Abstract
Land-based production provides societies with indispensable goods such as food, feed, fibre, and energy. Yet, with economic globalisation and global population growth, the environmental and social trade-offs of their production are ever more complex. This is particularly so since land use changes are increasingly embedded in networks of long-distance flows of, e.g., material, energy, and information. The resulting scientific and governance challenge is captured in the emerging telecoupling framework addressing socioeconomic and environmental interactions and feedbacks between distal human-environment systems. Understanding telecouplings, however, entails a number of fundamental analytical problems. When dealing with global connectivity, a central question is how and where to draw system boundaries between coupled systems. In this article, we explore the analytical implications of setting system boundaries in the study of a recent telecoupled land use change: the expansion of Chinese banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province, Laos. Based on empirical material from fieldwork in Laos in 2014 and 2015, and drawing on key concepts from the ‘systems thinking’ literature, we illustrate how treating the system and its boundaries as epistemological constructs enable us to capture the differentiated involvement of actors, as well as the socio-economic and environmental effects of this land use change. In discussing our results, the need for more explicit attention to the trade-offs and implications of scale and boundary choices when defining systems is emphasised.
Highlights
Economic globalisation, urbanisation, and global environmental change have accelerated the pressures on land resources and increased the complexity of land system change around the world [1,2,3,4,5]
We explore the analytical implications of setting system boundaries in the study of a recent telecoupled land use change: the expansion of Chinese banana plantation investments in Luang Namtha Province, Laos
By exploring how our ‘banana land system’ was constituted by different flows linking this land use change to processes elsewhere, our analysis showed that the investors play a key role as both ‘receivers’ of the market signal to make banana plantations from outside our system, for example, from Chinese government policies, and ‘senders’ of the material flow of the fruit, for example, to urban markets in China
Summary
Urbanisation, and global environmental change have accelerated the pressures on land resources and increased the complexity of land system change around the world [1,2,3,4,5]. The framework presents a tool for describing and characterising telecouplings by classifying sending, receiving, and spill-over systems, and flows between these systems, as well as the agents, causes, and effects within them [6] This framework offers an analytical breakdown of the interconnectivity in global land use change by establishing manageable units of analysis, most notably ‘systems’ and ‘flows’, and making it possible to avoid a ‘holistic trap’ were everything gets connected to everything else. It includes a fundamental analytical challenge regarding system boundaries. How to define and understand systems as separate coupled human-environment systems rather than one larger integrated system in a globalised world is emerging as a key challenge in telecoupling research [7,21,22]
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