Political Agroecology

Advancing the Transition to Sustainable Food Systems

Manuel González de Molina, Paulo Frederico Petersen, Francisco Garrido Peña, Francisco Roberto Caporal

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429768149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

Political Agroecology is the first book to offer a systematic and articulated reflection on Political Agroecology from the Agroecological perspective. It defines the disciplinary field responsible for designing and producing actions, institutions and regulations aimed at achieving agrarian sustainability. In short, it aims to build a political theory that makes the scaling-up of agroecological experiences possible, turning them into the foundation of a new and alternative food regime.

The book proposes theoretical, practical and epistemological foundations of a new theoretical and practical field of work for agroecologists: Political Agroecology. It establishes a framework for a common agroecological strategy, covering the different levels of collective action and the different instruments with which it can be developed. This will be essential reading for agroecologists, environmentalists, farming and food communities, and an ideal textbook for advanced agroecology courses in universities.

Key features:

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• Offers a unique state of the art on this fundamental new topic: Political Agroecology

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• Presents a complete introduction to the political and institutional aspects of Agroecology, covering the whole food system

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• Offers an important tool for searching agrarian sustainability

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• Provides a broad epistemological, theoretical and methodological focus, exploring the connection between the different levels and scales involved in agroecological theory and practice

1Theoretical Foundations of Political Agroecology

Agroecosystems are artificialized ecosystems that shape a particular subsystem operating within the general metabolic flows between society and nature; therefore, they are a product of the socioecological relations. For example, using or changing crops is a decision that often has socioeconomic roots and, at the same time, environmental consequences. These kinds of socioecological relations are part of social relations generally, in which power and conflict are present. Consequently, even in the simplest societies, technologically speaking, the specific assembly of each agroecosystem responds to different types of institutions, forms of knowledge, world views, rules, norms and agreements, technological knowledge, means of communication and governance, and forms of ownership (González de Molina & Toledo, 2011, 2014). An agroecosystem’s sustainability does not result solely from a series of physical and biological properties: it also reflects power relations. Agroecology therefore needs to be placed within a political framework.

In this regard, the quest for sustainable agricultural ecosystems requires Political Agroecology, which is a new way of organizing agroecosystems and agricultural metabolism in general. In the same way that political power articulates different subsystems in a socioenvironmental system, Political Agroecology should articulate an agroecosystem’s different subsystems by organizing energy, material, and information flows. Political Agroecology is tasked with this articulation, programming and functional orientation, bringing continuity and order to the agroecosystem’s evolution. This chapter seeks to define Political Agroecology and to develop its epistemological and theoretical basis.

1.1 Political Agroecology: A Tentative Definition

Political Agroecology would be the application of Political Ecology to the field of Agroecology, or a close association between these fields (Toledo, 1999; Forsyth, 2008), but there is no agreement as to what Political Ecology actually is (Peterson, 2000; Blaikie, 2008, 766–767). The term gives rise to many meanings and understandings regarding its goal, but all of them have in common a Political Economy approach to natural resources and its preferential application to developing countries (Blaikie, 2008, 767). We share the interpretation of Gezon and Paulson (2005) for whom “the control and use of natural resources, and consequently the course of environmental change” are shaped by “the multifaceted relations of politics and power, and the cultural constructions of the environment”. In this sense, Political Ecology combines political and ecological processes when analyzing environmental change and it could also be understood as “the politics of environmental change” (Nigren & Rikoon, 2008, 767). Paraphrasing Blaikie and Brookfield, we could say that “Political Ecology [is] an approach for studying ecological and social change” (Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987), but together. In other words, Political Ecology is an approach to studying socioecological change in political terms. Based on Paulson et al. (2003, 209) and Walker (2007, 208), we could say that Political Agroecology should “develop ways to apply the methods and findings [of Political Ecology research] in addressing” socioecological change in agroecosystems and the whole food system.

However, Political Agroecology is not only a research subject. It has another closely related practical dimension that is regarded as a core goal: achieving agrarian sustainability. Many agroecologists are involved in a form of “‘popular Political Ecology’ that ties research directly to activist efforts to improve human well-being and environmental sustainability through various forms of local, grassroots activism and organization” (Walker, 2007, 364). In this respect, Political Agroecology should branch off into two directions: into an ideology, in competition with others, dedicated to disseminating and turning the organization of ecologically and sustainably based agroecosystems into the dominant system (Garrido, 1993); but also into a disciplinary field responsible for designing and producing actions, institutions and regulations aimed at achieving agrarian sustainability.

Political Agroecology is based on the fact that agrarian sustainability cannot be achieved using only technological (agronomical or environmental) measures helping to sustainably redesign agroecosystems. Without profoundly changing the institutional framework in force, it will not be possible to spread successful agroecological experiences nor to effectively combat the ecological crisis. Consequently, Political Agroecology examines the most suitable course of action today and how to best use the instruments that make institutional change possible. Such a change, in a world still organized around nation states, is only possible through political mediation. In democratic systems, for example, it implies collective action through social movements, electoral political participation, alliance games between different social forces to build majorities of change, etc. In other words, it calls for the creation of strategies that are essentially political. The two main objectives of Political Agroecology precisely comprise: the design of institutions (Ostrom, 1990, 2001, 2009) that favor the achievement of agrarian sustainability, and the organization of agroecological movements in such a way that they can be implemented.

