholders raise cattle using practices that degrade land, also endangering future livelihoods. Silvopasture, a type of agroforestry, enables cattle farming, biodiversity conservation and can have climate ben...

Seasonal food scarcity during pre-harvest months is, widely, considered to be the principal manifestation of food insecurity, for some 600 million members of smallholder families, who rely on a variety of coping strategies. This paper analyses both the peasant-economy variables that explain the presence and intensity of seasonal food scarcity, and...

CONTEXT The ecosystem services (ES) concept has brought together research on ecosystems, biodiversity and human well-being, but critical challenges remain to make ES operational. ES assessments are relevant tools in multi-purpose landscapes, such as agricultural landscapes situated within natural protected areas where the challenge is to meet both...

Los agroecosistemas (AES), como su nombre lo expresa, son sistemas ecológicos modificados continuamente para la producción de alimentos, así como de otros bienes y servicios. En las transformaciones que los humanos generamos hacia los ecosistemas con fines principalmente agroalimentarios intervienen no solo procesos técnicos de manejo, sino también...

Abstract Traditional silvopastoral systems consist of animals feed in pastures with a tree gradient ranging from pastures with live fences, with shrubs and/or fallows, with scattered trees and within forested areas. We assess the environmental traits of traditional silvopastoral systems (TSS) owned and managed by 117 small and medium sized cattle...

The influence of private financing on ecological conservation has grown in recent years, but little is known about the actual links between large-scale development projects, public-private contractual arrangements, and community-based conservation. We analyze the political economy of such links by considering a conservation area under management by...

Absolute yield and land use efficiency can be higher in multicrops. Though this phenomenon is common, it is not always the case. Also, these two benefits are frequently confused and do not necessarily occur together. Cropping choices become more complex when considering that multicrops are subject to strong spatial and temporal variation in average...

Analizamos el efecto que el régimen socioambiental predominante en un Área Natural Protegida tiene sobre la gobernanza y sobre la reproducción económica de los grupos domésticos rurales de dos ejidos en la Reserva de la Biósfera La Sepultura (REBISE), Chiapas. Desarrollamos una investigación transdisciplinaria mediante el esquema conceptual de los...

La Agroecología y las Ciencias de la Complejidad surgieron en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En tanto campos académicos en construcción y de frontera, ambas enfrentan los retos de continuar reflexionando sobre sus bases epistémicas, explorar enfoques metodológicos novedosos y robustecer sus corpus a través de casos de estudio de distinta naturaleza...

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) and related conceptual frameworks like the cascade model, can be relevant to explore the ways through which people and nature are connected and how the benefits of nature, upon which people depend, are realised. An integrated cascade framework was used to study the ES pathway of pine resin, a traded forest pro...

Since the 1990s, many of neoliberalism's policies for growth and development have contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for rural peasants who are marginalized and unwilling or unable to abandon their lands. In every nation in which this phenomenon is prevalent, the resulting impoverishment of rural peasants has motivated numerous a...

Since the 1990s, many of neoliberalism's policies for growth and development have contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for rural peasants who are marginalized and unwilling or unable to abandon their lands. In every nation in which this phenomenon is prevalent, the resulting impoverishment of rural peasants has motivated numerous a...

Por más de tres años (2015-2018), en el marco del proyecto “Agricultura familiar: afrontando la complejidad de su adaptación al contexto globalizado”, un equipo de Investigadores de El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ecosur), la Universidad Autónoma Chapingo (uach) y la Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas (unach), con vasta experiencia en investigación par...

En la frontera sur de México han existido y existen proce- sos en los que la participación social es muy importante para que las colectividades logren los objetivos que se han trazado. Por ejemplo, el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacio- nal busca su autonomía, las organizaciones de productores de café, cacao o de otros productos agrícolas se ha...

El libro presenta el análisis de las estrategias de vida desplegadas por grupos domésticos rurales de la frontera sur de México, en el contexto de las políticas neoliberales que han dominado la vida nacional durante las dos últimas décadas. Los estudios de caso se realizaron en los territorios de cinco grupos étnicos: lacandones de Lacanjá Chansaya...

En este capítulo nos enfocaremos en la actividad agrícola que realizan en propiedades de pequeña y mediana extensión los grupos domésticos rurales de Chiapas, como parte de su proceso de reproducción social en el régimen neoliberal. Entenderemos la agricultura del grupo doméstico rural (gdr) en sentido amplio: abarca lo agrícola, pecuario, forestal...

