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Land Use Competition pp 1–17Cite as

Land Use Competition: Ecological, Economic and Social Perspectives

Part of the Human-Environment Interactions book series (HUEN,volume 6)

Abstract

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the development over time from research on land cover towards research on drivers of land use practices as part of an integrated land systems science. The increasingly spatially, temporally and functionally distributed nature of these drivers poses multiple challenges to research on land use practices. We propose the notion of ‘competition’ to respond to some of these challenges and to better understand how alternative land use practices are negotiated. We conceive of competition as a relational concept. Competition asks about agents in relation to each other, about the mode or the logic in which these relations are produced and about the material environments, practices and societal institutions through which they are mediated. While this has centrally to do with markets and prices, we deliberately open the concept to embrace more than economic perspectives. As such competition complements a broadening of analytical attention from the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ to include prominently the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of particular land use practices and the question to whom this matters and ought to matter. We suggest that competition is an analytically productive concept, because it does not commit the analyst to a particular epistemological stance. It addresses reflexivity and feed-back, emergence and downward causation, history and response rates—concepts that all carry very different conceptual and analytical connotations in different disciplines. We propose to make these differences productive by putting them alongside each other through the notion of competition. Last not least, the heuristic lens of competition affords the combination of empirical and normative aspects, thus addressing land use practices in material, social and ethical terms.

Keywords

  • Relational perspective
  • Land cover
  • Global change
  • Scaling
  • Interdisciplinarity

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of European Ethnology and Integrative Research Institute THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jörg Niewöhner

  2. Governance and Sustainability Lab, Trier and IRI THESys, Trier University, Trier, Germany

    Antje Bruns

  3. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Helmut Haberl, Christian Lauk & Juliana Lutz

  4. Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development in Transition Economies, Halle (Saale) & IRI THESys, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Müller

  5. Department of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Patrick Hostert, Tobias Krueger & Jonas Ø. Nielsen

Authors
  1. Jörg Niewöhner
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  2. Antje Bruns
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  3. Helmut Haberl
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  4. Patrick Hostert
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  9. Jonas Ø. Nielsen
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Correspondence to Jörg Niewöhner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. of European Ethnology & Integrativ, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jörg Niewöhner

  2. Governance and Sustainability Lab, Trier University, Berlin, Germany

    Antje Bruns

  3. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Patrick Hostert

  4. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Krueger

  5. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jonas Ø. Nielsen

  6. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Helmut Haberl

  7. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Christian Lauk

  8. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Juliana Lutz

  9. Halle (Saale) & IRI THESys, Leibniz Ins. for Agri. Devel. Trans. Eco, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Müller

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Niewöhner, J. et al. (2016). Land Use Competition: Ecological, Economic and Social Perspectives. In: , et al. Land Use Competition. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33628-2_1

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