Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's<i>Agriculture for Development</i><i>Report</i>read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

McAllister, Carlota

doi:10.1080/03066150903143038

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The effects of the armed conflict were particularly severe in the western highlands, damaging social organization (Carmack, 1988;McAllister, 2009). The advancement of evangelical Christianity among indigenous groups created new sectarian divides in the communities (Copeland, 2011).…”

Section: Study Region: Cuchumatanes Western Highlands Guatemalamentioning

confidence: 99%

Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from western Guatemala

Porcuna-Ferrer

Fiala

Freyer

et al. 2020

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability

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Community seed banks (CSBs) are initiatives to support the conservation and use of diverse crops though locally rooted collective action. The impact of CSBs is assumed to be complex, but has not been investigated in detail. Our study addresses this gap by analysing the impact of CSBs using social-ecological resilience as theoretical framework. We focus on the western highlands of Guatemala where CSBs have been implemented since 2009.We used qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis, including focus groups, participatory workshops, and structured and semi-structured interviews conducted in the local communities with CSB members and non-members. Our results indicate that CSBs contributed to increased seed exchanges, improved access to novel crop diversity, more saving of traditional varieties, and greater information and knowledge access, use and exchange. These effects strengthened the social-ecological resilience of the local communities. The scope of action of the CSBs, however, was constrained by wider socio-economic trends, including social divisions, out-migration of youth, and a change in livelihood strategies. We conclude that for CSBs to effectively strengthen social-ecological resilience in the future, they should be continuously adapted to the local context. Conceptually, our findings call for the further evolution of the CSB concept.

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Section: Study Region: Cuchumatanes Western Highlands Guatemalamentioning

confidence: 99%

Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from western Guatemala

Porcuna-Ferrer

Fiala

Freyer

et al. 2020

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability

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“…Following the U.S.-backed coup in 1954, the Guatemalan economy transformed with the growth of nontraditional export crops such as coffee, sugar, cotton, and beef (Grandin 1997). The Pan-American Highway, built in 1956-1957, was a key infrastructure project of the postcoup government (McAllister 2009). More recently, there has been an increase in smallholder farmer production of higher value vegetable crops for the export market and in some cases illicit poppy cultivation (Steinberg and Taylor 2007).…”

Section: The Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing social-ecological resilience within small-scale agriculture in conflict-affected Guatemala

Hellin¹,

Ratner²,

Meinzen-Dick³

et al. 2018

E&S

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Climate change scenarios suggest largely detrimental impacts on agricultural production from a deterioration of renewable natural resources. Over the last 15 years, a new field of research has focused on the interactions between climate and conflict risk, particularly as it relates to competition over natural resources and livelihoods. Within this field, there has been less attention to the potential for resource competition to be managed in ways that yield greater cooperation, local adaptation capacity, social-ecological resilience, and conflict mitigation or prevention. The challenge of increasing social-ecological resilience in small-scale agriculture is particularly acute in the socioeconomically and agroecologically marginalized Western Highlands of Guatemala. Not only is climate change a threat to agriculture in this region, but adaptation strategies are challenged by the context of a society torn apart by decades of violent conflict. Indeed, the largely indigenous population in the Western Highlands has suffered widespread discrimination for centuries. The armed conflict has left a legacy of a deeply divided society, with communities often suspicious of outsider interventions and in many cases with neighbors pitted against each other. We use the example of the Buena Milpa agricultural development project to demonstrate how grassroots approaches to collective action, conflict prevention, and social-ecological resilience, linking local stakeholder dynamics to the broader institutional and governance context, can bear fruit amidst postconflict development challenges. Examples of microwatershed management and conservation of local maize varieties illustrate opportunities to foster community-level climate adaptation strategies within small-scale farming systems even in deeply divided societies.

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“…Many large, but once-remote villages have become bustling towns, while provincial towns are now small cities. Rural urbanization, Carlota McAllister points out, has been paradoxically accompanied by "ruralization," since the high cost of living forces people to rely increasingly on subsistence agriculture [49]. Fueled as well by remittances from migrants in the U.S., agro-urbanization has occurred in tandem with, and in part because of, the baby boom that has made Guatemala's population one of the youngest on Earth.…”

Section: Dreaming In Kaqchikel: Swot 6 and The Body Politic In The Eamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Movement, the Mine and the Lake: New Forms of Maya Activism in Neoliberal Guatemala

Way

2016

Humanities

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This article explores the social, economic, cultural and political issues bound up in two matters relating to the environment in the Sololá and Lake Atitlán region of the Guatemalan Mayan highlands in [2004][2005]: the violent breakup of an anti-mine protest and the various reactions to a tropical storm that threatened the lake ecosystem. It views these events as part of a historical conjuncture and centers them in a larger discussion of Maya political activism, environmentalism and neoliberal development in Guatemala from the 1990s-mid-2010s. It begins with the transition from war to peace in the 1990s, charting how Maya participation in municipal politics soared even as the official Mayan movement waned as the state turned to neoliberalism. Zooming in on municipal development and politics in Sololá in the early 2000s, it then traces at the ground level how a decentralizing, "multicultural" state promoted political participation while at the same time undermining the possibility for that participation to bring about substantive change. The center of the article delves deeper into the conjuncture of the first decade of the new millennium. By mapping events in Sololá against development, agrarian transformation and rural urbanization, it argues that resilient Maya community structures, although unable to stop the exploitative tide, continued to provide local cohesion and advocacy. Activists and everyday citizens became more globally attuned in the 2000s. The article's final section analyzes municipal plans made between 2007 and 2012, arguing that creating and controlling community structures became increasingly important to the state in a time when Guatemala's "outward" global turn was accompanied by an "inward" turn as people confronted spiraling violence in their communities. Critics called young people apolitical, but in 2015, massive demonstrations led to the imprisonment of the nation's president and vice-president, showing that there is a chapter of Guatemala's history of activism yet to be written.

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Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank'sAgriculture for DevelopmentReportread from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

Cited by 8 publications

References 3 publications

Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from western Guatemala

Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from western Guatemala

Increasing social-ecological resilience within small-scale agriculture in conflict-affected Guatemala

The Movement, the Mine and the Lake: New Forms of Maya Activism in Neoliberal Guatemala

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