Model-Based Synthesis of Locally Contingent Responses to Global Market Signals

Nicholas Magliocca

doi:10.3390/land4030807

Abstract

Rural livelihoods and the land systems on which they depend are increasingly influenced by distant markets through economic globalization. Place-based analyses of land and livelihood system sustainability must then consider both proximate and distant influences on local decision-making. Thus, advancing land change theory in the context of economic globalization calls for a systematic understanding of the general processes as well as local contingencies shaping local responses to global signals. Synthesis of insights from place-based case studies is a path forward for developing such systematic knowledge. This paper introduces a generalized agent-based modeling framework for model-based synthesis to investigate the relative importance of structural versus agent-level factors in driving land-use and livelihood responses to changing global market signals. Six case-study sites that differed in environmental conditions, market access and influence, and livelihood settings were analyzed. Stronger market signals generally led to intensification and/or expansion of agriculture or increased non-farm labor, while changes in agents’ risk attitudes prompted heterogeneous local responses to global market signals. These results demonstrate model-based synthesis as a promising approach to overcome many of the challenges of current synthesis methods in land change science and identify generalized as well as locally contingent responses to global market signals.

Highlights

Consumption and production of land-based food, fiber, and fuel are increasingly separated in space through economic globalization [1,2,3]
Conceptual approaches for investigating local land use and livelihood change in the context of increasing economic globalization vary widely owing to the diversity of disciplines that contribute to land change science
When commodity price and market influence decreased and average risk preference increased, livelihood strategies generally became more similar across the population leading to less unequal income distributions (Figure 2)

Summary

Introduction

Consumption and production of land-based food, fiber, and fuel are increasingly separated in space through economic globalization [1,2,3]. I analyze the effects of such local-global linkages on local land use and livelihood decisions through two main points of entry: structural and agency-based explanations. These two perspectives originate from different disciplinary traditions and generally emphasize top-down or bottom-up explanations of local-global linkages, respectively. This is presented as a structure-agency dichotomy, this is not meant to imply these explanations stand in isolation, rather the structure-agency distinction serves to highlight different points of entry within a land systems context for analysis. The approaches discussed below are aligned along a spectrum and, taken together, provide a more comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate local land and livelihood contingencies in response to global conditions than either approach can provide alone

Results

Discussion

Conclusion