TY - JOUR A1 - Alff, Henryk A1 - Spies, Michael T1 - Pfadabhängigkeiten in der Bioökonomie überwinden? Landwirtschaftliche Intensivierungsprozesse aus sozial-ökologischer Perspektive JF - Peripherie: Politik, Ökonomie, Kultur N2 - Der Wandel zu einer „bio-basierten“ Wirtschaft, wie er in nationalen und internationalen Bioökonomie-Strategien propagiert wird, kann nur mit tiefgreifenden Veränderungen landwirtschaftlicher Systeme zur Steigerung der Agrarproduktion einhergehen. Besonders in Ländern des Globalen Südens gingen solche Prozesse jedoch meist mit unbeabsichtigten – oder in Kauf genommenen – negativen Konsequenzen wie Umweltdegradation oder die Verschärfung gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheiten einher. Dennoch finden die Kenntnisse über die Risiken bisheriger landwirtschaftlicher Interventionen kaum in politischen Bioökonomie-Strategien Berücksichtigung, die auf wirtschaftlich-technische Lösungen einer „nachhaltigen“ Intensivierung durch agrartechnologische Innovationen auf der einen, und eine Ausweitung von Produktionsflächen auf der anderen Seite setzen. Wie diese Produktionssteigerungen ökologisch und sozial nachhaltig gestaltet werden sollen, bleibt unklar, und bisherige Erfahrungen mit derartigen Interventionen lassen eher das Gegenteil befürchten. Anhand von zwei historischen Beispielen – der Grünen Revolution im Punjab Pakistans und der Neulandkampagne in Kasachstan – skizziert der Beitrag die vielschichtigen sozialen und ökologischen Folgen bisheriger, großangelegter landwirtschaftlicher Interventionen zur Produktionssteigerung und geht der Frage nach, inwiefern diese Erfahrungen (besser) in Bioökonomie-Strategien Berücksichtigung finden (können). Kritische Reflektion sollte dabei vor allem die Rolle institutioneller Pfadabhängigkeiten in der Gestaltung aktueller und zukünftiger Entwicklungen erfahren. Wie bisherige Erfahrungen im Landwirtschaftssektor deutlich machen, müssen Bioökonomie-Strategien ihren geforderten systemischen Ansatz ernst nehmen – was impliziert, dass technologie- und produktivitätsorientierte Ziele stets sozialen und ökologischen Zielen untergeordnet werden müssen. KW - Landwirtschaft KW - Bioökonomie-Strategien KW - Produktionssteigerung KW - Grüne Revolution KW - Neulandkampagne KW - Pakistan KW - Kasachstan Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-2280 VL - 40 IS - 159/160 SP - 334 EP - 359 PB - Verlag Barbara Budrich ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Spies, Michael A1 - Alff, Henryk T1 - Assemblages and complex adaptive systems: A conceptual crossroads for integrative research? JF - Geography Compass N2 - In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more-than-human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social-ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, despite the success of these conceptual perspectives in their respective research fields, there have been few attempts so far to bring these theoretical strands together to explore their common ground and investigate how they could cross-fertilize each other. This contribution seeks to address this gap, by investigating the ontological compatibility of these two approaches and exploring the potential for meaningful syntheses that could be utilized for integrative research—combining perspectives, approaches, and methods taken from social and environmental sciences for the analysis of human-environmental relations. Based on a comparative discussion of four selected “guiding principles” found in assemblage thinking and complex adaptive systems, namely, socio-nature, emergence/historicity, relationality, and self-organization, we find not only significant common ground between the two perspectives but also discrepancies that may be utilized for cross-fertilization. In particular, we argue complex adaptive systems would benefit from a deeper engagement with society-nature theorizations found in the assemblage literature, while assemblage thinking could borrow from complex adaptive systems to broaden its conception of how elements relate to and co-function with each other. KW - historicity KW - more-than-human social theory KW - relationality KW - social-ecological systems KW - socio-natures Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-2319 SN - 1749-8198 VL - 2020 IS - 14 PB - Wiley ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Spies, Michael A1 - Zuberi, Mehwish A1 - Mählis, Madlen A1 - Zakirova, Aksana A1 - Alff, Henryk A1 - Raab, Christoph T1 - Towards a participatory systems approach to managing complex bioeconomy interventions in the agrarian sector JF - Sustainable Production and Consumption N2 - Calls for a “sustainable bioeconomy” have recently begun to proliferate in academic and political circles as an answer to global challenges such as the rapidly increasing world population and changing environmental conditions due to climate change. To build economies that rely on various sources of biomass rather than on fossil-based resources, bioeconomy policies highlight a need to explore ways in which productivity in agriculture can be increased. While the focus on productivity growth has largely been inspired by technology optimism and modernisation thinking, the local knowledge of farmers and other rural stakeholders – as a means of contributing to socially and ecologically more sustainable bioeconomy pathways – has frequently been sidelined. This perspective article proposes and discusses a participatory approach to strategy formulation and evaluation in agricultural transformation and bioeconomy development that is based on the methodological toolbox MARISCO (Adaptive MAnagement of vulnerability and RISk at COnservation sites). By offering a means of developing a comprehensive knowledge map, bringing together both insights and perspectives from diverse local stakeholders, this approach enables a systemic evaluation of the social and ecological effects of intervention strategies on the ground. The article outlines the benefits – and challenges – of such a