En las últimas tres décadas los estudios rurales se han orientado hacia investigaciones disciplinarias que tratan de explicar los comportamientos individualizados de los campesinos en un escenario neoliberal. En cambio, en este capítulo proponemos que en la frontera sur de México algunos grupos domésticos rurales aún desarrollan estrategias colecti...

Este capítulo busca ubicar en un plano privilegiado de análisis y reflexión los grupos domésticos rurales, en términos de lo que actualmente son y lo que hacen para lograr su reproducción social, tarea esencial para entender la agricultura familiar contemporánea en el marco del régimen neoliberal que impone límites a las acciones de dichos grupos....

The present study aims to analyze the role of traditional knowledge in territorial autonomy and environmental governance, as well as the level of interest of different indigenous and non-indigenous actors in the southern Colombian Amazon in applying traditional knowledge to public policy. Using the theoretical approaches of political ecology as wel...

Understanding traditional livestock management is essential in the design of more sustainable systems, given the forest loss associated to the growing demand for meat. In Latin America, where extensive livestock production is increasing, along with tropical dry forest (TDF) transformation, the role of small holders is critical for designing more su...

In this chapter, we analyze the reasons why local socio-environmental systems have met in a limited way the purpose of balancing conservation with development in the Upper Basin of the Tablón River (UBTR), located in La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve (SEBIRE). The study used a transdisciplinary exercise which conceives the Local Socio-Environmental Sy...

Ecosystem service (ES) assessments, which make an explicit link between nature and people’s well-being, can support the management of natural protected areas that face complex and persistent sustainability challenges. We present a case study of ES supply in a biosphere reserve community in southern Mexico. We aimed to identify stakeholder-relevant...

In recent years, rural studies have transitioned from analyzing internal agrarian dynamics within peasant societies to exploring contractual relationships in a vertical manner between agribusiness and peasants with respect to food production and marketing. The present study follows the tradition of classical agrarian research in order to develop an...

Se ofrecen métodos participativos para trabajar con familias rurales

We report on 10 years of participatory research processes linking livelihoods, agroforestry, and conservation in the La Sepultura Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico. These processes entail both cooperation and conflict between farmers and external actors who try to create and/or prevent the collapse of “nature-friendly” land use...

Los pobladores que viven sin reconocimiento agrario en las reservas de la biosfera construyen identidades, enfrentan conflictos, desafíos internos y externos para construir su territorio, los cuales dificultan la regularización agraria. Los campesinos de Los Laureles buscan asegurar su permanencia en el territorio refuncionalizando de manera contin...

This article reflects on a participatory research that led to the design and use of a board game with indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of the “Juego de Chagras” is to produce, process and market food, and in its execution, decision making involves the players in discussions and analysis of the studied phenomenon. The strateg...

In agricultural landscapes, management practices and other environmental and social factors shape complex agroecological matrices. In turn, the structure of such matrices impacts both agricultural activities and biodiversity conservation, for instance, by mediating wildlife migration between agricultural and habitat patches. One way to characterize...

Browsing of forest frontiers by cattle in sub-tropical landscapes is detrimental to ecosystem health, but essential to smallholder livelihoods. We described a silvopastoral landscape, searching for browsed plants to assess how much of the forest is actually used for this end, and also searching for potential new useful species for silvopastoral pur...

This article reflects on a participatory research that led to the design and use of a board game with indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon. The goal of the "Juego de Chagras" is to produce, process and market food, and in its execution, decision making involves the players in discussions and analysis of the studied phenomenon. The players' str...

En este capítulo del libro Familia y vida campesina en la frontera sur: caminos de escucha transdisciplinarios, Cruz-Morales, Juana (editora) se describe el juego Sendero de la vida lacandona diseñado como parte del proyecto Multidisciplinario y Transversal Agricultura Familiar: Afrontando la Complejidad de su Adaptación al Contexto Globalizado (PR...

Abstract. This work is part of the initiatives of a multidisciplinary and transversal project aimed at fostering communication with and between rural domestic groups in Chiapas and some other localities in the Southern Border region, about the ways in which these groups are responding to the processes of neoliberal globalization of the society and...

Abstract. This work is part of the initiatives of a multidisciplinary and transversal project aimed at fostering communication with and between rural domestic groups in Chiapas and some other localities in the Southern Border region, about the ways in which these groups are responding to the processes of neoliberal globalization of the society and...

