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Impacts of climate change are a burden for many rural communities in the global south, and particularly affect vulnerable farming households, that depend on agriculture for their sustenance. Understanding how vulnerable rural migrant households respond to this, from a translocal perspective can help to build households’ resilience to climate change. While studies in Nigeria have assessed the impact of migration as a means of adaptation, studies assessing the influence of vulnerable households, using this approach is limited. This study therefore assessed how translocality influence adaptation to climate change, for vulnerable rural households in Arochukwu, southeast Nigeria. To achieve this objective, a multistage purposive random sampling technique was used to collect data from rural farm households. Primary data were collected from the households in the Area of Origin (AoO) and Area of Destination (AoD) using survey and interviews, and analysed using mixed methods analysis. Results indicate that rainfall variability and high temperature are the most risks encountered, resulting in crop losses. As a means of adaptation, migrant and non-migrant households engage in off-season migration to urban and rural areas, with more migrant households engaging in off-season rural-urban and rural-rural migration. Among migrant households, flow of resources occur, with the type of item determining the medium of exchange; while households in the AoO pay less attention to agricultural investment. Migrant and non-migrant households also differ significantly in terms of the number of adaptation measures employed. Findings from the empirical analysis on the influence of translocality on adaptation indicate that, perception of climate change, household size, and the transfer of ideas, knowledge, and innovation by migrants to their households in the AoO significantly influence adaptation of rural farming households. The research makes a case for consideration of translocality in national adaptation plans, aimed at building resilience of rural households in Southeast Nigeria.
Organic agriculture in Java, Indonesia, has been historically intertwined with social movements that struggled for more economically, ecologically, culturally, and socially sustainable agriculture. While these grassroots movements emerged under an authoritarian government that showed little interest in organic agriculture, the turn of the 21st century saw the rapid involvement of the Indonesian government in supporting, regulating and, arguably, commodifying organic agriculture. Institutionalization triggered diverse responses from competing organic actors, reflecting their different standpoints and knowledges. In this context, a transdisciplinary approach is deemed suitable to provide context-specific insights into organic agriculture.
This dissertation draws on anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to explore the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a contribution to a critique of transdisciplinarity. My interest on the hierarchization of different knowledges is inspired by the work of anthropologists of knowledge that asks how the communities they study construct knowledge and how they themselves construct knowledge about these communities. Since transdisciplinary knowledge is co-produced by science and society and reflects their embedded power relations, transdisciplinary research needs to be open to different interpretations, and reflexive towards the unequal distribution of resources, accountability, and responsibility. By linking these two lines of thought, I examine the making of knowledges through reflexive transdisciplinary work. I reflect on how “epistemic living space” (Felt 2009) and “co-presence” (Chua 2015) affect research and shape the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I argue that the hierarchization of different knowledges of organic agriculture was intertwined with my shifting positionalities, as a field researcher in Indonesia and PhD student at Passau University, as I moved between these two different “field sites”.
This cumulative dissertation is divided into two parts. In Part I, “Knowledge in the making”, I present my contributions towards transdisciplinary knowledge production and politics of knowledge of organic agriculture. Part II, “Publications”, comprises the three stand-alone papers. The first contribution is my formulation of the notion of knowledge in the making. The second is my exploration of the ways that reflexive transdisciplinary work, and living and intersubjective experience shape knowledge in the making. The third is my demonstration of how an understanding of knowledge in the making sheds lights on the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture. This approach serves to examine the politics involved in synthesizing the conceptualizations of organic agriculture employed by different actors into one overarching narrative, such as sustainable agriculture or alternative agriculture. My final contribution is the notion of transdisciplinary moments, a conceptualization of transdisciplinary research practice that accounts for the politics of knowledge in which both scientific and extra-scientific actors are embedded. As a conclusion, I share the lessons learned from pursuing a PhD as a cumulative dissertation in an unstructured setting within a German–Indonesian research project on Indonesian organic agriculture. Finally, I identify bodies of literature and strands of thinking for future engagement within transdisciplinary research and discuss their potential to contribute to radical change in the institutional and value structures of contemporary academia.