Our Research
"Conflicts over the countryside: Civil society and the political ecology of rural development in the Andean Region"
Research questions
In the contemporary context of Latin America, characterized both by the dominance of neoliberal policies and by the possible beginnings of a return to more social democratic approaches to governing development, this research aims to understand the causes and effects of conflicts over the countryside produced by the expansion of extractive industries and the liberalization of agriculture.
Based on a multidisciplinary approach we seek for answers to the following questions:
- To what extent and under what conditions do civil society actors challenge and contribute to the geographies of neo-liberal development?
- Under what conditions are civil society actors able to change the terms of national and local debate on the types of rural economy that ought to be promoted in the region?
- What factors drive the geography of civil society?
- What are the relations (of cause and effect) between this geography and the geographies of neoliberalization?
We want to contribute to debates asking: What is and could be the role of the countryside in national development strategies, and what is its role in countries that are trying to negotiate new relationships with the global economy? Also, how can rural citizenship contribute to the consolidation of still fragile and imperfect democracies and the creation of fairer rural economies?
These questions have wide relevance and lie at the core of contemporary political debate and policy choice in each country as well as at a continental level (Economist, 2005). These debates – increasingly conflictive, occasionally violent – revolve around the extent to and ways in which market liberalizing reforms should be defended, deepened or resisted, the roles of civil society and the state in regulating economic development, and the ways in which economic wealth generated by such reforms should be distributed.