Transforming peasant lives, livelihoods and landscapes: an analysis of agroecological transitions in Northeast Brazil

Abstract

This thesis explores the potential of agroecological transitions to transform peasant lives and livelihoods, emancipate the rural poor and reconfigure government policies in order to support agroecological transitions in northeast Brazil. In this work, agroecological transitions are understood as processes of transformation that seek to address the ecological, as well as the socioeconomic and political challenges of peasant agriculture, and support peasants in their historical struggles for emancipation and rural change. Integrating a livelihood analysis, with a discussion on emancipatory rural politics and a multilevel perspective, the work uniquely assesses the transformative, emancipatory and evolutionary process shaping agroecological transitions. The four empirical chapters focus on different phases of the transition process. They begin in Chapter 4 with a political economy analysis of agrarian change, peasant marginalisation and rural resistance, follow in Chapter 5 with a livelihood analysis of agroecological grassroots innovations (focusing in Pernambuco, Brazil), continue in Chapter 6 with an analysis of the development of agroecology into a social and political movement for peasant emancipation, and finish in Chapter 7 with a multilevel perspective of the co-evolutionary processes leading to the institutionalisation of agroecology into national politics. The chapters are framed around three common questions, namely how agroecological transitions transformed peasant lives and livelihoods in Pernambuco, to what extent and in what ways they supported peasant emancipation, and why transitions unfolded the way they did. Drawing on different sources of data (semi-structured interviews, farmers surveys, observations, and scientific and grey literatures), the analyses presented in this thesis demonstrate that agroecological transitions have transformed not only the lives and livelihoods of many peasant communities in Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil, but also created a social and political movement for peasant emancipation and rural change and began to reconfigure institutional frameworks to support the mainstreaming of agroecology. This thesis situated the emergence and development of agroecological innovations in a broader historical, social and political context of agrarian change and peasant marginalisation. This historical perspective was essential to understanding the contribution of agroecology to peasant emancipation and rural change. The livelihood analysis also revealed that advancing innovative practices and technologies, as well as empowering local communities and challenging conventional knowledge systems were important steps in a transformative process to improve peasant livelihoods and well-being and enhance farm agrobiodiversity and resilience. While situating transitions within theoretical discussions on emancipatory politics, the work demonstrated how the agroecology movement embraced historical peasant struggles for autonomy and contributed to strengthening the links across practices, science, social movement and policies. The thesis demonstrates how grassroots organisations increasingly organized around local, regional and national level networks and created a national agroecology movement to demand governments support in nurturing endogenous processes of innovation and improving peasants’ access to key livelihood resources. The multilevel analysis revealed how this movement took advantage of a policy opening at the national level and translated lessons from successful experiences into innovative policies. A reconfiguration pattern unfolded as a result of competing and collaborative interactions between grassroots innovations, network dynamics, landscape trends and regime structures. However, the analysis also pointed to some governance dilemmas and institutional constraints that limited the capacity of policies to support the mainstreaming of agroecology. It also raises some questions about the challenges and uncertainties moving forward as agroecology faces a new wave of authoritarian politics and policy retrenchment. This challenging moment reflects clear conflicts between transformative grassroots innovations and conforming regime forces and reinforces the idea that power shifts are key conditions in transition processes of translating and mainstreaming innovations. This thesis contributes to knowledge by providing a conceptually and empirically informed framework to analyse the transformative and emancipatory potential of agroecological transitions, and to identifying and discussing the challenges to mainstreaming agroecology as a transformative approach to peasant emancipation and rural change. At the same time, it contributes to the methodological and conceptual developments that are still needed to study and support agroecological transitions as a policy project, by uniquely integrating livelihood, political and multilevel approaches. In addition, the work corroborates a wide body of literature that indicates the potential of agroecology to transform peasant lives and livelihoods, emancipate the rural poor and potentially reorienting agricultural and rural development trajectories, particularly in the developing world.