No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article explores the nature of calls for risk-based policy present in expert discourse from a cultural theory perspective. Semi-structured interviews with professionals engaged in the research and management of livestock disease control provide the data for a reading proposing that the real basis of policy relating to socio-technical hazards is deeply political and cannot be purified through 'escape routes' to objectivity. Scientists and risk managers are shown calling, on the one hand, for risk-based policy approaches while on the other acknowledging a range of policy drivers outside the scope of conventional quantitative risk analysis including group interests, eventualities such as outbreaks, historical antecedents, emergent scientific advances and other contingencies. Calls for risk-based policy are presented, following cultural theory, as ideals connected to a reductionist epistemology and serving particular professional interests over others rather than as realistic proposals for a paradigm shift.

Past work on social risk amplification has concentrated on studying large-scale, aggregated societal responses to risk issues as the outcome of social processes. An alternative approach, explored in this article, is to regard amplification as an attribution. Social risk amplification is something that social actors attribute to one another as they try to explain their systematic differences in response, not an objective characterisation of a response that is somehow disproportionate to its stimulus. This avoids the problem that the idea of a social amplification of risk can be taken to imply that a risk external to the social system can somehow be distorted by it. The attributional view also helps illustrate differences in risk response as much as commonalities. In order to explore risk amplification as an attribution we analyse the explanations and descriptions used by actors discussing recent outbreaks of zoonotic disease. We present a grounded analysis that produces a classification of these explanations and descriptions. It is evident from the clichés that informants used -such as 'crying wolf', 'scare-mongering' and 'jumping on the bandwagon' -that social actors have had a concept resembling social risk amplification that long predates the social amplification of risk framework. Moreover, they use it in a strongly normative way: sometimes saying this amplification is explicable and excusable, sometimes not. It is therefore a basis of social judgment. The idea of amplification as an attribution offers the particular advantage that it helps deal with situations where social actors develop their risk responses in reaction to the risk responses of other social actors.

No abstract

Despite a longstanding literature on small farm-households, there is limited consideration of small farms' role in food and nutrition security (FNS) at territorial level. The purpose of this study is to provide insights about how small farms contribute to FNS at different territorial scales, by focusing on farmers' strategies and consequential FNS outcomes. Analysis is based on two years (2017-2019) of field work done with farmers and food system actors in SALSA reference regions culminating in a workshop done with research partners. We find that small farms deliver food and nutrition security and other socioeconomic and environmental outcomes for the farmhousehold, at local, regional and global levels. The regional level is shown to be critical for small farms, as it provides the scale at which their diversity is realised. Understanding this diversity is a goal for both research and for effective support mechanisms for small farm integration, and the multiple public and private functions small farms can deliver should be higher on the policy agenda.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.