systemic and participatory approach and briefly sketches how the results can be utilised in more sustainable governance processes in the development of bioeconomy strategies. We conclude that our adapted MARISCO methodology offers a viable tool to make more visible the perspectives and knowledge of biomass producers for policymakers and to contribute to a much-needed discursive shift in bioeconomy debates towards more holistic and inclusive perspectives. KW - Bio-based economy; Participatory methods; Social-ecological systems; Intensification; Agriculture Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-4205 SN - 2352-5509 IS - 31 SP - 557 EP - 568 PB - Elsevier ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lin, Shaun A1 - Yang, Yang A1 - Alff, Henryk A1 - Frost, Mark R. A1 - Kaneti, Marina A1 - Oakes, Tim A1 - Rigg, Jonathan A1 - Rippa, Alessandro A1 - Wang, June A1 - Winter, Tim T1 - Review forum reading Tim Winter's Geocultural Power: China's Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2019). 304 pp.; bibliog.; index. ISBN: 978-0-226-65835-3 US $27.50 (paperback). JF - Political Geography Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-6040 SN - 978-0-226-65835-3 SN - 0962-6298 SN - 1873-5096 VL - 84 PB - Elsevier ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alff, Henryk T1 - Book review to: Portuguese decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: history and ethnography. - by Pamila Gupta, London : Bloomsbury, 2019, 240 pp., ISBN: 978-1-350-17472-6 JF - Journal of the Indian Ocean Region Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-6029 SN - 978-1-350-17472-6 SN - 1948-0881 SN - 1948-108X VL - 17 IS - 2 SP - 263 EP - 265 PB - Taylor & Francis ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alff, Henryk T1 - Book review to: Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin. - by Alun Thomas, London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, ix‒xii + 257 pp., ISBN 9781350143685 JF - Nomadic Peoples Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-6037 SN - 9781350143685 SN - 0822-7942 SN - 1752-2366 VL - 24 IS - 2 SP - 352 EP - 354 PB - White Horse Press ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alff, Henryk T1 - Book review to: Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China. - by Alessandro Rippa, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020, 282 pp., ISBN 978-94-6372-560-6 JF - Journal of Borderlands Studies Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-6055 SN - 978-94-6372-560-6 SN - 0886-5655 SN - 2159-1229 VL - 37 IS - 3 SP - 659 EP - 660 PB - Taylor & Francis ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alff, Henryk T1 - Book review to: Beyond the Steppe Frontier. A History of the Sino–Russian Border. - Sören Urbansky, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, xiii + 367pp. JF - Europe-Asia Studies Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-6067 SN - 9780691181684 SN - 0966-8136 SN - 1465-3427 VL - 74 IS - 3 SP - 508 EP - 510 PB - Taylor & Francis ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Alff, Henryk A1 - Schmidt, Matthias A1 - Spies, Michael A1 - Steenberg, Rune ED - Schmidt, Matthias ED - Steenberg, Rune ED - Spies, Michael ED - Alff, Henryk T1 - Layered legacies - an introduction T2 - Beyond post-Soviet: layered legacies and transformations in Central Asia T3 - Geographica Augustana - 33 Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-4160 UR - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/89035 SN - 978-3-948283-05-6 SN - 1862-8680 SP - 4 EP - 6 PB - Institut für Geographie, Universität Augsburg CY - Augsburg ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zakirova, Aksana A1 - Alff, Henryk A1 - Schmidt, Matthias T1 - Cash crop or food crop? socioeconomic and geopolitical factors affecting smallholder farmer crop selection in times of crisis in southwestern Tajikistan JF - Frontiers in Agronomy N2 - Tajikistan's agricultural sector, primarily dominated by cotton cultivation, has experienced significant changes since the Soviet era. Although farmers introduced food crops into agricultural production to ensure food security after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government still mandates that cotton cultivation occupy a considerable portion of Tajikistan's limited irrigated land. However, following the recent Covid-19 pandemic crisis, farmers have encountered the need to reassess their agricultural practices, given constrained governmental assistance and a range of socioeconomic considerations. This research adopts resilience as a conceptual framework to examine the coping strategies of smallholder farmers in the Khatlon region of Tajikistan, with a specific emphasis on the period spanning from 2019 to 2022. At the outset, our research employed the snowballing technique to increase respondent participation, later transitioning to a representative sample size that facilitated the collection of qualitative data from around 100 semi-structured interviews, 10 focus groups, and personal visits to agricultural fields over the course of four years. The paper not only demonstrates the overall creativity of Tajikistani farmers in growing and selecting non-cotton crops in this most recent period of crisis, but also points to wealthier farmers’ generally greater willingness to adopt technological innovations and gain new knowledge to apply to them. Although these strategies have been taken in order to address farmers’ immediate needs in troubled times against the backdrop of the existing state cotton policy, their sustainability remains uncertain. While the qualitative focus of this study bears certain inherent limitations, the data collected nevertheless show that this period of crisis has been generative for many farmers as they seek out new methods of subsistence. KW - resilience; coping strategies; subsistence; post-Soviet; Covid-19; Central Asia Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:eb1-opus-7972 SN - 2673-3218 IS - 5 PB - Frontiers ER -