Political Agroecology thus goes beyond proposing a specific program. For example, the demand for alimentary sovereignty, promoted by Vía Campesina and other social movements is a specific proposal for a program that can emerge from applying Political Agroecology to the current conditions of the ruling food regime. Political Agroecology is responsible for establishing it and, as a new branch of Agroecology, it is not a political proposal or program to achieve agrarian sustainability. Political Agroecology is not a new term for food sovereignty. It seeks to produce knowledge that allows Agroecology and food sovereignty to be put into practice, exploiting the knowledge accumulated by Political Ecology and the experience of social movements.

Political Agroecology thus requires to be grounded in a rigorous socioecological framework that adequately spells out the roles of institutions and the necessary means to establish or change them, anchored in the indissoluble nexus established between human beings and their biophysical environment. In the sections that follow we explore societies’ biophysical foundations and draw attention to the determining role of institutional arrangements in their dynamics. This approach is later applied to agroecosystems, understood as the materialization of socioecological relationships in the field of agriculture. We also draw attention to the key role of institutions that regulate their dynamics.

1.2 A Thermodynamic Approach to Society

Our conception of Political Agroecology is based on a biophysical reading of society, in accordance with its socioecological nature: social systems are subject to the laws of thermodynamics. That means, therefore, that the laws of nature operate on and affect human beings and the devices they build. We thus assume that entropy is common to all natural processes, be they human or other, and it may be the most relevant physical law to explain the evolution over time of the human species. Our understanding of the material structure, functioning, and dynamics of human societies is thus grounded in a thermodynamic understanding, as in the case of biological systems which they also part of.

From a thermodynamic point of view, all human societies share the need for controlled, efficient processing of energy extracted from the surroundings with other physical and biological systems. Such is the proposal of Prigogine (1983) regarding non-equilibrium systems (thermodynamics of irreversible processes), which is one of the basic concepts of our socioecological approach to power and politics: generation of order out of chaos. Because the natural trend of societies – as any physical and biological system – is toward a state of maximum entropy, social systems depend on building dissipative structures for balancing this trend and keeping away from maximum entropy (Prigogine, 1947, 1955, 1962). These structures are maintained thanks to the transfer by the system of a part of the energy being dissipated by its conversion processes (Glandsorff & Prigogine, 1971, 288). The transfer takes place by using flows of energy, materials, and information to perform work and dissipate heat, consequently increasing their internal organization. Order emerges from temporal patterns (systems) within a universe that, as a whole, moves slowly toward thermodynamic dissipation (Swanson et al., 1997, 47). Prigogine described this configuration of dissipative structures as a process of self-organization of the system.

Although human societies share the same evolutionary precepts as physical and biological systems, they represent an innovation that differentiates them and makes their dynamic specific, adding complexity and connectivity to the whole evolutionary process. Social systems cannot be explained by a simple application of the laws of physics, even though human acts are subject to them. The reason for this is that although evolution is a unified process, human society is an evolutionary innovation emerging from human beings’ reflective (self-referring) capacity, which is more developed than in any other species. The most direct consequence of this human mental feature is the capacity – not exclusive among higher-order animals, but rare – for building tools and, therefore, for using energy outside the organism, i.e., the use of exosomatic energy. To build and use tools, information and knowledge needed to be generated and transmitted, i.e., the generation of culture was required. Culture involves a symbolic dimension containing, besides knowledge, beliefs, rules and regulations, technologies, etc. Accordingly, evolutionary innovation encompasses human capability regarding the exosomatic use of information, energy, and matter, also giving rise to a new type of complex system: the reflexive complex system (Martínez-Alier et al., 1998, 282) or self-reflexive system and self-aware system (Kay et al., 1999; Ramos-Martin, 2003). This feature will be instrumental because it gives social systems a unique neopoietic capacity absent from other systems or species, and that confers an essential, creative dimension to human individuals and – more so – to collective actions.

In analogy to living organisms, culture is the transmission of information by non-genetic means, a metaphor that became popular in the academic world. Cultural evolution has been described as an extension of biological information by other means (Sahlins & Service, 1960; Margalef, 1980), and a parallel has been drawn between the diffusion of genes and that of culture. Culture can thus be understood as an innovative manifestation of the adaptive complexity of social systems; it is the name of a new genus of complexity provided by the environment for perpetuating and reorganizing a particular kind of dissipative system: social systems (Tyrtania, 2008, 51). Culture is but an emergent property of human societies. Its performative or neopoietic character, its creative nature (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Rosen, 1985, 2000; Pattee, 1995; Giampietro et al., 2006) enables the configuration of new and more complex dissipative structures at even larger scales by means of technology (Adams, 1988).

