Blog Post

TRANSECT at POLLEN 2024

9 July 2024

Aksana, Michael, and Mehwish presented project findings at the fifth biennial Political Ecology Network conference which took place in June.

It was held in Lunds University (Sweden), Dodoma University (Tanzania), and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima (Peru) as a multi-sited and hybrid event. The theme of this year’s POLLEN was “Towards Just and Plural Futures”. The full program can be found here.

Together with Irna Hofman, advisor of the TRANSECT research group, Michael co-organised a double panel on "Contested imaginaries? Eclectic pathways of agrarian change". In the hybrid panel with participants from two conference locations -- Lund, Sweden and Dodoma, Tanzania — we aimed to look behind the polarized policy and academic debates on agricultural development by focusing on local perspectives. Who owns the control over, and who governs, future production pathways? And how do farmers position themselves in the making of agrarian futures? The empirically-rich papers presented in the double panels included case studies from across the globe and addressed the diversity of actors that are implicated and/or involved in the making of agricultural futures, and with what result. Within this panel, Mehwish presented findings from South Punjab concerning spatial imaginaries of smallholder farmers for desired improvement in agriculture, looking deeper into factors related to histories, structures, and livelihoods that may limit the farmers’ possibilities to envision alternate agrarian pathways.

In a separate panel on “Agrarian Transformations”, Aksana presented her manuscript in progress on the complex interactions among social, economic and ecologic variables that influence the decision-making processes of Tajikistani smallholders as they navigate the transition towards adopting organic cotton production practices. This transition, initiated and guided by the external actors, largely from the global North, emphasizes broader power dynamics and asymmetries inherent within the global agricultural system. She highlighted the vulnerability of smallholder farmers to the volatility of the global organic cotton markets, influenced by external shocks such as pandemics, wars, and natural hazards.
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