Abstract
Trajectories of many rural landscapes in Latin America remain unsustainable. Options to support sustainable rural trajectories should be comprehensive and rooted in the interests of rural actors. We selected a municipality in a coffee-growing region in Colombia with an increasing urban–rural nexus to describe interactions between rural processes and their drivers while identifying and contextualising the perceptions of local actors on major constraints and opportunities for more inclusive and sustainable rural trajectories. We described these interactions by combining secondary data on main drivers, agricultural census data, and interviews with different local actors. Changes in population structure, volatility in coffee prices, in-/out-migration, deagrarianisation, and rurbanisation, among others, are reconfiguring the rural trajectories of the study area. Despite not being a major coffee region, farmers in the study area have developed different strategies, including intensification, diversification, replacement or abandonment of coffee production, and commercialisation. The perceptions of local actors and the multiplicity of agricultural households, food/land use systems, rural processes, and drivers described in this study suggest that more sustainable rural transitions need to be supported by inclusive, integrated, and transformative landscape planning approaches that align with local priorities. However, this transformation needs to be accompanied by changes at a systemic level that address the fundamental bottlenecks to real sustainability.
Highlights
Trajectories of many rural landscapes in Latin America remain unsustainable in spite of the pressing need to reduce and mitigate the negative impact of human activities on the environment while improving the wellbeing of the rural population [1,2]
Regarding the challenges and opportunities of the increasing rurbanisation and in-/out-migration observed in the study area, Berdegué et al [9] explained how most rurality in Latin America is located between highly urbanised centres and remote rural regions
The aim of this paper was to illustrate the interaction between rural processes and their drivers in a municipality in Colombia, and to contextualise the perceptions of local actors on the main constraints and opportunities for fostering more sustainable rural landscapes
Summary
Trajectories of many rural landscapes in Latin America remain unsustainable in spite of the pressing need to reduce and mitigate the negative impact of human activities on the environment while improving the wellbeing of the rural population [1,2]. Soil erosion, environmental pollution, and climate change, among others, affect the livelihoods and adaptive capacity of the (local) communities, and the biodiversity and provision of essential ecosystem services such as climate mitigation and water regulation [3,4]. These rural trajectories are shaped by the (re)action of local communities to socioeconomic and environmental drivers and by local processes interacting at different spatial scales [5,6]. Still limited, new niche economies have flourished, demanding multiple services from coffee-growing regions, such as leisure/tourism, nature conservation, and healthy and sustainable food production, that have the potential to benefit the producer, the consumer, and the environment [18,19]
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