As we have seen, organization is an autopoietic product in which flows of information have a definitive influence. There is no structure without information, as has been demonstrated in the biological world (Margalef, 1995). In the social world, systems are also subjected to the laws of thermodynamics, given that they occupy time, space, and energetic resources. Applying thermodynamics in Boltzmann’s statistical terms provides an explanation of flows as a unidirectional and irreversible process going from its state of order – its more evident manifestation – to a state of disorder, whose organizational properties have disappeared. Therefore, the main function of these flows is negentropic: “Information, in this technical sense, is the patterning, order, organization, or non-randomness of a system. Shannon showed that information (H) is the negative of entropy (S)” (Swanson et al., 1997, 47). Therefore, flows of information are here considered capable of reordering and reorganizing the different components of the physical, biological, and social systems in which they function. That is, they have characteristics that produce action (change). Information flows are the basic vital ingredients of the processes of organization of social systems. Information is here defined in a pragmatic or operative way as a codified message, which decision-makers can use to regulate levels of entropy.

As H. Gintis (2009, 233) remarked, culture can also be considered as an epigenetic mechanism of horizontal, intragenerational transmission of information among humans, i.e., the system’s memory along the evolutionary process. In sum, dissipative structures of social systems are designed and organized through culture. There is insufficient space here to present a theory of information flows and their role in complex adaptive systems. Niklas Luhmann (1984, 1998) largely developed this theory, and we direct interested readers to his writings. Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems is useful to elaborate a theory of information flows and their role of organizers of the dissipative structures that all societies build to compensate entropy (disorder). In sum, the uniqueness of social systems in the evolutionary principle lies in how they process and transmit information not by means of biological heredity, but by means of language and symbolic codes. Culture is thus the designer of metabolism fund elements and the combinations of flows of energy and materials that make them function and reproduce. However, culture also produces and reproduces the flows of information that order and give structure to energy and materials flows. This does not mean, however, that there are no entropic costs – whether material, social or regulatory – of the physical consequences of the transmission of information.

While biological systems have a limited capacity for processing energy – mainly endosomatically – due to availability in the environment and genetic load, human societies exhibit a less-constrained dissipative capacity that is only limited by the environment. Human beings can thus dissipate energy by means of artifacts or tools, i.e., through knowledge and technology, and they can do it faster and with greater mobility than any other species. Societies adapt to the environment by changing their structures and frontiers by means of association, integration, or conquest of other societies, something biological organisms cannot do. In other words, contrary to biological systems with well-defined boundaries, human societies can organize and reorganize, building a capacity to avoid or overcome local limitations from the environment. That explains why some societies maintain exosomatic consumption levels beyond the means provided by their local environments without entering into a steady state. The exosomatic consumption of energy is a specifically human trait. Because no genetic load regulates such exosomatic consumption, it becomes codified by culture, which involves a faster but less predictable evolutionary rate.

Human societies give priority to two basic tasks: on the one hand, producing goods and services and distributing them among individual society members, and on the other hand, reproducing the conditions that make production possible in order to gain stability over time. In thermodynamic terms, this implies building dissipative structures and exchanging energy, materials, and information with the environment so that these structures may function. A large number of social relations are geared toward organizing and maintaining this exchange of energy, materials, and information.

1.3 A Socioecological View of Society: Social Metabolism

The organization of this stable exchange of energy, materials, and information has been called social metabolism. In other words, social metabolism pertains to the flow of energy, materials, and information that are exchanged by a human society with its environment for forming, maintaining, and reconstructing the dissipative structures allowing it to keep as far away as possible from the state of equilibrium (González de Molina & Toledo, 2014). Open systems such as human societies have managed to create order by ensuring an uninterrupted flow of energy from their environment, transferring the resulting entropy back to their surroundings. From a thermodynamic perspective, the functioning and physical dynamics of societies can be understood on the basis of this metabolic simile: any change in a system’s total entropy is the sum of external entropy production and internal entropy production owing to the irreversibility of the processes that occur within.

∆S_t = S_in + S_out (eq. 1)

where

∆S_t is the increase in total entropy

S_in is the internal entropy and

S_out is the external entropy

To put it another way, order is generated within a society at the expense of increasing total entropy through the consumption of energy, materials, and information by its dissipative structures or fund elements. This level of order will remain constant or will increase if sufficient quantities of energy and materials or information are added, creating new dissipative structures. This will in turn increase total entropy and, paradoxically, will reduce order or make it even more costly. Complex adaptive systems have resolved this dilemma by capturing the required flows of energy, materials, and information from their surroundings to maintain and increase their level of negentropy, transferring the entropy generated to their surroundings. In other words, the total entropy of the system tends to increase, reducing at the same time internal entropy, if external entropy increases. To put it another way:

_⇓ S_in= _⇑ S_out (eq. 2)

Entropy is reduced by extracting energy and materials from one’s own environment (domestic extraction) or by importing from another environment. The greater the flow of energy and materials extracted from its own territory or imported fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Cover Art (by Lucia Vignoli)
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical Foundations of Political Agroecology
• 2 The Industrialization of Agriculture and the Enlargement of the Food Chain
• 3 A Regime on the Road to Collapse
• 4 Cognitive Frameworks and Institutional Design for an Agroecological Transition
• 5 Scaling Agroecology
• 6 The Agents of the Agroecological Transition
• 7 The Role of the State and Public Policies
• References
• Index