Keywords

As we have seen in the analysis of the domains, agroecological transformation emerges through collective action, often driven by the collective agency of food producers in territories. Its governance must be participatory rather than top down, for two reasons.

First, agroecology is generally based on universal principles or elements that demand adaptation to local context, not adoption of prescribed technological packages. In specific territorial contexts, these principles must be implemented in a way that reflects the social, political and biocultural contingencies and knowledge of place. In the same way, the domains we have presented offer not a prescription of interventions or technologies but rather suggestions of critical areas for the development of agroecology. Analysis and interventions must be articulated and deployed democratically in place for each domain.

It is very important to also consider the intersections and overlaps between domains. Generally, when governance interventions shift power in more than one domain (through one of the six effects described in earlier chapters), the possibilities for transformation increase. When processes of transformation within multiple domains start to overlap and become ‘tied’, the opportunities for wider transformation—in a locale, territory or a country—are amplified, as change in the domains tend to align and mutually reinforce each other. An integrative approach that addresses and ties these domains is impossible through the interventions of individual groups, government agencies and other actors operating in isolation. It is through participatory and democratic collective processes of negotiation, reflexive analysis and action in territories that this becomes possible. Figure 11.1 visualizes this confluence.

Fig. 11.1
figure 1

On the left side, domains largely reflect disabling conditions for agroecology. As domains start to overlap, enabling conditions in each domain become more aligned, enhancing the potential agroecological transformation (right)

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The second point relates to the effects of interventions on transformation processes. As we have seen, the direct effect(s) of interventions in the realm of governance cannot always be predicted. Most interventions are implemented in highly complex, relational situations that are in constant flux, and most often, it is only apparent in retrospect what influence a particular intervention has on the development of agroecology. As we have seen in the previous chapter, an intervention that had the intention of nurturing agroecology could evolve into dynamics that enable co-optation or containment instead—and vice versa, as, for example, in the case of Nicaragua (Box 11.1).

FormalPara Box 11.1 Peace in Our Places of Origin: From Oppressing to Anchoring Agroecology in Nicaragua

Nicaragua’s history has been a crucial factor in its agroecological transformation. The institutional environment created through social movement mobilization of the 1990s, and then transformed over three consecutive Sandinista governments, has favoured a popular economy rooted in resistance, repeasantization and agroecology. Interventions by changing regimes have had a range of effects on the growth of agroecology—often unintended.

In a classic example of neo-colonial development, Nicaragua was invaded and occupied by the United States several times, while the coffee, tobacco, banana and cotton booms that defined its early and mid-twentieth century agriculture were built around US capital during five decades of rule by the Somoza family. The rural oligarchy enforced violent sharecropping relationships through armed ‘white guards’ and the National Guard systematically eliminated social and community leaders. A popular insurrection toppled the Somoza regime, and the Sandinista Revolution (1979–1990) carried out an extensive agrarian reform, targeting latifundio landlord estates and redistributing more than half the nation’s farmland. Across the country, migrant farm workers became cooperative landholders. However, the revolutionary government also promoted a chemical-intensive export agriculture model, in order to sell commodities to Eastern bloc countries and finance the war against the CIA-funded Contra armies that carried out terror attacks in the countryside.

It was in this context that the peasant-to-peasant method (see Box 5.2 in Chap. 5) to spread agroecological food production practices became popular in Nicaragua. Mexican agroecologist Jaime Morales, who served as an internationalist in Nicaragua in the 1980s, recounts why: “if the government sent fertilizer or pesticides to the rural areas, the shipment would be targeted by the Contras. If they sent a technician, the person would be shot by the Contras. Campesino-a-campesino was the only way to improve food production in war conditions.”

A war-weary population voted the Sandinista Front out of power in 1990. The incoming neoliberal regime privatized education and health care and reversed land reform. The mass of rural workers who had gained land access carried out a process of reconciliation with small farmers, retired soldiers and the former Contra fighters in order to found a national chapter of the peasant movement La Vía Campesina. Workers and peasants carried out highly precarious land occupations to prevent the privatization of state lands.

In the context of structural adjustment and privatization that characterized the 1990s, the role of large non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and development agencies became fundamental in the national economy, as Nicaragua became the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. At the height of the neoliberal period, illiteracy, hunger and destitution reigned in Nicaraguan cities and in the countryside. Meanwhile, the campesino a campesino agroecological movement grew exponentially in the context of resistance to neoliberal reforms in the countryside and fuelled by the huge budgets of foreign development agencies such as the Ford Foundation (McCune and Sánchez 2018).

