Sergio Villamayor-Tomas’s research while affiliated with Autonomous University of Barcelona and other places

Este informe presenta los principales resultados de una encuesta realizada a diversas comunidades de regantes en España como parte del proyecto de investigación RECOUNT.

As food security becomes a growing concern in urban areas worldwide, municipal authorities are actively seeking ways to enhance and complement the food systems of their respective cities. Integrating a food system’s productive components within city limits has emerged as a promising strategy to achieve these goals. However, it is impractical to undertake urban agriculture to the extent of rural agriculture, such as livestock rearing and large-scale field crop production, due to insufficient and inadequate space within cities. Producing high-value crops, however, is feasible and already practiced in many urban areas around the world within community gardens. This study investigates the agronomic practices and organizational aspects of community gardens within Barcelona’s municipal boundaries. It does so through surveys of community garden members and visual inspections of the gardens. The results show that 10 of the 22 most consumed vegetables in Barcelona are harvested within the city’s community gardens, highlighting their agrobiodiversity. Based on observed crop yields, if monoculture for each crop produced in the community gardens were practiced across all available urban areas in Barcelona, the city could achieve significant self-sufficiency in those crops. However, to realize this potential, urban horticulture would need to be professionalized, and the city’s municipal authorities would have to play a coordinating role.

It is necessary to consider the contextual factors surrounding water governance systems to understand their performance. We conducted a review of 165 empirical studies and 223 cases from the water governance literature to investigate water-related contexts. Our analysis is based on an archetype analysis of three dimensions of water-related contexts across 160 cases: water resources, related water uses, and sustainability issues. Our results show that there are five distinct water-related problématiques: "groundwater exploitation in agriculture," "land and water systems sustainability," "surface water pollution," "industrial and household water security," and "hydropower vs. water ecology." These problématiques often exhibit geographical patterns and regional associations. Noteworthy insights from the analysis of problématiques include the prominence of the groundwater exploitation in agriculture problématique, contrary to arguments that groundwater is understudied, and the limited coverage of hydropower governance compared to other problématiques. Overall, our results enhance the understanding of contextual factors in water governance and suggest potential avenues for developing middle-range theories and advancing water governance diagnostics.

Governance is key to ensuring the sustainability of water systems in the long run. With the recognition of the complexities inherent in governing water resources, new and diverse governance models have started to emerge and be diffused to various contexts. This systematic review explores 223 cases from 165 studies on water governance and sustainability. We assess the cases based on water governance paradigms and how these paradigms relate to governance characteristics, water‐related problématiques, and sustainability outcomes. Our results indicate a lack of knowledge cumulation and patterns connecting problématiques (e.g., “groundwater exploitation in agriculture”) and paradigms (e.g., “community‐based management”). We found that the “integrated approach to water management” was the most common paradigm, and paradigms might manifest with various governance characteristics, some of which may not fully align with the paradigm's fundamental principles. While certain paradigms, such as “integrated approach to water management,” “participatory and collaborative governance,” and “community‐based management,” are mostly associated with better sustainability outcomes, these successes should be interpreted cautiously due to the context‐sensitive nature of paradigms and potential biases in the reviewed studies. These findings provide a basis for further diagnostic work and suggest the need for more nuanced approaches to water governance and sustainability.

Despite their potential to conserve water, technological modernization investments that increase the efficiency of irrigation systems rarely result in water savings. On the contrary, they oftentimes increase overall water consumption. An important factor for this outcome is that farmers adapt their behavior to the new technological possibilities. If actual water savings are to be achieved, water conservation policies need to be tailored to the logic adapted by water users. In this study, we investigate the applicability and relevance of mental accounting in agricultural water use. In particular, we test whether farmers’ perceptions of water diverge conditional on whether it is supplied naturally or obtained from efficiency gains. We conduct a survey-based experiment among representatives of water user associations in Spain. According to the results, farmers tend to have a stronger sense of ownership over water that is obtained from efficiency increases than over water that originates from natural supply increases; however, they do not intend to use both “types” of water differently. Future policies could strongly benefit from targeting the sense of ownership of higher efficiency gains to achieve water savings. Furthermore, the responsibility of translating efficiency gains into water savings should rather be delegated to water user associations than to individual users.

