•It is not just drought: water markets, commodity prices, rural demographic shifts and a changing farming industry.•Economic impacts: drought, drying and the demise of the family farm.•Future ...scenarios: climate change, adaptation and mitigation.•Social stress: rural communities, farmers and their families.•Insights into barriers, policy failures and potential areas of improvement in adapting to drought.
Australia's vulnerability to climate variability and change has been highlighted by the recent drought (i.e. the Big Dry or Millennium Drought), and also recent flooding across much of eastern Australia during 2011 and 2012. There is also the possibility that the frequency, intensity and duration of droughts may increase due to anthropogenic climate change, stressing the need for robust drought adaptation strategies. This study investigates the socio-economic impacts of drought, past and present drought adaptation measures, and the future adaptation strategies required to deal with projected impacts of climate change. The qualitative analysis presented records the actual experiences of drought and other climatic extremes and helps advance knowledge of how best to respond and adapt to such conditions, and how this might vary between different locations, sectors and communities. It was found that more effort is needed to address the changing environment and climate, by shifting from notions of ‘drought-as-crisis’ towards acknowledging the variable availability of water and that multi-year droughts should not be unexpected, and may even become more frequent. Action should also be taken to revalue the farming enterprise as critical to our environmental, economic and cultural well-being and there was also strong consensus that the value of water should be recognised in a more meaningful way (i.e. not just in economic terms). Finally, across the diverse stakeholders involved in the research, one point was consistently reiterated: that ‘it's not just drought’. Exacerbating the issues of climate impacts on water security and supply is the complexity of the agriculture industry, global economics (in particular global markets and the recent/ongoing global financial crisis), and demographic changes (decreasing and ageing populations) which are currently occurring across most rural communities. The social and economic issues facing rural communities are not just a product of drought or climate change – to understand them as such would underestimate the extent of the problems and inhibit the ability to coordinate the holistic, cross-agency approach needed for successful climate change adaptation in rural communities.
Despite Rural Sociology’s long history of publishing rigorous research about rurality, one notable area for improvement is attention to race and racial issues. As Tieken and Wright argue, this ...special issue is an important first step toward expanding the journal’s scope and reckoning with its historical failings. This issue introduction summarizes the critical insights the issue’s articles offer the field at this pivotal moment of racial awareness and demographic change. The authors end with a call for emancipatory scholarship—that is, research that reflects the lived experiences of all rural residents and can be used to dismantle racist policies and practices.
This article develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of community that is designed to explain the complexity, diversity and changes that account for comparative community differentiation in ...the modern world. The concept is deconstructed into a number of constituent dimensions and dynamic processes, revealing the interrelationships between interest, normativity and identity. Contradictory processes associated with solidarity and exclusion are shown to push and pull at each other through the different dimensions. These processes are manifested in people's everyday lives, often simultaneously. This complexity is a source of both the vulnerability and the strength of communities. The article concludes with a number of diagnostic tools for deconstructing community and a three‐pronged approach for community revitalisation.
•CFM shows mixed results for enhancing livelihoods and forest conditions.•A “Community of Practice” is a crucial precondition for CFM to perform.•A practice-based approach to CFM can be well combined ...with QCA methodology.
Community Forest Management (CFM)—ranging from community-based to co-management regimes—has become an influential approach in the management of forests around the world in the last couple of decades. In response to some of the adverse effects of state forestry and commercial timber production, CFM claims to improve local livelihoods and conserve forests. Many international organizations, donors, NGOs, and governments therefore advocate CFM. However, a vast body of literature reveals that the overall results are mixed. This paper contributes to this literature in two ways. By building upon neo-institutionalism in CFM studies, the paper uses a practice-based approach as a theoretical lens to better understand how and why CFM institutions are successful or not. In addition, the paper applies a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) methodology to conduct a systematic cross-case comparison, while allowing for some generalization. By analyzing a decade of CFM research at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy (FNP) group from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, this paper compares and synthesizes ten CFM cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It concludes that: (1) CFM does indeed present mixed results; (2) CFM performs similarly on social and ecological parameters; (3) overall, community-based organizations are strongly engaged in CFM; (4) such strong engagement though is not sufficient for CFM to perform; and (5) in particular, the presence of a “Community of Practice” that links local people to external forest professionals for mutual learning, based on respect and trust, makes a positive difference in terms of livelihoods and forest conditions.
•Evaluation of pastoral livelihood security facing climate change in drylands.•Increasing precipitation variability had negative or positive effects on herd size.•Identification of critical regimes ...beyond which livelihoods are endangered.•Mobility compensates for climate change but not for increasing income needs.•Appropriate mitigation strategies need to include sufficient resting of pastures.
Livestock is the most important source of income for pastoral livelihoods in drylands. Pastoralists have developed flexible resource utilization strategies that enable them to cope with the high spatio-temporal resource variability typical to these areas. However, climate change in the form of decreasing mean annual precipitation accompanied by increasing variability has important consequences for rangeland productivity and thus pastoral livelihood security. Here, we use a spatial simulation model to assess impacts of changing precipitation regimes, and to identify limits of tolerance for these changes beyond which pastoral livelihoods cannot be secured. We also examine strategies to control these limits.
Our results indicate that: (i) while reduced mean annual precipitation always had negative effects, increased precipitation variability can have negative, none or even positive effects, depending on the vegetation's recovery potential. (ii) Depending on income requirements there are limits of tolerance to decreases in mean annual precipitation beyond which precipitation regimes overcharge the coping capacity of the pastoral household and threaten its livelihood. (iii) There are certain strategies, in particular “Increasing mobility” and “Diversifying income for coping with income risks from pastoralism”, that allow the limits of tolerance to be shifted to a certain extent. We conclude that it is important to consider climate change and human requirements together to create appropriate climate change mitigation strategies in pastoral systems. Our results also shed new light on the discussion on disequilibrium rangeland systems by identifying mechanisms that can support fluctuating but non-degrading herbivore-vegetation dynamics. The paper finishes with remarks on the broader potential of the presented modelling approach beyond rangelands.
