Coexisting
Role of Protected Areas in Improving Rural Livelihoods and Well-being in Southern Africa: A South African Case Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session André Pelser
In most African countries, rural communities surrounding protected areas are likely to experience poverty rates higher than the national average. Protected areas are thus increasingly expected to cross the boundaries of conventional biodiversity protection and to also provide tangible benefits to neighbouring communities that will contribute to poverty reduction. Official conservation policy in South Africa strongly promotes the integration of biodiversity conservation with overall population and development programmes as a means to mitigate poverty among rural populations. This paper deals with the main findings of an assessment of two intervention programmes run at the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in the Free State province of South Africa and the core lessons learned from this initiative. If poverty is understood and recognised as a multi-dimensional reality of existence, then a protected area’s contribution to poverty alleviation should not be confined to the financial aspects of poverty only, but should also allow for a broader social, cultural, and economic scope.
Agricultural Expansion, Livelihood Stability, and Change in Rural Indonesia: Cases of Oil Palm Plantations in Central Kalimantan
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Arya Hadi Dharmawan, Eka Intan Kumala Putri, Nurmala Katrina Panjaitan
Massive expansion of oil palm in rural Indonesia has been a major phenomena for many years. It began in the 2000s, when many corporations and smallholders were expanding their plantation following the increasing price of palm oil in the world market. The oil palm plantation expansion has been considered to be very aggressive encroaching on forest lands and bringing about negative effects on deforestation, intensified carbon emission, and loss of biodiversity as well as giving rise to worsening water conditions. On the social-economics side, oil palm expansion has triggered dramatic social change in the form of livelihood transition, adaptive mechanism from diverse to single dependence on livelihood sources. The depth and width of social change caused by oil palm expansion are, however, determined by socio-cultural and technological as well institutions existing in the community. This paper elaborates on the typology of oil palm expansion and understanding the socio-economical impacts of oil palm expansion in rural regions. The expansion also causes livelihood stability, resilience, and vulnerability. The paper wants to come up with theory of agricultural expansion and to find out constructive policy solutions for oil palm expansion in Indonesia.
Contributions of Environmental History in the Creation of Hybrid Knowledge That Adds to Social Change: Building Transdisciplinarity in the Environmental Humanities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martha Micheline Cariño Olvera
The complexity of the social reality in the civilization crisis that we face as humanity has led the environmental sciences and humanities to apply a transdisciplinary analysis in order to understand and deepen long-term explanations. This is how environmental history research projects need to incorporate other social sciences approaches such as ecological economics, political ecology, ethnobiology, and critical geography. This leads to a transdisciplinary confluence in which the loans between these hybrid fields of knowledge are so intense and common that with our research practice we are transcending multidisciplinary fields towards a new hybrid knowledge field of environmental humanities. Through this emerging paradigm and with multidisciplinary research teams we are able to better understand environmental problems such as climate change and its past and present adaptation/mitigation strategies, socio-environmental conflicts arising from various extractive activities and in different ecosystems, the multiple processes of dispossession caused by the expansion of the borders of nature commodities, and the asymmetry of power that prevails in the imposition of the development model on geographic identities and diverse types of life. The results of these kind of research projects can better contribute to social change.
