Patrick Bottazzi

Universität Bern | UniBe · Institute of Geography

Agroecological farming is widely considered to reconcile improved working and living conditions of farmers while promoting social, economic, and ecological sustainability. However, most existing research primarily focuses on relatively narrow trade-offs between workload, economic and ecological outcomes at farm level and overlooks the critical role...

In Senegal, the transition towards agroecology is hindered by a precarious balance between traditional agricultural policies and efforts towards a more environmentally friendly agriculture. The majority of policies remain oriented towards a productivist agriculture. The impact of international initiatives also remains limited Although NGOs support...

Work time reductions (WTRs) may contribute to a transition to a post-growth society. We analysed Swiss stakeholders’ perceptions of the effects of WTRs and their support for measures to implement them. It is assumed that public support will play a significant role in putting WTRs into practice.There is some scientific evidence that work time reduct...

Participatory guarantee systems (PGS) are locally-embedded guarantee systems that allegedly empower local smallholders. Although PGS are often implemented in the realm of labour-intensive agroecological farming, empirical evidence about their labour implications remains sparse. This article addresses this gap by providing data from anthropological...

This book explores Critical Sustainability Sciences, a new field of scientific inquiry into sustainability issues. It builds on a highly novel integration of elements from relational ontologies, critical theory, political ecology, and intercultural philosophy in support of emancipatory perspectives on sustainability and development. Critical Susta...

Development actors in West Africa have been promoting agroecological farming as a solution to combat climate change and to create more sovereign food systems that enhance the autonomy of local smallholders. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence regarding the actual implementation of such programs and their potential to empower smallholders...

Labor conditions and rights are a key justice issue in agri-food systems, particularly in global, capitalized and industrialized food supply chains. While alternative food networks have emerged to produce and distribute food outside these logics, their ability to provide more equitable work conditions remains widely debated. We examine equity issue...

The conversion of tropical forests to croplands and grasslands is a major threat to global biodiversity, climate and local livelihoods and ecosystems. The enforcement of protected areas as well as the clarification and strengthening of collective and individual land property rights are key instruments to curb deforestation in the tropics. However,...

This paper presents some results of the research project "Participation, conservation and livelihoods: Evaluating the effectiveness of participatory approaches in protected areas" undertaken in 2006-08, in an interdisciplinary and interagency team (IUCN, UNESCO-MAB, IRD and IHEID). Amid various mechanisms designed to reduce or halt biodiversity ero...

Political ontology reveals the processes of domination at play in the enactment of realities in a(post-) colonial context. In this article, we illustrate the implications of the power asymmetries inherent in conservation and co-management of protected areas involving Indigenous populations. We do so by exploring the case of Pilón Lajas in the Boliv...

In the northern coastal region in Senegal, called the Niayes region, vegetable producers face increasing water stress. This has initiated a poverty trap of family farms without the means to adapt to decreasing water levels. As a result, family farms start to abandon their land. This process is further driven by a multitude of complex interacting dr...

Senegal is among the few African countries that counts with an important agroecological movement. This movement is strongly backed up by a network of transnational partnerships and has recently matured into an advocacy coalition that promotes an agroecological transition at national scale. In this article, we investigate the role of transnational l...

Agroecology has become an ideological foundation for social and environmental transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. In Senegal, agroecological advocacy coalitions, made up of farmers’ organizations, scientists, NGOs, and IOs, are using agroecology as an umbrella concept for proposing policy changes at multiple scales. We describe the history of the...

Agroecological farming has long been described as more fulfilling than conventional agriculture, in terms of farmers’ labour and sense of autonomy. These assumptions must be reconsidered with adequate theoretical perspectives and with the empirical experience of recent studies. This paper introduces the concept of channels of labour control in agri...

In semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa, farming populations face harsh climatic conditions but also very unequal and dynamic social processes that affect their resilience. This study addresses aspects of power and social justice related to the social-ecological system of the Niayes coastal region of Senegal and examines the potential of agroecology to imp...

Conservation science needs more high‐quality impact evaluations, especially ones that explore mechanisms of success or failure. Randomized control trials (RCTs) provide particularly robust evidence of the effectiveness of interventions (although they have been criticized as reductionist and unable to provide insights into mechanisms), but there hav...

Engaging with normative questions in land system science is a key challenge. This debate paper highlights the potential of incorporating elements of environmental justice scholarship into the evolving telecoupling framework that focuses on distant interactions in land systems. We first expose the reasons why environmental justice matters in underst...

There is growing use of economic incentives such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) to encourage sustainable land management. An important critique is that such approaches may unintentionally disrupt environmental and social values, ‘crowding out’ pre-existing motivations to conserve. Some scholars suggest that the use of in-kind payments and...

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment through which it promotes a vision of the world and the relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use three themes to demonstrate these lin...

Food insecurity remains a major concern for numerous rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa who rely on agriculture as their main source of livelihood. The assessment of the links between food security and livelihoods is central for overcoming widespread food insecurity. However, assessments remain challenging due to food security's multi-dimension...

Going to work has become such a ritualized activity for the modern human that few people challenge its relevance from a sustainability perspective. Since the Industrial Revolution, the prospect of unlimited growth with the aim of jobs creation has been dramatically associated with a massive social-ecological degradation that puts the Earth system a...

