Abstract
Valorising the biocultural heritage of common goods could enable peasant farmers to achieve socially and economically inclusive sustainability. Increasingly appreciated by consumers, peasant heritage products offer small farmers promising opportunities for economic, social and territorial development. Identifying the obstacles and levers of this complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder objective requires an integrative framework. We applied the panarchy conceptual framework to two cases of participatory research with small quinoa producers: a local fair in Chile and quinoa export production in Bolivia. In both cases, the “commoning” process was crucial both to bring stakeholders together inside their communities and to gain outside recognition for their production and thus achieve social and economic inclusion. Despite the differences in scale, the local fair and the export market shared a similar marketing strategy based on short value chains promoting quality products with high identity value. In these dynamics of biocultural heritage valorisation, the panarchical approach revealed the central place as well as the vulnerability of the community territory. As a place of both anchoring and opening, the community territory is the privileged space where autonomous and consensual control over the governance of common biocultural resources can be exercised.
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Notes
We define peasants as agricultural producers bound to their land, customs and culture, combining autonomy with community-oriented decisions (Van der Ploeg 2018). Peasants are not limited to premodern subsistence agriculture, and many of them are long-standing actors of the economic market (Soper 2016; Van der Ploeg 2018). We use the term "peasant agriculture" instead of the commonly used term "family agriculture" to focus on the farming model (peasant farming vs. entrepreneurial farming) implemented by these producers rather than on their social status as family units.
We use the term "adaptive loop" to avoid the connotation of deterministic recurrence of the term "cycle", originally coined by Holling (1973).
Due to its higher density, cold air drains to the lowlands at night thus increasing the risk of frost there while slopes remain less exposed.
Remember that "short value chain" does not refer to the geographical distance between producer and consumer, but rather to the reduced number of intermediaries that separate them in the value chain.
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Acknowledgements
This work received financial support from CONICYT (National Council for Scientific and Technological Research, Chile: Project PAI-80160043 BAQUIANA, UCM/IRD), MSH (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme SUD, France: Project PANARCHI 2017-2018, IRD/CNRS/UCM/UNJU) and ANR (The French National Research Agency, France: Project ANR-06-PADD-011-EQUECO). We thank Pablo Jara-Valdivia and Marcela Calquín for their contributions to the participatory process with the Lipimávida community, and Mathieu Dionnet, co-organiser of the workshop “Common goods and participatory methods” (MSH-SUD, 16-18/05/2018, Montpellier, France). We are all indebted to the producers, development agents and local authorities involved with us in these projects. Thanks are also due to the reviewers whose comments greatly improved the paper.
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Winkel, T., Núñez-Carrasco, L., Cruz, P.J. et al. Mobilising common biocultural heritage for the socioeconomic inclusion of small farmers: panarchy of two case studies on quinoa in Chile and Bolivia. Agric Hum Values 37, 433–447 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09996-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09996-1