The critical impact of humans on the biosphere has led scientists to coin the term Anthropocene. The global environmental changes associated with it are happening under the aegis of capitalism. A transition towards sustainability requires a critical scrutiny of capitalism. The social–ecological system (SES) approach conceptualises the relationship between the socio-economic subsystem and the biosphere. However, in its various operationalisations it either treats the former as a black box or it fails to capture dynamic aspects. We address these limits and develop a Dialectical Socio-Ecological System (D-SES) framework, which combines process ecology with historical materialism, to describe the emergence and persistence of capitalist dynamics. We draw on data collected through fieldwork and desk research and deploy our framework to study capital-intensive agriculture in the Chaco Salteño, an important agricultural frontier in South America, obtaining some general insights. We open up the socio-economic subsystem and break it down into a lower-level material/economic sphere and an upper-level cultural/institutional sphere. Capitalist dynamics emerge out of the peculiar relationships occurring both within and between these spheres. This configuration shows the typical signs of autocatalysis. It attracts resources and capital to expand itself (centripetality). It becomes more complex and organised over time, fine-tuning production modes, cultures, and institutions (directionality). It is subject to the laws of competition and profit maximisation, which emerge independently from the individual actors and processes making up the system (autonomy). Finally, it engenders frictions, reflecting class antagonism between the direct producers and the appropriators of wealth. These frictions can become leverage points for a system’s transformation.
<p>The Gran Chaco represents an important habitat that is undergoing significant changes, as a result of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, with a range of negative social and environmental consequences. Such a change is the result of a &#8220;bad transition&#8221; from an extensive/subsistence agricultural system towards a capital-intensive one, to which corresponds a completely different level of anthropization. The largest part of the Gran Chaco is located in Argentina. Partially as a response to the rapid loss of natural habitat in the region, Argentina passed a federal forest law in 2007. The law requires the different provinces to introduce a set of implementing regulations and adopt a territorial classification of native forests (TCNF), denoting different conservation values (high, medium and low). Although referring to the same federal law, the TCNFs developed by the various provinces in the Argentinian Chaco ecoregion differ significantly. We first develop a theoretical framework, which combines historical materialism with the theory of socio-ecological systems, to explain the emergence of institutional configurations. Through this framework, we hypothesise that the heterogeneity in the TCNFs results from the combination of contextual factors (i.e., differences in the physical environment among the provinces), material/economic conditions (i.e., production processes, social relationships and reproduction processes) and different forms of agency. We test the hypothesis by developing thick case-studies on the various Argentinian provinces in the Gran Chaco region via qualitative comparative analysis. The results allow determining which configurations co-occur with certain outcomes in terms of TCNFs. The results shed light on the process of emergence of differentiated environmental institutions in the region from the interactions of different conditions, contexts and forms of agency. This knowledge, in turn, could be extremely useful in navigating the Anthropocene while promoting a &#8220;good transition&#8221; towards sustainability.</p>
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