Neoclassical economic interpretations of Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which assume that participants weigh up costs and benefits, are making room for more complex analyses. However, there is still little evidence of how PES programmes interact with existing motivations to conserve, the extent to which funded conservation is additional,...

Flooding disasters in urban and suburban Dakar have been prioritised in various policy actions over the last two decades. Our research aimed to generate a historical overview of the progressive transformations of flood governance in Dakar. We found that flood governance policies have gone through three main phases, each representing a paradigm shif...

In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that emb...

In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embr...

Neoclassical economic interpretations of Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which assume that participants weigh up costs and benefits, are making room for more complex analyses. However, there is still little evidence of how PES programmes interact with existing motivations to conserve, the extent to which funded conservation is additional,...

Migration from the Bolivian Altiplano to the Amazonian lowlands poses a number of challenges related to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. Alto Beni, located in the Bolivian Yungas at the interface between two altitudinal zones, is a critical area in this respect. Unsustainable land use practices are leading to soil erosion, sha...

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘inst...

Cocoa production in Alto Beni, Bolivia, is a major source of income and is severely affected by climate change impacts and other stress factors. Resilient farming systems are thus important for local families. This study compares indicators for social-ecological resilience in 30 organic and 22 non-organic cocoa farms of Alto Beni. Organic farms had...

The aim of this paper is to explore possible links between forest cover change and characteristics of social-ecological systems at sub-national scale based mainly on census data. We assessed relationships between population density, poverty, ethnicity, accessibility and forest cover change during the last decade for four regions of Bolivia and the...

The first part summarises the origins, definitions and debates around the general notions of development, culture and associated more specific concepts such as identity, tradition, exogenous and endogenous knowledge, institutions, governance or territoriality. A second part highlights how culture and development got related to the debates around su...

Lands inhabited by indigenous peoples often have low population density but abundant natural resources. For those reasons, many actors have historically attempted to occupy those lands or use the resources in them. Increasing pressures over lands occupied by indigenous peoples have resulted in the awakening of indigenous peoples over their rights t...

Agricultural and forest productive diversification depends on multiple socioeconomic drivers—like knowledge, migration, productive capacity, and market—that shape productive strategies and influence their ecological impacts. Our comparison of indigenous and settlers allows a better understanding of how societies develop different diversification st...

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community-level institutions regulate t...

Depuis le début des années 1980, la Bolivie connaît de profondes réformes politico-territoriales. Ces réformes ont permis aux peuples autochtones ainsi qu’aux populations migrantes andines de sécuriser des millions d’hectares de terres forestières dans les parties amazoniennes du pays. Elles ont aussi entraîné une transformation parfois radicale de...

Cocoa-based small-scale agriculture is the most important source of income for most farming families in the region of Alto Beni in the sub-humid foothills of the Andes. Cocoa is grown in cultivation systems of varying ecological complexity. The plantations are highly susceptible to climate change impacts. Local cocoa producers mention heat waves, d...

Previous studies have shown that collective property rights offer higher flexibility than individual property and improve sustainable community-based forest management. Our case study, carried out in the Beni department of Bolivia, does not contradict this assertion, but shows that collective rights have been granted in areas where ecological conte...

Agrarian reform cannot be limited to a linear process of land distribution. It involves a societal restructuration that affects power relations, multi-level governance structures, the (re)spatialization of juridical legitimacy and symbolic boundaries between sociocultural groups (ethnicity). This paper analyses the consequences of the major Bolivia...

In development studies with a focus on livelihoods, assets (also referred to as resources, capital, or means) represent a crucial dimension that influences people’s ability to secure a livelihood. Lack of access to land, water, or education often leads to poverty. The present paper summarises research findings from an international research network...

Recognition of the limitations of the traditional ‘fortress approach’ to governance of protected areas has led to a new model that seeks to reconcile environmental conservation with human development and promote participation by local populations. Based on a comparative analysis of four case studies in Bolivia and Peru, the present article shows th...

10 field studies (parks and biosphere reserves) on the links between participation, conservation and livelihoods in Latin America

The “territorial historicity” related to the Tsimane’ people living in the Bolivian lowlands is a complex process involving many governmental and nongovernmental actors. The initiative of evangelist missionary organisations at the beginning of the 1990s led to the formal recognition of two Tsimane’ territories. While one territory was given a doubl...

Biodiversity conservation policies are intrinsically related to ethnic issues in the Bolivian Amazon. The great social diversity that prevails in Bolivia is rooted in specific institutional arrangements according to categories which make the implementation of participatory mechanisms difficult to carry out. The present case study investigates the r...

Les peuples indigènes 1 sont réputés être « proches de la nature », en particulier depuis la conférence de Rio en 1992 et l'élargissement du « régime international de la biodiversité » (Hufty, 2001). Ils figurent de plus en plus dans les programmes de conservation ou de développement durable comme « gardiens de la biodiversité ». Cette idée corresp...

Résumé La ratification de la convention 169 de l'OIT par le gouvernement bolivien a donné lieu à l'adoption de nouveaux droits territoriaux pour les peuples indigènes qui résident dans le pays. Depuis le début des années 90, près de 19 millions d'hectares ont été accordés par décrets présidentiels à la majeure partie des groupes sociaux originaires...