Land Use as a Socio-Ecological System: Developing a Transdisciplinary Approach to Studies of Land Use Change in South-Central Chile

Abstract

Studying land use change as a socio-ecological system provides a holistic framework from which to integrate social, political, historic, economic, and environmental observations regarding human-nature interactions. However, integrating the insights of multiple disciplines poses methodological challenges. This chapter focuses on the expansion of commercial forestry in south-central Chile, to the detriment of smallholder agriculture and native forest conservation, due to specific political and economic transformations since 1974, including the enactment of the Native Forest Act (NFA). This chapter provides a global overview of the economic and political drivers of land use change, as well as the environmental outcomes of such change in a historical perspective. Then, this chapter presents two methodological tools that complement the socio-ecological perspective. One tool is the use of land use modeling. The second tool is ethnography of peasant’s households living at the fringes of tree farm expansion. This chapter foregrounds the ways in which environmental change has profoundly altered lifeways and livelihoods for rural people within just one generation. Finally, this work provides a discussion of the necessary theoretical and methodological intervention, thinking with and through land use change from an explicitly socio-ecological and transdisciplinary perspective.