By the early 2000s, Latin America was beginning to experience the renewed influence of socialism, and the governments of Cuba and Venezuela supported municipal politicians in Nicaragua to carry out pilot programmes to support health, education and peasant agriculture. In 2006, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega won the presidential election. Institutional support for agroecology was formalized when the National Assembly passed Law 693—The Food and Nutritional Security and Sovereignty Act—in 2009 and Law 765—The Foment of Agroecological and Organic Production Act—in 2011. However, many observers have noted how in the drafting process, disagreements between international NGOs and local partners, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), political parties and national agribusiness, led to the watering down of the language (Godek 2015) and the lack of budgetary commitment to implementation (Schiller et al. 2019). What has been noted with less frequency is that the overall political economy being created in Nicaragua since 2007 has led to a net repeasantization, with the rural population growing faster than the urban population.

The large part of the population that came to cooperatively own means of production (including land, vehicles, machinery, licences to operate, and credit), either through the redistributions of the 1980s or the worker- and peasant-led occupations of the 1990s, has consolidated what in Nicaragua is known as the popular economy: a non-state, non-private agricultural sector that is based on associative and self-managed economic activity. This sector uses the means of production to produce employment for itself, often through agroecological practices and by de-commodifying labour relationships (Núñez 2000).

“Peace in our places of origin” was the key, according to Edgardo Garcia, General Secretary of the Land Workers Association (ATC-Nicaragua) and currently a member of the International Coordinating Committee of La Vía Campesina. “We shifted from a state of siege in our farms and communities to a situation of stability. We won land now titles, titles for our cooperatives, access to local markets.” The state now provides low-interest loans to peasant cooperatives, the National Institute of Agricultural Technology has reoriented its work toward promoting native and creole seeds and agroecological practices, and adult education based on skill-sharing to tens of thousands of students is taking place in nearly one thousand rural communities (Osejo 2014).

Perhaps most importantly, national institutions cooperate at the local level through municipal and departmental Production, Commercialization and Consumption Councils, sharing vehicles and personnel with one another, universities and peasant organizations in order to meet the local demand for workshops, schools and social movement gatherings, even providing locally significant services such as emergency transportation in the countryside and mobilizing around climate disasters. Women’s equality has also emerged as a major component of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, with the country holding steady in the fifth place for gender equality in the world since 2016 (World Economic Forum (WEF) 2020).

In 2018, an extremely violent political conflict broke out in Nicaragua when labour unions and the government decided to raise a social security tax on businesses. The country polarized for months as scores of people were killed in disputed circumstances.

García explains how in the midst of this crisis, the importance of peasant agroecological farming became evident: “In 2018, when the large companies called for an economic shutdown, the peasant markets across the country remained open. When they wanted people to see that there was no way to eat, people instead saw us. And they saw that the large capitalist agro-food complex had become a parasite.” A regime of economic sanctions was imposed upon Nicaragua in 2018 by the United States and the European Union and the country has been denied access to credit, even in the context of the COVID public health crisis.

In this more recent situation of reduced foreign investment and private sector employment, the agroecological transformation has accelerated. Diversified, small farms have been emphasized in the anti-imperialist discourse of the national government and supported by state policies. While genetically modified seeds continue to be prohibited in Nicaragua, around 400 community seed banks provide native and open-pollination seeds to farmers through barter and seed loan systems (McCune 2016). The country has gone from producing 30% of the rice it consumes to producing over 80% in just over a decade, and it is self-sufficient in beans, the other main staple, as well as fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy products, with 80% of food produced by smallholders (Centeno 2020). Edgardo García summarizes creativity that led to the growth of peasant-led agroecology in Nicaragua as follows: “when there is a force that wants to paralyze you, block you, and leave you dead, you have to look for ways forward.”

This box was prepared by Nils McCune.

Continuous reflection is therefore critical in order to assess on an ongoing basis whether interventions are still supportive of a transformative agroecology or additional steering or a new intervention is required. This is what we refer to as reflexive governance. In order to embed reflexive governance within the transformation process, ongoing and iterative social learning processes among actors is needed. In this way, actors can enable and ensure governance interventions that both nurture and anchor agroecology.

Agroecological transformation therefore demands governance and facilitation mechanisms that enable continuous discussions, negotiations, exchange and joint planning between actors. This will also contribute to maintaining momentum and longevity (see Box 11.2). Facilitators in this case act not as expert intermediaries but rather as enablers of local and trans-local processes. It is their task to continuously reflect on the effects of any intervention and to ensure that agricultural producers and citizens in their respective territories control transitions. In that way, efforts towards institutionalization can be kept in check by the grounded realities, possibilities, needs and agency of these people, in a democratic and socially just process. Such participatory governance must ensure that time, resources, expertise and coalition-building are organized in a way that minimizes existing power imbalances (Peuch and Osinski 2019).

