Socio-environmental Challenges Research Articles

Competitive Analyses of the Pig Industry in Swaziland

Over recent decades, Swaziland’s pork industry has been stagnant, failing to meet the domestic demand for pork. It is only in recent years that the number of pig farmers has increased rapidly, with smallholder farmers taking the lead. However, while higher demand for pork could lead to opportunities for growth, with uncertain future markets, increased pig production capacity could subject farmers to extreme market competition and failure to sell their produce. This study used a survey and SWOT analysis to assess the current pig production and market performance of smallholder farms in Swaziland. To quantify SWOT factors, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to derive priorities for subsequent formulation of potential pig production strategies that are resilient both to market and climate changes. Strategy formulation was based on Porter’s cost leadership strategy. The findings revealed that, currently, the pig industry is attractive, and that the present is probably the best time for smallholder farmers to maximize their profits. Unfortunately, the industry was found to be threatened by the expected increase in production capacity, future market competition, and the socio-environmental challenges associated with expansion. Despite this, the findings suggest that smallholder farmers can survive future market challenges by strategically using agro-industrial by-products as alternative feed ingredients to reduce production cost. The formation of farmers’ associations could benefit smallholder farmers through economies of scale, processing and product value addition, and increased access to markets, and unity could strengthen their position in the market when bargaining for better prices.

The urban resource nexus: On the politics of relationality, water–energy infrastructure and the fallacy of integration

The ‘resource nexus’ has emerged over the past decade as an important new paradigm of environmental governance, which emphasises the interconnections, tensions and synergies between sectors that have traditionally been managed separately. Nexus thinking presents itself as a radically new approach to integrated governance in response to interconnected socio-environmental challenges and constraints. This paper provides a critical review of nexus thinking. The nexus paradigm, we contend, is part of a broader trend towards integrated environmental governance where previously externalised ‘bad’ nature is increasingly internalised by capital. In general, the nexus discourse has become techno-managerial in style, linear in its analysis and reductionist in its recommendations. Focussing particularly on urban water and energy infrastructure as important political sites in the (re)configuration of resource connectivities, we advance two principal arguments. Firstly, that the current nexus thinking inadequately conceptualises the scalar politics of interconnections between resource sectors. Secondly, we challenge the currently pervasive focus on technological and institutional ‘solutions’, efficiency-oriented ecological modernist vision and the presentation of ‘integration’ as a panacea for unsustainable resource practices.

Scaling up sustainability in commodity agriculture: Transferability of governance mechanisms across the coffee and cattle sectors in Brazil

A number of governance mechanisms address socio-environmental challenges associated with commodity agriculture in tropical forested countries. Governance mechanisms that prove effective in one agricultural sector are often applied to other sectors as well. For example, voluntary certification programs have been adopted by producers of commodities as diverse as beef, coffee, palm oil, and soy. However, there are substantial differences in the extent to which governance mechanisms scale up and achieve impact in different sectors. This paper analyzes how the potential for scaling up a particular governance mechanism is influenced by environmental, market, and social geographies that differ between sectors. Through stakeholder interviews, farm-level surveys, and a literature review, we examine two types of voluntary governance mechanisms (third-party certification, and sustainable intensification programs) in the coffee and cattle sectors in Brazil, to understand why the two governance mechanisms have scaled differently between these two sectors. We find that third-party certification programs have scaled up relatively well in Brazil's coffee sector, more so than its cattle sector, in part owing to differences in sustainability priorities, market orientations, supply chain traceability, and social networks between the two sectors. We also find that pilot sustainable intensification programs in the cattle sector have had more success than certification in engaging farmers, in part because they involve less investment from participating farmers. We conclude that the distribution and quality of environmental resources, markets, knowledge, actors, and networks can play an important role in the ability of a governance mechanism to effectively take root.

