About
57
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Introduction
My research is at the crossroads of environmental science, geography and social anthropology. I engage with how people interact with the natural world, how they perceive this interaction, and how we can make environmental protection more socially just.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - December 2015
February 2012 - December 2014
March 2009 - February 2010
Education
January 2003 - November 2007
March 2000 - August 2000
September 1997 - November 2002
Publications
Publications (57)
This paper aims to deepen the search for ecosystem-like concepts in indigenous societies by highlighting the importance of place names used by Quechua indigenous farmers from the central Bolivian Andes. Villagers from two communities in the Tunari Mountain Range were asked to list, describe, map and categorize the places they knew on their communit...
We aim to explore how indigenous peoples observe and ascribe meaning to change. The case study involves two Quechua-speaking farmer communities from mountainous areas near Cochabamba, Bolivia. Taking climate change as a starting point, we found that, first, farmers often associate their observations of climate change with other social and environme...
Equity has become a major concern in efforts to conserve nature. However, in the Global South, inequitable social impacts of conservation usually prevail. We investigate barriers to equitable governance of four protected areas through an innovative approach linking the tri-dimensional framing of environmental justice with the notion of telecoupling...
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...
Reduced tillage, permanent ground cover and crop diversification are the three core pillars of Conservation Agriculture (CA). We assess and compare on-farm effects of different practices related to the three pillars of CA on maize yields under ENSO-driven rainfall variability in Kenya and Malawi. Reduced tillage practices increased yields per hecta...
Food systems contribute to multiple crises while failing to deliver healthy, nutritious food for all. A substantial amount of research suggests that the root cause of this issue lies in the complete integration of food systems within global capitalism and the consequent subordination of fairness and sustainability to profit accumulation. We draw on...
Wälder sind als zentrales Element der Landschaft (Waldlandschaften) von grosser Bedeutung für die Erreichung der Ziele für nachhaltige Entwicklung (SDGs) und spielen eine wichtige Rolle für die lokale Wirtschaft und die soziale Identität. Sie stehen aber gleichzeitig vor grossen Herausforderungen, indem sie durch Landnutzungsänderungen, steigende H...
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...
Climate change, land degradation, demographic change and persistent poverty pose major challenges to smallholder farmers in the arid and semi-arid lands of sub-Saharan Africa. Though many studies have focused on how resilient these households are to shocks, very few studies deal with how household resilience varies over time. We provide a longitudi...
Context
For nearly three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human well-being and livelihoods, communities, and economies in myriad ways with consequences for social-ecological systems across the planet. The pandemic represents a global shock in multiple dimensions that has already, and is likely to continue to have, far-reaching effects on...
Political ecology aims to highlight the power issues in society–environment relations and pays particular attention to the way environmental problems are formulated and how these formulations respond to different interests. This chapter reviews the various existing approaches that mobilize toponymy in the understanding of the human–environment rela...
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,...
Humans place strong pressure on land and have modified around 75% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. In this context, ecoregions and biomes, merely defined on the basis of their biophysical features, are incomplete characterizations of the territory. Land system science requires classification schemes that incorporate both social and biophysical dimen...
Declining land productivity remains a challenge for agriculture-based livelihoods and for achieving food security. Yet identifying how land users perceive land degradation and their capacity to manage land in an environmentally sustainable manner, can influence the measures initiated to address it. Using a case study of Niger State, Nigeria, this s...
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...
Persistent vulnerability of smallholder farmers to natural hazards and livelihood insecurity call for the identification of measures that enhance the resilience of their agriculture-dependent livelihoods. Without understanding how to secure smallholder livelihoods against adverse social-ecological dynamics, especially related to climate variability...
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...
Great efforts are made in Cuba to achieve a sustainable development that guarantees food security and energetic self-sufficiency, compatible with environmental protection. This purpose receives the contribution of the international project BIOMAS-CUBA, which has among its main objectives the promotion and implementation of sustainable agroenergetic...
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...
This chapter explores the concept of place interpreted from ecological knowledge and religious practices of rural indigenous people found from southern Peru to Bolivia and northern Chile and Argentina. Based on literature from this area as well as on field observations from Bolivia, I highlight the evidence of a culturally specific, widely shared a...
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...
One Health is an approach that integrates perspectives from human, animal and environmental health to address health challenges. As the idea of One Health is grounded in achieving sustainable outcomes, an important aspect is the contribution of One Health to social sustainability. In this chapter we ask, what social sustainability is, what the indi...
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...
Recent advances in land system science and in institutional analysis provide complementary, but still largely disconnected perspectives on land use change, governance, and sustainability in social-ecological systems, which are interconnected across distance. In this paper we bring together the emerging concept of telecoupled land systems and the es...
This article reviews the current status, trends and challenges of land system science in Latin America. We highlight the advances in the conceptualization, analysis and monitoring of land systems. These advances shift from a focus on the relationships between forests and other land uses to include a greater diversity of land cover and land-use type...