FormalPara Box 11.2 Five Steps for the Reflexive and Participatory Governance of Agroecological Transformation

Michel Duru et al. (2015), among others, offer a framework for a ‘co-innovation’ process for managing and governing agroecology transformations. They outline five steps, adapted below as key questions, that can be used to effectively facilitate processes for coordinating actors at the local or territorial level.

(1) Who are we?

The question of who is, or should be, involved in the agroecology transformation in the territory is key. Important players in this context are food producers from different backgrounds, genders, castes, sectors and classes, as well as supporting actors in research, government, civil society, the private sector and media.

(2) Where are we in the process?

Participants analyse the current situation in the territory, identifying the key assets for agroecology in the territory along with the barriers that limit it. This process often involves using participatory approaches to map out the available social and material resources and other elements of the territorial capital and/or joint development of the history of the territory. This stage may involve identifying exogenous changes and drivers that may influence the local situation, to build a collective understanding of the state of play. The exercise could provide a baseline for ongoing evaluation.

(3) Where do we want to go?

Using forecasting, participants design a future territorial organization to support agroecology. This generally involves a process of collective vision development and negotiation of values, aspirations and interests.

(4) How do we get there?

Using backcasting, participants identify the steps required to move from the current context to the vision identified in step 3, building on what has worked in the past. It includes developing an understanding of which additional assets, resources, contacts, competencies and capacities are required to achieve the desired change while recognizing that the ‘desired change’ may be contested and may evolve over time.

(5) What have we learned?

In this stage, participants set up decision-making processes and strategies for ongoing participatory governance of the transformation process, including systematically and iteratively monitoring progress against the objectives. From here, the process could circle back to point 1.

Source: Duru et al. (2015)

There are several challenges in participatory governance processes, as highlighted by Koen Kusters et al. (2017). Because these processes involve complex relations between multiple stakeholders and their heterogeneous interests, they require significant time commitment from participants to resolve differences as well as resources (including financial) to mobilize actors and maintain commitment. Moreover, the most well-positioned institutional host or facilitators of these processes may not be the producers, or producers’ organizations, involved in agroecology but rather researchers or experts in organizational development. They often have access to resources, salaries, connections and competencies, and trust from regime actors, to carry out this work. However, for many historic reasons, agricultural producers, as the key protagonists of agroecology, are highly cautious of the power of external experts and professionals to drive and control processes in ways that may not always reflect their priorities.

Indeed, as we have seen elsewhere, scientists, policy-makers, NGOs, consultants, institutions and funding processes often effectively reproduce the power relations and dynamics from the dominant regime that undermine the perspective, agency and voice of food producers. Thus, participatory governance in agroecology must be ‘endogenous’, or steered from within, instead of driven by external actors or objectives. This involves reversing the current democratic deficit which excludes food producers and citizens and favours the interests of powerful actors such as corporations and technocratic government. It often requires an expansion of ‘direct’ democracy in decision-making in order to complement, or replace, models of representative democracy that prevail in conventional policy-making.

This is a major challenge. First, deepening democracy assumes that every citizen is competent and reasonable enough to participate in political decision-making. However, for some people this requires a life-long education process to develop a different kind of character from that of passive taxpayers and voters. Second, empowering food producers as well as other citizens in the governance of food systems requires social innovations that: (1) create safe spaces for deliberation and inclusion and that contribute to gender equity, as well as other forms of equity; (2) build local organizations, horizontal networks and federations to enhance peoples’ capacity for voice and agency; (3) strengthen civil society; (4) expand information democracy and citizen-controlled media (e.g. community radio and participatory film-making); (5) promote self-management structures at the workplace and democracy in households; (6) learn from the rich history of direct democracy; and (7) nurture active citizenship (Pimbert 2012b). Last, an endogenous steering of this kind of democratic governance for agroecology is driven by the idea that active participation in decision-making is a right that is claimed through the agency of people themselves; it is not granted by the state or the market.

The Territorial Governance of Agroecology Transformations

While agroecological governance spans scales from household and farm to national and international, the territory is increasingly seen as the decisive level in fostering agroecological transformations (e.g. Wezel et al. 2015). Territories are not (only) delineated by administrative boundaries. Rather, they are generally defined by a range of circumstances and context- specific factors: spatial, geo-physical and environmental conditions, political and administrative structures, and cultural identities. Key aspects of a territorial approach include the valorization of endogenous resources, intersectoral development, the recognition and celebration of local identities, self-control of “development processes” and solidarity and democracy (Wezel et al. 2015).

