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Agricultural systems world-wide are facing an increasing level of uncertainty and risk in light of unprecedented climate and environmental change. The ecological challenges for agrarian sectors are further complicated by social factors such as growing world population and an expanding demand for biomass-based products. Formalized knowledge structures can benefit from approaches that consolidate informal local knowledge networks in understanding social and ecological change related causal chains (Tengö et al., 2013). This is especially relevant for the research-policy interface concerning sustainable agrarian system management.
As part of the junior research group TRANSECT, which investigates the social-ecological effects and interdependencies of agrarian transformations in Central and South Asia, a framework for knowledge mapping on sustainable land use systems is under development. We aim to bring together knowledge from local land users and other relevant stakeholders to develop future policy scenarios related to bio-based economy in the agrarian sector and to critically assess their social and ecological consequences on the ground. Our proposed framework is inspired by previous experiences with the MARISCO method (Ibisch and Hobson, 2014; www.marisco.training), a methodology for the adaptive management of risk and vulnerability, developed at the Center for Econics and Ecosystem Management in the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development. This approach has been applied in various projects of natural resource management as a tool that allows the collection of complex and diffused knowledge from different sources, and to structure, evaluate, and prepare for the development of integrated solutions. The visual presentation of existing knowledge in the form of ‘knowledge maps’ that raise awareness of ignorance, and the systemic identification of knowledge gaps and risks are central features of MARISCO method (Ibisch and Hobson, 2014).
While the original methodology provides an established and proven toolbox for evaluating the ecological dimension of complex socio-environmental challenges, our inspired methodology elaborates on the social dimension of environmental and societal threats as well as policy interventions, for which we find it crucial to put a stronger emphasis on equity. In contrast to the more ecosystem-focused MARISCO method, a central feature of our approach is a socially differentiated analysis that distinguishes between different social groups or strata when evaluating social (and ecosystem) services and the (social) impact of stresses or threats.
We will introduce and elaborate on our proposed participatory and socially differentiated approach for knowledge mapping on sustainable land use systems with illustrative examples from experiences in Central Asia. As our current experience shows, a key challenge in designing and implementing such approaches is to take social-ecological complexity seriously while keeping the method manageable for regular workshop settings without overburdening participants.
Since the Soviet breakup, rural communities in the Kazakhstan–China borderlands have faced cataclysmic social, economic, and ecological transformations. Collective and state farms have been replaced by precarious smallholder agriculture suffering from a decline in financial inputs and the deterioration of infrastructure. At the same time, dynamic transformations of border permeability (and trans-border reconnections) between Kazakhstan and China have challenged the until relatively recent widespread Soviet rhetoric on Western China (or rather Xinjiang) as an underdeveloped space across the border. This article is based on several months of fieldwork between 2019 and 2021 in Panfilov District, located at major cross-border road and railway intersections and hosting important infrastructural objects, such as a dry port, a major railway transhipment hub, and a trans-border special economic zone. The article explores how the border situation (and the border’s changing permeability for people, commodities, and ideas since the early 1990s) as well as the implementation of new trans-border infrastructures eventually shaped local discourses and practices in the socio-economic development of south-east Kazakhstan’s agricultural sector. It is scrutinized herein how various forms of trans-border socio-economic interactions (although heavily regulated) and China’s (agri-) economic policy in Xinjiang started to affect farmers’ ambitions and practices across the border.
This article scrutinizes the Maritime Silk Road Initiative by framing it not as a static, state-centric device to channel Chinese developmental ambitions, but by emphasizing the flexible character of its production and the provisional configuration of its materialization. It draws on assemblage theory as a conceptual angle to, on the one hand, focus on the agentive character of human and non-human ‘actors’ such as ‘traveling’ discourses of development or infrastructures to explore Maritime Silk Road Initiative’s materialization ‘on the ground’ in its emergent rather than resultant way, on the other.