Involving victim population in environmentally sustainable strategies: An analysis for post-conflict Colombia

Environmental objectives tend to receive a push to the background in post-conflict scenarios. On the other hand, the processes displacement and refugee's relocation in post-conflict countries have been associated with different environmental impacts. Currently, Colombia faces a post-conflict scenario, which brings about relevant socio-environmental challenges: it is a mega-biodiverse country, it has millions of displaced people and is one of the most inequitable country in the world. Since there is a gap in post-conflict studies regarding the exploration of victims' involvement in environmental strategies, this paper aims to analyze victims' willingness to participate (WP) in Land Recovery Strategies (LRS) in post-conflict Colombia. This research (1) describes the socio-economic characteristics of forced-displacement victims from a Caribbean municipality of Colombia; (2) analyzes the victims' WP in hypothetical LRS and their preferred type of participation in the project, (3) identifies the way of grouping victims according their WP. Finally, (4) it analyzes the kind of benefits victims would prefer to receive in exchange for their participation in the LRS. Our results made evident that the majority of the consulted victims are willing to participate in LRS by giving up manual work time or in exchange of local ecological knowledge. We also found that the victims' participation in LRS associates to the age of the respondents, and whether they have benefited from government programs previously. Victims would prefer monetary retribution in exchange for their involvement in LRS, which may be explained by their vulnerable socioeconomic conditions. This research also demonstrates that victims with positive WP in LRS are a heterogeneous group. We highlight the need of actively involving women in LRS and other post-conflict projects in order to ensure their wellbeing. The results of this research are valuable, because they put forward the population of victims as an active performer within environmental sustainability.

Contextual constraints and choices: Strategic identity management among LGBTQ youth

ABSTRACTLesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) young people's identity management impacts their well-being, yet little is known about how distinctive social environments shape their identity management strategies. We qualitatively examined how 46 LGBTQ young adults ages 19–26, who are either homeless or attending college, manage their identities across distinctive social contexts. Young adults engaged in identity concealment, which extended across social context as both groups grappled with masking their identities. Furthermore, both groups of young people adapted to socioenvironmental challenges in navigating identity within social relationships. Finally, young adults emphasized the contextual importance of maintaining agency within identity. Understanding how LGBTQ young people immersed in various social contexts traverse identity-related challenges and establish effective coping strategies is essential in developing diverse social programs for this population.

Cura ou conservação: um dilema socioambiental na formação continuada de professores

There are many contemporary socio-environmental challenges: socio-environmental quality and sustainability of cities, mitigation and coping with climate change, water and solid waste management, forest management, growing demand and energy alternatives, among others. In this context, the research was driven by the following question: in what terms teachers, in a process of continuous formation, base their decision-making on a socio-environmental dilemma involving the forest theme? The research was based on a qualitative approach and was carried out in the context of a process of continuous training of teachers. The analyzes refer to a case study (fictitious, but credible) entitled "Cure or conservation: human health and the ecosystem". The positions of the teachers brought together knowledge from two areas: natural sciences and social sciences, approaching them; considered aspects such as identity, culture and traditional knowledge, avoiding positions that exorcize the alterity and the sovereignty of scientific knowledge in relation to others. Despite of to their specific academic education, teachers integrated knowledge, in an authentic interdisciplinary attitude in the consideration of the socio-environmental dilemma proposed in the training. The teachers' discussions were legitimate, their positions pertinent and they were actual, considering the concerns that are manifested in the environmental field.

Quemando incienso en altares cercanos

El crecimiento masivo y global de las ciudades se ha convertido en uno de los más importantes retos socioambientales del siglo XXI. Por lo tanto, es necesario un enfoque más proactivo en la búsqueda de alternativas para la conservación biológica. Este artículo analiza la importancia de los jardines domésticos urbanos como áreas estratégicas para la conservación biológica. Jardines domésticos urbanos (o quintais en portugués) se definen como espacios privados adyacentes a las viviendas, y que pueden contener, en grados variados, céspedes, polígonos con vegetación ornamental y alimentaria y fuentes de agua. É común que especies vegetales que han experimentado una disminución severa en sus hábitats silvestres, alcancen altas productividades o densidades en los jardines domésticos urbanos. Esos espacios tienen una enorme capacidad para el suporte de la biodiversidad aunque sea corriente en ellos un predominio de especies vegetales exóticas.

