Understanding How Smallholders Integrated into Pericoupled and Telecoupled Systems

Abstract

Increasing connections and influences from near to far have changed social structures, access to natural resources, and essential livelihoods of smallholders (i.e., those with incomes generated primarily from natural resources on small rural properties). However, the potential benefits and negative impacts from these connections to smallholders' livelihoods and social-ecological effects remain understudied. In this paper, we applied the frameworks of pericoupling and telecoupling (human-nature interactions between adjacent and distant systems, respectively) to systematically investigate how the flows linking smallholder systems to other systems affect their livelihoods, and causing varying economic, social, and environmental effects from case to case. We synthesized 12 cases of smallholder systems around the world that are linked to adjacent and distant systems through flows of goods, people, resources, and/or information. In each case, we summarized smallholders' agency, i.e., capability on the formation or operation of these flows, and the changes on livelihoods on the economic, social, and environment effects. Results suggest that strong smallholder agency is associated more with positive than negative effects. Smallholders with medium to high agency have greater overall well-being within the area of interest. Smallholders integrated in pericoupled systems often have strong agency. Being spillover systems in an intercoupled system (e.g., large-scale agricultural investments) can often cause negative outcomes unless smallholders have additional pericoupling flows. Our findings suggest one potential approach to ending poverty and increasing well-being for smallholders is creating and increasing pericoupling flows to empower smallholders for desired livelihood and social-ecological outcomes.

Effects of global shocks on the evolution of an interconnected world

“…Consumers can then be brought closer to producers. Therefore, if society at-large obtains an understanding of the metacoupling framework, this will not only improve research, such as identification of knowledge gaps (Liu and Yang 2013 ), but also assist with the production of new knowledge (Schaffer-Smith et al 2018 ; Dou et al 2020 ; Xu et al 2020a ; da Silva et al 2021 ), and the development and adoption of more effective sustainability policies (Liu et al 2018b ). Such an understanding may come from the incorporation of the framework into education curricula, from K-12 to graduate school levels, with a direct identification of individual coupled human and-natural systems, the flows within and between those systems, and the causes and effects of those flows.…”

Bioengineering, telecoupling, and alternative dairy: Agricultural land use futures in the Anthropocene

“…ZAE Cana was recently repealed by the Bolsonaro administration, positioning approximately 1.2 million hectares of forests and natural grasslands at potential risk from sugarcane expansion (de Andrade et al, 2020). Therefore, environmental gains achieved in BC could be offset by land clearing due to the livestock displacement and/or sugarcane expansion in Brazil that would result from increases in sugar demand.…”

“…In Brazil, some businesses would take advantage of the repealed ZAE Cana and increased sugar demand, expediting sugarcane expansion into forests and natural grasslands. However, the policy repeal is not popular among all sugarcane industry members (see Hofmeister, 2019), and there is incentive to maintain the reputation of the industry as being not as environmentally destructive as other agricultural industries, such as livestock farming (de Andrade et al, 2020). Therefore, the expedited rates of land clearing may lead to concerted industry‐environmentalist efforts to restore ZAE Cana.…”

Metacoupled Tourism and Wildlife Translocations Affect Synergies and Trade-Offs among Sustainable Development Goals across Spillover Systems

“…A new integrated framework, based on the concept of metacoupling [21], was introduced to evaluate SDG synergies and trade-offs within and across boundaries explicitly [6]. As a new frontier for global sustainability [22][23][24][25][26][27][28], the metacoupling framework addresses socioeconomic-environmental interactions within a system (i.e., intracoupling) and across adjacent (i.e., pericoupling) or distant systems (i.e., telecoupling) [21]. The metacoupling framework has been applied to many important issues, such as environment [29], energy [30], soil conservation [31], food trade [32], and fishery [22], and across different scales, such as smallholders [25], regional watershed systems [33], national energy network [30], and marine system at global scales [23].…”