Journal
AGRICULTURE AND HUMAN VALUES
Volume 33, Issue 2, Pages 275-290Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10460-015-9605-z
Keywords
Political ecology of education; Landless Workers' Movement (MST); Spatial imaginaries; Agrarian reform; Remote sensing
Funding
- National Science Foundation [1060888]
- Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship)
- Fulbright Foundation
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [1060888] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Scholarly attention to sustainability transitions is rapidly increasing. This article explores how cultural politics constrain agricultural change. Cultural politics, or conflicting values about appropriate types of agriculture, are an underexplored variable influencing whether or not farmers adopt agroecological methods. The research focuses on the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that influence cultural politics. It analyzes the intersection of mechanisms and cultural politics in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST). Insights into the factors confounding the agroecological transition are derived from an analysis of longitudinal spatial data derived from historic aerial photographs and remotely sensed images, and ethnographic data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on a political ecology of education perspective, the cultural politics surrounding the agroecological transition are traced to the confluence of the region's historical usage for cattle ranching (environmental mechanisms), farmer's conceptions of space (cognitive mechanisms) and the combination of agricultural extension and government credit (relational mechanisms). The MST's agroecological education initiatives hold the promise to drive the sustainability transition, but are also constrained by these cultural politics and associated mechanisms.
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