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el modo en que una experiencia de trabajo asociativo incorpora las necesidades e intereses de las unidades domésticas de sus asociados/as en el marco de la disminución de inversión social en el campo. En cuanto a la metodología, se realizó una investigación cualitativa que retoma aspectos del método etnográf...

Las áreas naturales protegidas como instrumentos de conservación de los ecosistemas han ido cobrando mayor importancia ante los organismos internacionales; sin embargo, varias de estas zonas de protección son frecuentemente establecidas sobre territorios ya habitados. Este artículo aborda las implicaciones del decreto de la Reserva de la Biosfera L...

Win-win solutions might be short-lived. Government permission for smallholder farmers to extract and sell resin from a pine savanna biosphere-reserve in Mexico has settled a long dispute among different stakeholders in the short-term; however, forest production and conservation beyond 20 years are compromised due to low pine recruitment caused by c...

TRUE GRASP (Tree Recruitment Under Exotic GRAsses in a Savanna-Pineland) is a socio-ecological agent-based model (ABM) and role playing game (RPG) for farmers and other stakeholders involved in rural landscape planning. The purpose of this model is to allow actors to explore the individual and combined effects - as well as tradeoffs - of three meth...

Este libro describe la construcción de un estudio socioecológico participativo que explora formas para integrar a los actores locales y regionales en el proceso de toma de decisión y aprendizaje colectivo del manejo del bosque a partir de modelación acompañante. Se utiliza como ejemplo la resinación de Pinus oocarpa en dos ejidos de la Reserva de l...

The Supplementary Material S1–8 contains all necessary files to be able to play the Alaotra Wetland Game after printing the game components. The game is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, i.e., you can use, share and adapt the material under the condition that you indicate changes and give appropriate credit; we rec...

Human induced savannas in subtropical regions are often favored by smallholder farmers for livestock production and extraction of wood or non-wood products. Frequent burning and grazing are required to maintain the savanna vegetation structure. However, in conservation areas, fire suppression is promoted to avoid wild-fires; whereas domestic livest...

A majority of Madagascar's rural people depend on the primary sector. The country's agricultural hub, the Alaotra-Mangoro region, is mainly tied to fisheries and rice production. Increasing human population and decreasing output from fisheries and agriculture are pushing the rural resource users further into the protected marshlands. Understanding...

Resumen Quienes realizamos investigación ecológica forestal y agroforestal reconocemos crecientemente la indisoluble interacción entre los procesos ecológicos y sociales, y nos vamos sumando a los esfuerzos de investigación multi- y transdisciplinaria y de acción entre múltiples actores sociales. Esto ha modificado en diversos sentidos y grados nue...

Policies on firefighting within protected natural areas have shifted from a suppression approach to one of fire management, which has had consequences for the practices and perspectives of peasant populations. The study poses the question of how regulation, restriction and prohibition on the use and management of fire, whose objective is conservati...

Small-scale coffee farmers understand certain complex ecological processes, and successfully navigate some of the challenges emerging from the ecological complexity on their farms. It is generally thought that scientific knowledge is able to complement farmers’ knowledge. However, for this collaboration to be fruitful, the gap between the knowledge...

Acknowledging the diversity of preferences, goals and motivations of individuals is key to promote the effectiveness of incentive-based conservation interventions. This paper analyses the heterogeneity of motivations to adopt silvopastoral practices, a social-ecological innovation for soil conservation and carbon emission reduction. We use Q method...

Many studies have considered community-based forestry enterprises to be the best option for development of rural Mexican communities with forests. While some of Mexico’s rural communities with forests receive significant economic and social benefits from having a community forestry enterprise, the majority have not formed such enterprises. The purp...

In this paper, we present a framework and a methodology to identify the long-term strategies of small-scale farmers dealing with uncertainties. To do so, we link the Activity System framework to the concept of perceived vulnerability and analyse the small-scale farmers' trajectories. Based on a sample of 34 small-scale coffee producers in Guatemala...

The current and potential relationship of contemporary rural youth with the agricultural and natural patrimony (PAN, according to its Spanish initials) that they will inherit is little known, but vitally important. In this study, we designed, adapted, and evaluated a variety of socio-environmental learning tools in order to identify and reflect on...

Shade-grown, montane coffee agroforestry systems have the potential to conserve native tree species of conservation concern (CC) and typical of old growth or late succession (LS) forests in montane cloud forests. However, it remains unclear how preferential selection by farmers for or against certain tree species and diameter sizes affects CC and L...

