and is the Head of GIEEA. He is interested in governance issues of forestry and food production in a globalising world and in the dynamics of innovative grassroots initiatives in particular.
Abstract:The path to sustainable development involves creating coherence and synergies in the complex relationships between economic and ecological systems. In sustaining their farm businesses farmers' differing values influence their decisions about agroecosystem management, leading them to adopt diverging farming practices. This study explores the values of dairy and beef cattle farmers, the assumptions that underpin them, and the various ways that these lead farmers to combine food production with the provision of other ecosystem services, such as landscape conservation and biodiversity preservation. This paper draws on empirical research from Galicia (Spain), a marginal and mountainous European region whose livestock production system has undergone modernization in recent decades, exposing strategic economic, social and ecological vulnerabilities. It applies a Q-methodology to develop a values-based approach to farming. Based on a sample of 24 livestock farmers, whose practices promote landscape conservation and/or biodiversity preservation, the Q-methodology allowed us to identify four 'farming styles'. Further analysis of the practices of the farmers in these groups, based on additional farm data and interview material, suggests that all 24 farmers valorize landscape and nature and consider cattle production and nature conservation to be compatible within their own farm practices. However, the groups differed in the extent to which they have developed synergies between livestock farming and landscape conservation. We conclude by discussing how rural development policy in Galicia could strengthen such practices by providing incentives to farmers and institutionally embedding a shift towards more diversified farming and product development.
This paper introduces the concept of commoning in circular economies, and explores how commons reproduce over time. The starting point is that commoning can have an important role in fostering circular economies and sustainable and socially-inclusive development. By commoning, we refer to local stakeholders working collectively to preserve or restore their natural resource base to generate benefits that are locally shared. Through the analysis of a specific case of a group of commoners' associations in Galicia (Spain), the paper describes and discusses the development, and ultimate unravelling, of an innovative and decentralized waste management project to convert waste biomass from the monte (often-neglected upland green spaces, largely consisting of brush and trees) into compost. In order to make this composting project economically viable the possibility of collecting and processing urban green waste was also explored. While the project's application of the principles of a circular economy had the potential to bring locally-shared economic and ecological benefits, and foster territorial prosperity and resilience, it was ultimately frustrated by questions of scale, administrative and regulatory barriers, competing and conflicting land-use claims and financial cutbacks in the public sector.
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