Critical adult education and the art gallery museum

Although burdened by legacies of elitism, exclusion and paternalism, some public museums are attempting to respond to the socio-environmental problems currently facing our planet by developing critical non-formal educational activities to foster consciousness and change. This article explores one such response; a six-week non-formal course entitled Art and Slow Violence hosted at Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London. The course was centred around a variety of artworks and multimedia representations aimed to stimulate dialogue, reflections and meaning making about the social and ecological impacts of the aftermaths of climate change, war and conflict. As a participant researcher, I gathered data through observations, journaling, and interviews. Findings show tensions between learning and education, expert-teacher and novice-learner, audience wants and knowledge assumptions, instructor and organisations expectations and challenges vis-à-vis self-direction around the artworks. Yet the course was powerful, particularly the informal gatherings following each class and the stories the artworks told and represented. Together, these served as means to question critically, reflect, debate and comprehend differently, the complex, contentious, but often ‘invisible’ socio-environmental challenges of our time.

Theology Facing Religious Diversity: The Perspective of Latin American Pluralist Theology

Life is plural and diverse, biodiverse. This reality has always provoked philosophy, the sciences, and also theology. But how does theological thinking reflect on this eco-human diversity? What about religious diversity? Are diversity and pluralism the same phenomenon? These questions express the aim of this article: to reflect on theology in the face of diversity and pluralism. With the methodology of bibliographic analysis, the article begins by discussing the challenges of this reality. Then it deals with how theology confronts diversity and pluralism. In the end, it reflects on the possibility of Latin American Liberation Theology being conceived as pluralist, articulating itself with the Theology of Religious Pluralism—especially from the 1990s. One of the exponents of the Latin American Liberation Theology that justifies such a paradigm shift is the theologian Leonardo Boff. With his outputs, Latin American theology starts to realize, from the ecological paradigm, the articulation between liberation and dialogue, then being called pluralistic liberation theology. The conclusions of the article point out that cultural change, the ecological paradigm and, recently, the questions of decolonial theology, have led theological thinking to transform more, facing the socio-environmental challenges of diversity, conflicts, and interreligious dialogue, accepting even more the awareness of pluralism.

Connective Tissue: Practice as Research in Cross-disciplinary Research Collaborations

Practice as Research (PaR and its associated forms) is becoming established within a knowledge paradigm encompassing a broad spectrum of different artistic research practices in the performing arts. In this short essay, Hansen first acknowledges and describes methodological characteristics of this work, which appear across different discussions and examples. The author’s primary objectives, however, are to look at PaR in relationship to broadly established scientific and interpretive research paradigms; to identify the points of negotiation that cross-disciplinary research entails; and to discuss the additional capacity of PaR as ‘connective tissue’ between, for example, creative practice and scientific research. These objectives are driven by the observation that contemporary socio-environmental challenges are too complex to be addressed through segregated, discipline-specific research alone.

Sedentarization as Constrained Adaptation: Evidence from Pastoral Regions in Far Northwestern China

This paper examines the effect of a state-led sedentarization scheme on pastoralist adaptation in northern Xinjiang, China. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with 159 Kazak pastoral households, our results indicate that socio-environmental challenges made extensive herding more tenuous but less profitable. Consequently, certain pastoralists voluntarily adopted sedentarization under state facilitation, although this process was accompanied with declines in household income and asset holdings. Our findings suggest that pastoralists were subject to the combined effects of institutional push and socio-environmental risks, making sedentarization seemingly the only viable choice. We thus argue that pastoral sedentarization in northern Xinjiang represents a constrained adaptation strategy. Future policy should build on pastoralists’ motivation to sedentarize and seek their knowledge to facilitate adaptive development in the pastoral regions.