Purpose of Review This perspective article is based on a non-exhaustive literature review of the fundamentals of economic appropriation institutions, as well as their associated governance typologies and ethical-normative guidelines. We also address potential convergences, complementarities and exchanges among Landscape Ecology, Ecological Economics and Political Ecology fields on their normative approaches regarding environmental resilience and social fairness in landscape appropriation processes. Recent Findings Landscape Ecology (LE) contributes, primarily, to the understanding of the relationship between spatial structure of habitat in the landscapes and their ecological processes. Indeed, LE presents a growing concern on the social and economic drivers of landscape changes, and assumes a key role for societal changes, by delivering landscape resilience parameters (as the minimum percentage of native vegetation) and also through active participation of scientists and practitioners in public and private decision-making arenas. Summary The effectiveness of the contributions of Landscape Ecology (LE) to public policies and to private strategies demands a clear understanding of the fundamentals of the multiple institutions and governance typologies for appropriation of goods and services. Institutions, in the sense of formal and informal rules and norms, are outcomes from decision-making arenas which constrain, among many other social relations, the land and ecosystem services appropriation in landscapes. The closer interaction with decision-making and institutional change processes, where the outcomes are laden by ethical-normative pre-analytical choices, demands from LE a careful reexamination on its ontological and epistemological assumptions. Departing from fundamental controversies regarding economic appropriation processes, this paper frames the main relations between basic institutions and the governance typologies for landscape appropriation, as well as their ethical-normative guidelines regarding environmental resilience and social fairness.

Evidence on the effectiveness of climate change adaptation interventions in low- and middle-income countries has been rapidly growing in recent years, particularly in the agricultural and coastal sectors. Here we address the question of whether results are consistent across intervention types, and risk reduction versus development-related outcomes using a systematic review of 363 empirical observations published in the scientific literature. Generally, we found more evidence of risk reduction outcomes in the coastal sector than in the agricultural sector, and more evidence of development-related outcomes in the agricultural sector. Further, results indicate that nature-based solutions have the strongest positive effects for both the coastal and agricultural sectors. Social/behavioural interventions in the coastal sector show negative effects on development-related outcomes that will need to be further tested. Taken together, our results highlight the opportunity for development and climate adaptation practitioners to promote adaptation interventions with co-benefits beyond risk reduction, particularly in the case of nature-based solutions.

The European payment for ecosystem services in the agricultural sector, or agri-environmental schemes (AES), have shown limited success in stopping biodiversity loss due to the mismatches between the scale at which they are adopted and the scale of ecological processes. This study analyzes the spatial distribution of farmer participation in the "Improvement of the steppe habitats of the Natura 2000 Network" AES in Catalonia (Spain) to test and explain potential agglomeration patterns. Our findings evidence spatial agglomeration of AES enrollment both within the farm (with farmers enrolling their adjacent or nearby plots in the scheme) and among farms (with farmers that adopt AES being near each other). Plots under the Natura2000-AES are located within a maximum distance of 2.4 km from their nearest enrolled plots, which would provide sufficient habitat continuum to allow for birds' mobility across landscapes. Our results also indicate that participation concentrates on larger, non-irrigated and/or fallow plots, farms that are managed by professionals, young farmers, and/or members of a farmer organization, and municipalities with lower socioeconomic indexes. These results contradict the assumption that there are no agglomeration patterns in the AES context and reveal the interest of further studying the socio-ecological factors that underlie spatial agglomeration patterns of AES and designing landscape-management strategies accordingly.

There is a need to synthesize the vast amount of empirical case study research on social‐ecological systems (SES) to advance theory. Innovative methods are needed to identify patterns of system interactions and outcomes at different levels of abstraction. Many identifiable patterns may only be relevant to small sets of cases, a sector or regional context, and some more broadly. Theory needs to match these levels while still retaining enough details to inform context‐specific governance. Archetype analysis offers concepts and methods for synthesizing and explaining patterns of interactions across cases. At the most basic level, there is a need to identify two and three independent variable groupings (i.e. dyads and triads) as a starting point for archetype identification (i.e. as theoretical building blocks). The causal explanations of dyads and triads are easier to understand than larger models, and once identified, can be used as building blocks to construct or explain larger theoretical models. We analyse the recurrence of independent variable interactions across 71 quantitative SES models generated from qualitative case study research applying Ostrom's SES framework and examine their relationships to specific outcomes (positive or negative, social or ecological). We use hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis and network analysis tools to identify the frequency and recurrence of dyads and triads across models of different sizes and outcome groups. We also measure the novelty of model composition as models get larger. We support our quantitative model findings with illustrative visual and narrative examples in four case study boxes covering deforestation in Indonesia, pollution in the Rhine River, fisheries management in Chile and renewable wind energy management in Belgium. Findings indicate which pairs of two (dyads) and three (triads) variables are most frequently linked to either positive or negative, social or ecological outcomes. We show which pairs account for most of the variation of interactions across all the models (i.e. the optimal suite). Both the most frequent and optimal suite sets are good starting points for assessing how dyads and triads can fulfil the role of explanatory archetype candidates. We further discuss challenges and opportunities for future SES modelling and synthesis research using archetype analysis. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.