Agroecological Local Dinamization postgraduate course

Food sovereignty can be conceptualized as a political proposal for social change in the field of agri-food relations. However, specific strategies of how to achieve this transformative potential are diverse, and contextdependent. The paper explores this diversity by examining discourses on the food sovereignty construction process in Catalonia. Using Q methodology we have explored visions held by individuals participating in the social movement for food sovereignty, identifying five discourses: activism, anti-purism, self-management, pedagogy, and pragmatism. Key strategies of transformation include social mobilization, institutional negotiation, self-management, education to foster value change, and politics of the possible. The relevance assigned to ideological affinity explains different views on the subject of transformation, particularly regarding the involvement of the administration and the productive sector. As regards transformative strategies, discourses assign differing importance to the role of agency for effecting social transformation, which influences their assessment of individual actions as an effective means for social change. Forms of individualized and classic collective action currently coexist within the Catalan agri-food movement, but such diversity is not acknowledged as an effective alliance towards food sovereignty. Moreover, all discourses agree to a dual definition of food sovereignty, both as a process, that is, as democratization of the decision- making process in the agri-food sector, and as a result, that is, establishing an agri-food model alternative to the neo-liberal one. However, the discourses share an unclear view of democracy as decentralized collective decisionmaking that does not make explicit how this model should be implemented to achieve social control of the agri-food system.

Social capacity building for natural hazards is a topic increasingly gaining relevance not only for so-called developing countries but also for European welfare states which are continuously challenged by the social, economic and ecological impacts of natural hazards. Following an outline of recent governance changes with regard to natural hazards, we develop a heuristic model of social capacity building by taking into account a wide range of existing expertise from different fields of research. Particular attention is paid to social vulnerability and its assessment, as well as to risk communication and risk education as specific strategies of social capacity building. We propose to distinguish between interventionist and participatory approaches, thus enabling for a better understanding of existing practices of social capacity building as well as their particular strengths and weaknesses. By way of conclusion, we encourage more research on social capacity building for natural hazards in the European context which at present is highly diverse and, at least in parts, only poorly investigated.

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecol-ogy as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The 'multi-level perspective' is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent 'hybrid forums' can provide a space between niche and regime where niche innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a 'hybrid forum'. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student's opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems.

La Dinamización Local Agroecológica (DLAe) forma parte del paradigma agroecológico, un paradigma alternativo de desarrollo rural y periurbano que se despliega en tres frentes: como disciplina científica, como conjunto de prácticas de manejo agrario y como movimiento social transformador. La triple propuesta ofrecida por la DLAe cuestiona el sistema agroalimentario industrial basado en el productivismo e incentiva la puesta en marcha de procesos participativos para analizar las acciones y relaciones de los diferentes actores sociales, respecto al sistema agroalimentario local, al tiempo que promueve la gestión colectiva y sostenible de bienes comunes como la alimentación, la tierra, las semillas o el agua. Para ello se dota de herramientas que comparte con la educación ambiental, como la investigación-acción-participativa y las metodologías participativas, que permiten establecer un diálogo de saberes entre el conocimiento tradicional y el conocimiento científico para promover mayor sostenibilidad en las comunidades agrarias.

Conceived as «new risks», agricultural GMOs activate a political and social dynamic with effects over the political-scientific decision-making process. This paper explores this dynamic in a double level, European and Catalan. In the first case, GMOs regulation is analysed, identifying the factors that explain its result. In the second case, the diagnosis of a polarized debate shows the existence of underlying processes, determinant for the discussion. These processes (different languages and debate on the agri-food model) are due to the existence of opposed value systems and they condition the dynamics of the dispute.

Una forma de superar algunas de las limitaciones de las políticas tradicionales de desarrollo rural es la apuesta por modelos agroalimentarios alternativos basados en la agroecología y la soberanía alimentaria. Los procesos de transición agroecológica pretenden, entre otras cosas, activar dos dinámicas fundamentales, la recuperación de conocimiento ecológico tradicional y la articulación de redes alimentarias alternativas, y para ponerse en marcha y mantenerse en el tiempo necesitan de un sistema organizativo en red que, en la medida de lo posible, cuente con el apoyo de las instituciones locales. En el caso español, durante los últimos años cada vez más administraciones públicas están poniendo en marcha políticas alimentarias locales, con paradigmas relativamente distantes del modelo agroalimentario hegemónico. En el presente texto se analiza cómo los procesos de transición agroecológica pueden contribuir a activar y/o reinventar un patrimonio cultural capaz de movilizar redes de a...