Agroecology as a pathway to resilience justice: peasant movements and collective action in the Niayes coastal region of Senegal

ABSTRACT

In semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa, farming populations face harsh climatic conditions but also very unequal and dynamic social processes that affect their resilience. This study addresses aspects of power and social justice related to the social-ecological system of the Niayes coastal region of Senegal and examines the potential of agroecology to improve the adaptive capacity of smallholder farmers. We performed a knowledge co-production process with a local farmer union to identify the main social-ecological nexuses that matter for smallholder farmers, their dynamics and the influence of powerful actors and institutions on them. We also look at the potential actions of the farmer union under the banner of agroecology to transform these dynamics. We found that social-ecological dynamics involve reinforcing feedback loops that undermine the resilience of smallholder farmers and that powerful actors such as agribusinesses have a strong influence on these processes. Union actions promoting agroecology have enhanced system thinking and related solutions, but observed social justice claims are very recent and have a limited scope. Our findings expand the notion of resilience grabbing, understood as the undermining of resilience through the loss of commons, to include systemic degradations due to direct and indirect actions of involved stakeholders. We also propose to expand the notion of resilience justice vertically, integrating procedural and recognition justice, and horizontally, integrating linked social-ecological issues. We conclude that agroecology can become a transformative bridge from resilience grabbing to resilience justice, but must be more sensitive to power relations, in particular around labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• environmental justice
• social-ecological system
• transformation knowledge
• resilience grabbing
• resilience justice
• Niayes
• Senegal

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank the Fédération des Agropasteurs de Diender (FAPD), its leaders and its members for their fruitful collaboration in this study, as well as all interviewed persons including the municipalities of Diender and Kayar, agribusiness and fishermen sector representatives. We thank Mor Ndoye Diop of the FAPD for his contribution in data collection, Claire Girardet for her literature review on water issues, Boubacar Barry of the Initiative Prospective Agricole et Rurale (IPAR) in Dakar for his expertise on groundwater and Sokhna Mbossé Seck (IPAR) for her simultaneous translation at the focus group discussions.

Disclosure statement

We declare no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, SB. The data are not publicly available due to information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Because our study is a local case study and mainly qualitative, it would be easy to trace back its source to individual persons and compromise privacy. We therefore prefer to keep control over who is accessing the data and we welcome readers to contact us to get the data. For this reason we prefer not to give access via URL.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under Professorship grant number: 176736 (‘AGROWORK’).