It is evident then that the territory (or landscape level) is important for agroecology. It is at this scale that direct interactions take place between ecological and social processes that (re)connect agriculture, food, environment and health (Lamine et al. 2019). A territorial approach to agroecology thus allows for holistic perspectives that take into account interlinkages between the three dimensions of sustainable development—social, economic and environmental—and the possible tensions and trade-offs between these dimensions and between different sectors. In other words: in the territory, farm-level land-use decisions that involve ecosystem functions (i.e. pollination and watershed management) are connected with dynamics at a landscape or territorial level (Wilson 2009). Key to the potential for agroecological transformation is thus interaction and collaboration between food producers and other land users in a territory.

The territorial scale, like that of the local community, is intimate and rooted in place, enabling people to build “a collective attachment to a community of fate” (Lamine et al. 2019, p. 13). At the same time, it is large enough to allow for more robust mobilization of collective resources. Éric Sabourin et al. (2018) underlined this same thinking as follows:

The proposals of support for the development of agroecological agriculture need to be formulated at the scale of the territory and not of the technical system of the production unit or even less at the scale of the cultivated plot. The territory is the scale of the management of natural resources and landscapes, social life, knowledge management networks and local, regional and national markets.

A focus on the territory also provides opportunities to shift from linear and globalized commodity-supply chains towards locally controlled circular systems reintegrating food and energy production with water and waste management. This can be achieved by closing nutrient cycles, using functional biodiversity and ensuring that production, distribution and consumption are established within the territory (Pimbert 2012a). Circular systems significantly reduce fossil-fuel use and emissions; boost food, water and energy security; create jobs; raise incomes; promote resilient and self-reliant communities; and enhance the potential for inclusive and democratic governance (Jones et al. 2012). The regeneration of agroecology and circular systems within territories thus contributes to an improved ‘quality of life’ and helps in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

In terms of power and governance, the territory is an important interface between top-down provisioning by government programmes and investment and the democratic expression of citizens’ needs, aspirations and demands—it is precisely here that the two can mesh through issues of power and governance (van der Ploeg 2018). At the territorial scale, support structures and resources can be tailored to specificities of place (OECD/FAO/UNCDF 2016) while increasing the potential for building and mobilizing territorial resources and mechanisms (knowledge, labour, relations, nature) to further catalyse agroecological transformations. Thus, the territory allows collective work to shift the rules of the game, reform institutions, build markets and foster innovation. Not surprisingly, some of the most successful examples of agroecological transformations in this book are the result of such a territorial approach.

The territorial governance approach to agroecology can be strengthened in some ways through regional institutions and through regional policy (FAO 2018; Wezel et al. 2015; Petersen 2017) but also through new grassroots and alternative institutions that transcend existing regional boundaries. For example, as we have argued in the chapter on systems of economic exchange (Chap. 6), part of building an agroecological system involves developing territorial and interterritorial markets, distribution mechanisms and processing facilities—from mills and local abattoirs to community-owned food-processing units—because foodstuffs produced via agroecological methods are often ill-suited for undifferentiated export markets. Experiments with new institutional arrangements, such as food policy councils or the biodistricts in Italy, are exemplary developments where new territorially based institutions are carving out new strategic roles, convening multiple stakeholders in a territory (see Box 11.3). Such new institutions and grassroots networks help to broaden and deepen (Petersen 2017) territorial connections, relations and practices within the multi-scale governance framework (Fig. 11.2) and are most effectively built through the agency of territorial actors in processes of endogenous development.

Fig. 11.2
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Agroecology should be considered within a multi-scalar governance framework that examines the dynamic relationship between actors, institutions, systems and policies across household, community, territorial, national and international scales. At the same time, there is growing evidence over the importance of the territorial scale for agroecological transitions

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Box 11.3 Biodistricts in Italy—Agroecology Transformations at the Territorial Scale

In Italy, the ‘biodistrict’ model was first launched by a farmers’ organization, the Association for Organic Agriculture, in 2009. Biodistricts convene multiple stakeholders in a territorial space to advance the local management of natural resources based on the principles of organic agriculture. These initiatives focus on governance, aiming to strengthen the interlinkages between actors such as farmers, consumers, the touristic sector, municipalities, regional parks and other local associations to improve local economic, social and ecological conditions. There are now dozens of biodistricts in Italy, each emphasizing and valuing place-based cultures and mobilizing territorial capital to provide new employment and livelihood opportunities, improve ecological conditions, attract people to rural areas and foster the production of territorial and often traditional products.

Importantly, these have a strong basis in farmers’ organizations but have gained support from municipal governments and other actors in a promising territorial approach. The European Network and Mediterranean Biodistricts are playing an important role in sharing this innovative model with others, particularly in Europe, to help with interterritorial sharing and collaboration (Fig. 11.3).

Fig. 11.3
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Farmers from around the world tour the biodistrict della Via Amerina e delle Forre as part of the Schola Campesina international learning exchange in Italy (Photo Credit: Colin Anderson)

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Source: International Network of Eco-Regions (2017)