This study explores the relationships between forest cover change and the village resettlement and land planning policies implemented in Laos, which have led to the relocation of remote and dispersed populations into clustered villages with easier access to state services and market facilities. We used the Global Forest Cover Change (2000–2012) and...
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...
Great efforts are made in Cuba to achieve a sustainable development that guarantees food security and energetic self-sufficiency, compatible with environmental protection. This purpose receives the contribution of the international project BIOMAS-CUBA, which has among its main objectives the promotion and implementation of sustainable agroenergetic...
For centuries, Quechua farmers have been using their traditional knowledge to manage a high diversity of ecosystems in the Tunari mountain range, near the city of Cochabamba (Bolivia). This book provides an in-depth understanding of the relationships between cultural and biological diversity in the area by merging methods from ethnography and veget...
Great efforts are made in Cuba to achieve a sustainable development that guarantees food security and energetic self-sufficiency, compatible with environmental protection. This purpose receives the contribution of the international project BIOMAS-CUBA, which has among its main objectives the promotion and implementation of sustainable agroenergetic...
Biodiversity will only be conserved in the long term if local people are actively involved in planning and managing its conservation. However, in the four cases studied and presen-ted here, the management of protec-ted areas is still disputed, and local as well as external people continue to exploit their resources in an unsus-tainable way. Bolivia...
Combined approaches to conserve both biological and cultural diversity are seen as an alternative to classical nature conservation instruments. The objective of this study was to examine the influence of urbanization coupled with exclusive conservation measures, on land use, local knowledge and biodiversity in two Quechua speaking communities of Bo...
The project aims at exploring the relationships between
the diversity of social actors, socio-economic differentiation
and land tenure with land use and land cover change
in the context of land reforms in Bolivia and in the Lao
PDR. Furthermore, it will produce a methodology to identify
“critical zones” in land use governance.
Este documento presenta un resumen del proyecto de investigación
con la comunidad campesina de Chorojo (Provincia Quillacollo,
Cochabamba) desarrollada en el marco de un convenio entre el
programa Agroecología Universidad Cochabamba (AGRUCO) de la
Universidad Mayor de San Simón (UMSS) y el Centro para el Desarrollo
y el Medio Ambiente (CDE) de la U...
While degrowth is about reducing energy and material flows in the economy while sustaining basic human needs, capitalism fosters the opposite trend. How then is degrowth to be implemented on a large scale? In line with different critical intellectual traditions, we argue that degrowth is unlikely to occur within an economy based on capital accumula...
The objective of the study was to define a typology of integrated food and energy production systems with agroecological approach, in Cuba. The results are based on a preliminary evaluation of the performance of integrated farms belonging to the international project Biomas-Cuba. A methodology is described which can be helpful as basis for future e...
Endogenous knowledge has become an important component of bottom-up approaches to strengthening sustainable development processes. After reviewing the rise of the paradigm of endogenous development, we highlight how research within the framework of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South has contributed to the advance...
The objective of the study was to define a typology of integrated food and energy production systems with agroecological approach, in Cuba. The results are based on a preliminary evaluation of the performance of integrated farms belonging to the international project Biomas-Cuba. A methodology is described which can be helpful as basis for future e...
Co-production of knowledge between academic and non-academic communities is a prerequisite for research aiming at more sustainable
development paths. Sustainability researchers face three challenges in such co-production: (a) addressing power relations;
(b) interrelating different perspectives on the issues at stake; and (c) promoting a previously...
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...
Recognition of the limitations of the traditional 'fortress approach' to gov-ernance 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 t...
Diese Studie untersucht im mittleren Teil des Vallée de la Roya Vegetations-Sukzessionen auf terrassiertem Kulturland und dessen soziokulturelle Bedeutung. Es wurden 14 Vegetationstypen unterschieden und in einem Sukzessionsmodell gruppiert. Auf den heute noch bewirtschafteten Terrassen hat es meist Olivenhaine oder Trockenwiesen. Bei fehlender Mah...
Questions
Questions (3)
I am looking for an inequality indicator that can be derived from the distribution of a population in five discrete poverty classes derived from the Latin American NBI (Necesidades Basicas Insatisfechas) methodology. The methodology ascribes each household of a locality (urban or rural) a "NBI index" in function of income, housing, education, etc. and then ascribe it to one of five "poverty classes" , etc, which are "non-poor, poverty line, moderate poverty, indigent, marginal". I have only data on the number of households per class per locality, not the NBI index per household.
I would like to extract and plot the probability of binary (1/0) raster values (e.g. from a forest/non-forest dataset) in function of an overlapping raster of continuous value (e.g. accessibility dataset) for a given area. Any ArcGIS or QGis function / script available?
When mosaicked together (in ArcGIS 9.3., 10.0 or 10.1), land cover rasters get shifted of about one pixel. This introduces a bias in the thematic change analysis between two temporal datasets. How can I avoid this shift?