Green and blue water demand from large-scale land acquisitions in Africa

In the last decade, more than 22 million ha of land have been contracted to large-scale land acquisitions in Africa, leading to increased pressures, competition, and conflicts over freshwater resources. Currently, 3% of contracted land is in production, for which we model site-specific water demands to indicate where freshwater appropriation might pose high socioenvironmental challenges. We use the dynamic global vegetation model Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed Land to simulate green (precipitation stored in soils and consumed by plants through evapotranspiration) and blue (extracted from rivers, lakes, aquifers, and dams) water demand and crop yields for seven irrigation scenarios, and compare these data with two baseline scenarios of staple crops representing previous water demand. We find that most land acquisitions are planted with crops that demand large volumes of water (>9,000 m3⋅ha-1) like sugarcane, jatropha, and eucalyptus, and that staple crops have lower water requirements (<7,000 m3⋅ha-1). Blue water demand varies with irrigation system, crop choice, and climate. Even if the most efficient irrigation systems were implemented, 18% of the land acquisitions, totaling 91,000 ha, would still require more than 50% of water from blue water sources. These hotspots indicate areas at risk for transgressing regional constraints for freshwater use as a result of overconsumption of blue water, where socioenvironmental systems might face increased conflicts and tensions over water resources.

How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature

This article argues that most contemporary children’s environmental picture books and easy readers published in the United States focus overwhelmingly on individual environmentalist acts and lifestyle changes, overlook the connections between environmental degradation and systemic social problems such as class disparities, and ultimately over-simplify environmental crisis. They typically encourage children to adopt environmentalist behaviors such as recycling that can be performed by individuals or families in the home, school, and local community, but do little to encourage civic engagement that would call into attention the intertwined ideological, economic, and political factors preventing profound environmental change. The analysis then examines several books that notably do inform readers about the larger political and economic issues and place a strong emphasis on environmental justice, a type of environmentalism deeply concerned with issues of race, class, gender, and economic inequality. Such texts are more likely to encourage an environmentalism that combines lifestyle and consumer choices with political activism. We need more books like this, as children’s texts that resign environmental action almost completely to individual choices and behaviors and disassociate environmental crises from their larger constitutive contexts do little to prepare young people for the socio-environmental challenges we face now and in the future.

Facing Uncertainties: The Economics of Transmission Networks [Guest Editorial

Power system transmission is at the core of modern wholesale electricity markets, allowing for competition to take place among generators. Thus, its adequate development is of utmost importance to ensure market efficiency with benefits to consumers. However, with the rapid incorporation of massive renewables into current power markets, new economic and technical challenges are arising in transmission planning, building, and integration, with a network needing to change with a faster dynamic faster than the one we were used to. The main challenge is the need for new regulatory procedures and mathematical models to explicitly factor in new uncertainties and risks. Discussions arise on proactive planning, anticipating bulkier transmission paths to cope with risks, identifying adequate cost-allocation schemes, incorporating competitive transmission expansion, and facing socio-environmental challenges. The issue of distributed generation coordinating with transmission expansion appears as a new challenge.

Socio-environmental entrepreneurship and the provision of critical services in informal settlements

This paper contributes to the understanding of processes by which small-scale entrepreneurs who provide household waste collection in informal settlements succeed in formalized co-production of such services. The paper draws on the social and solidarity economy and social and environmental entrepreneurship theoretical frameworks, which offer complementary understandings of diverse strategies to tackle everyday challenges. Two questions are addressed: How do informal waste collection initiatives get established, succeed and grow? What are the implications of this transition for the entrepreneurs themselves, the communities, the environmental governance system and the scholarship? A case study is presented, based on three waste picker entrepreneurs in Kisumu, Kenya, who have consolidated and expanded their operations in informal settlements but also extended social and environmental activities into formal settlements. The paper demonstrates how initiatives, born as community-based organizations, become successful social micro-enterprises, driven by a desire to address socio-environmental challenges in their neighbourhoods.