The topics of climate change and renewable energy are often linked in policy discussions and scientific analysis, but public opinion on these topics exhibits both overlap and divergence. Although ...renewable energy has potentially broader acceptance than anthropogenic climate change, it can also face differently-based opposition. Analyses of US and regional surveys, including time series of repeated surveys in New Hampshire (2010-2018) and northeast Oregon (2011-2018), explore the social bases and trends of public views on both issues. Political divisions are prominent, although somewhat greater regarding climate change due to substantive differences and more partisan opposition. Regarding climate change and to a lesser extent renewable energy, political divisions tends to widen with education. There also are robust age and temporal effects: younger adults more often prioritize renewable energy development, and agree with scientists on the reality of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Across all age groups and both regional series, support for renewable energy and recognition of ACC have been gradually rising. Contrary to widespread speculation, these trends have not visibly responded to events such as the US hurricanes of 2012, 2017 or 2018. Together with age-cohort replacement and the potential for changes in age-group voting participation, however, the gradual trends suggest that public pressure for action on these issues could grow.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the connections between young people's livelihoods, education and visions of the future in Ethiopia. It engages with educated youth's ...narratives of precarity, dispossession, and 'intimate exclusions,' discussing how development has impacted rural livelihoods. Educated youth protests in the Oromia region reveal how shortages of farmland and education play crucial roles in the conflict about sovereignty and development. Qeerroo (Oromo youth) are particularly active in the protests because they are excluded from a rural future through land grabbing and population growth as well as from a modernist development future that unequally distributes the fruits of economic growth. By politicizing educated unemployment and landlessness and connecting them to neoliberal capitalism, this article analyses the intentions of the Ethiopian state to 'save' its youth through economic development while youths claim to 'lose' their futures to generate grassroots politics. The article also draws analytical attention to why there is a need to rethink concepts like development, waithood, and rural futures.
This paper explores the role of various social ties in building trust and providing opportunities for information acquisition and knowledge exchange (IAKE). Social capital is used as a vehicle to ...explore the relationships between farmers and their advisors using bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a major disease facing the English cattle industry, as a case study. Much research on social capital and IAKE has been conducted within the field of rural sociology, but very little relates specifically to bTB. Exploratory findings suggest that trust provides an essential catalyst enabling passive information to be transformed into usable knowledge. Levels of ‘linking’ social capital between farmers and the government were found to be low, engendered by high levels of distrust and a lack of confidence in the information provided. In comparison, high levels of ‘bridging’ social capital between farmers and vets were found, brought about by long-term, regular and consistent contact, associated with high levels of trust and knowledge transfer. ‘Bonding’ social capital was also important in encouraging knowledge exchange among farmers, although overly close ties were shown to potentially lead to the emergence of exclusive networks and, consequently, the development of distrust. The implications for bTB policy and further research are discussed.
► The first paper to explore bovine TB information transfer through the framework of social capital. ► Social capital, trust and information transfer are explored through in-depth farmer interviews. ► Trust is low where contact between individuals is inconsistent and irregular. ► Trust provides a catalyst whereby information is transformed into knowledge. ►Findings suggest a rhetoric-reality gap in the government's bovine TB control policy.
Migration towards rural areas – pro‐rural migration – is a lively, diverse, well illustrated research area. However, interest tends to stop with spatial relocation, with migrants' subsequent lives in ...rural places much less examined. Such imbalance reflects a more general bias in favour of studying distinctive actions, such as migration, at the expense of non‐actions, such as staying put. This article challenges this situation. It argues for regarding migration in a more contextual, biographical and distributed manner, even potentially attaining some characteristics of what is known in non‐representational theory as an ‘event’. While pro‐rural migration is usually initially a contemplated ‘representational’ action, the significance to the migrant of the resulting relocation does not end here, requiring attention to be paid to everyday entanglements with (rural) place. Becoming event‐like, some experiences may be unanticipated and unexpected rather than foreshadowed. This sensitivity is applied in the article through introduction of an interpretative map for exploring why and how pro‐rural migrants subsequently stay in their destinations. Proceeding through the map, concerns with representations of the location are increasingly left behind in favour of becoming more attentive to life course issues and more‐than‐representational rural experiences shaping the migrant's ‘line of growth’.
International efforts to prevent the spread of biological threats to agro‐food production are increasingly being devolved from national governments to farming industries and farmers. Previous ...research has highlighted the farm‐level and institutional challenges in engaging farmers in biosecurity. However, little is known sociologically about what farmers already know and do to manage disease risk, and specifically how they practice biosecurity. This article addresses this issue through the application of theoretical work on the choreography of care. Drawing from a qualitative study of biosecurity in the Australian beef industry, we argue that farmers’ localised practices of caring for their herd health and farm are crucial in making biosecurity workable. These practices take two key forms: skilled craftwork, through which farmers construct and hold together different objects and elements of care; and fluid engineering, which involves efforts to construct barriers for separating on‐farm practices of care from perceived off‐farm disease risks. In engaging in these care practices, farmers make an important contribution to national livestock biosecurity principles and practices. We argue that greater recognition of localised practices of biosecure care may provide the basis for engaging farmers more effectively in a devolved form of biosecurity governance.
PDF