In agroforestry systems, the survival of shade trees is often the result of farmers' deliberate selection. Therefore, how communities generate knowledge and apply it to resource management practices influence the potential for biodiversity conservation of agroforestry systems. In this study, we investigated the use of knowledge by farmers to manage...

The lives of poor landowners in tropical mountains depend upon their collective capacity to create and coordinate social preferences derived from their interacting communalistic, hierarchical, and reciprocal exchanges. External actors currently contend for these territories under market rules that are modifying such preferences. We present the desi...

Background/Question/Methods Land use targeted towards maximizing a single provisioning ecosystem service causes declines in supporting and regulating ecosystem services at the cost of livelihood diversification, ecosystem resilience and human well-being. For holistic land use decisions thorough understanding is required on complex socio-environme...

Advances in molecular biology, remote sensing, systems biology, bioinformatics, non-linear science, the physics of complex systems and other fields have rendered a great amount of data that remain to be integrated into models and theories that are capable of accounting for the complexity of ecological systems and the evolutionary dynamics of life....

Agroforestry is considered a promising alternative to conventional agriculture that can both conserve biodiversity and support local livelihoods. Coffee agroforestry may be particularly important for sustaining trees of conservation concern and late-successional stage, but this possibility remains unclear. Here, we examined whether coffee agrofores...

This article constructs a map on the translation of knowledge concerning cervical cancer, based on citation networks analysis and the use of Gene Ontology terms and Medical Subject Headings. We identified two areas of research that are poorly interconnected and differ in structure, content, and evolution. One focuses on causes of cancer and the oth...

En este trabajo construimos un mapa de la traducción del conocimiento sobre cáncer cervicouterino, basado en el análisis de redes de citación y en el uso de términos del “Gene Ontology” y del Medical Heading Subject. Identificamos dos campos de investigación sobre cáncer cervicouterino, pobremente conectados entre sí, que difieren en estructura, co...

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in L...

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in L...

Background / Purpose: Small-scale farmers frequently have diverse farming systems because they perceive that biodiversity benefit them. Sometimes, the ecosystem services provided by biodiversity are fairly obvious, but other times they are hard to grasp. For example, complex interactions that involve many indirect actions can not be discern with...

Clearing forests and transforming them into agricultural land contributes significantly to soil degradation and loss. This process has been tracked for two major consecutive land use changes that occurred over the past 50 years in an ejido in the buffer zone of the La Sepultura Reserve: the transitions from forest to cornfields and from the latter...

In order to obtain evidence for the development of research policies that helps people to get the benefits from basic biomedical research, it is required to understand how the knowledge translation process (KTP) is deployed in the citation network between research papers. In recent years, studies based on citation network analysis aimed at mapping...

Sustainability assessment oriented to improve current systems and practices is urgently needed, particularly in the context of small farmer natural resource management systems (NRMS). Unfortunately, social-ecological systems (SES) theory, sustainability evaluation frameworks, and assessment methods are still foreign not only to farmers but to many...

We analyzed the livelihoods of cattle raising families in three different cases in the municipality of Villaflores, Chiapas (Mexico); particularly, the level of patrimony poverty and the possibilities for transitioning conventional cattle production units (cpu) toward organic production. Information was obtained through direct observation as well a...

Aggregated small-scale, intensive cattle-farming in the tropical forest frontier is a threat to primary forests which are host for a vast biological diversity. Land use and livelihood decisions directly impact habitat conservation dynamics and the availability of local natural resources (Brock et al. 2009). However, household level decision-making...

Abstract. In the recent past, innovation in Mexican rural areas was seen mainly as adoption of technology aimed at increasing crop, livestock and forestry yields and profits, with little or no consideration of its social and environmental impacts. It is increasingly accepted that many types of crisis are in course in rural México (and rural territo...

Abstract. One of the challenges faced for the udo of the Sustainable Livelihoods framework is the operationalization of the process to carry it out and properly apply the research methods. In our case, we resorted to combining the participatory method with the survey technique. The participatory method used was the community workshop, which was acc...

Abstract: Designers of recent international policies expect positive food-security effects of non-agricultural employment and income in poor rural areas. Researchers examine the effects of non-agricultural income sources on caloric intake of rural Mayan families of Northern Campeche, Mexico. Nutritional, economic and social information was obtained...