Understanding Poverty

Policies and strategies to fight global environmental degradation, gender inequality, and poverty are often inadequate, ineffective, or insufficient. In response, this article seeks potential synergies and leverage points between three significant interrelated discourses that are often treated separately—development, gender, and environment. Proceeding from a brief history of development thinking and poverty definitions, I describe indicators, strategies, and approaches to poverty reduction and gender equality. Second, I analyze how targeting, mainstreaming, and market-based initiatives all fail both to distinguish empirical from analytical gender and to incorporate environment and gender into development policy and action—despite their key role in meeting the normative goal of poverty reduction. Third, through a political-ecology lens, I suggest an integrated approach to poverty, inequality, and socioenvironmental challenges that arise at the intersections of development, gender, and environment, and for that, I draw examples from research on social and environmental change and action in sub-Saharan Africa.

Combining participatory mapping with Q-methodology to map stakeholder perceptions of complex environmental problems

It is readily accepted that understanding socio-environmental challenges requires consideration of multiple stakeholder perspectives and knowledge claims. But a largely ignored question is ‘how best to analyse those competing perspectives and claims?’. This paper explores the development of one GIS-based methodology – and reports on its application – to understand and map stakeholder knowledge. We find that combining Q-methodology with participatory mapping helps to overcome a significant problem in social engagement: representing the unclear connection between what people say or do and their underlying attitudes, values or beliefs. The paper is based on a reflexive engagement with flood management and natural adaptive capacity in the Scottish-English Borderlands. The paper confirms how such topics can benefit from an appreciation of the wide range of stakeholders' positions, as well as the underlying beliefs informing those positions. Most importantly, we provide an account of our methodology, offering a template for others interested in unpacking complex socio-environmental issues.

Gestão ambiental em escolas públicas do município de Erechim

Este trabalho foi desenvolvido com objetivo de avaliar a Gestão Ambiental (GA) implantada nas escolas públicas do município de Erechim – RS, procurando estabelecer a relação entre Educação Ambiental (EA) e Gestão Ambiental, bem como demonstrar sua importância para o enfrentamento dos desafios socioambientais. A técnica utilizada para a coleta de dados foi entrevista semi-estruturada, tendo como base um questionário de 26 questões, direcionado aos principais gestores das escolas públicas do município de Erechim

Redes, Ecología y Ciencias Sociales: las redes complejas en Ecología Humana

Networks, Ecology and Social Sciences: the complex network approach in Human Ecology: Complex networks have long been a powerful tool to assess theoretical and practical issues in Social Sciences and Ecology. Although Human Ecology emerged from these disciplines, the complex network approach has been underutilized in this field. This issue is particularly worrying because the complex network approach may help to understand and work out some socio-environmental challenges faced by conservationists. In this paper we revised the theoretical basis and applications of networks in Ecology and Social Sciences as well some novel and potential applications in Human Ecology. Our main goal is to increase awareness of academics and decision makers in the socio-environmental area regarding the applications of complex networks.

Territorialising Sustainable Development: The Politics of Land-use Planning in Laos

Since the emergence of the sustainable development paradigm in the late 1980s, land-use planning has become a key arena for political debates over society-environment interactions and, in practice, an important means for territorialisation projects. The paper reviews the main planning approaches that have been employed over the past three decades in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a country that has long been viewed as a valuable policy testing ground for the proponents of sustainable development. It highlights three concurrent territorialisation projects that have shaped the history of land-use planning and have fuelled tensions between central and subnational governments and local actors, national and foreign institutions, and land suitability and sustainability approaches. The paper argues that the latter tensions reflect an important dynamism and reactivity in the planning arena. It concludes that the capacity of land-use planners to adapt to specific contexts and evolving socio-environmental challenges should be harnessed in order to reconcile conflicting approaches to planning and, perhaps, to achieve sustainable development.