In a new article in Journal of Peasant Studies, Yann discusses how Criollo smallholders have been dealing with an upsurge in large-scale land deals in the Paraguayan Chaco over the last few decades. The upshot: they are doing all they can, but in the face of immense power imbalances, that is often still not enough.

Paraguay is experiencing tremendous pressure on land, with rates of conversion to agriculture among the highest in the world. In the Pilcomayo River basin, in the borderlands of Paraguay with Argentina and Bolivia, small-scale Criollo livestock herders are being squeezed out of their traditional livelihoods by outside investors.

Faced with constant pressure on land from outside actors, Criollo smallholders are responding in a variety of ways, including some contestation and resistance but also forms of everyday cooperation, intensification of production, livelihood diversification, and relocation.

These responses are shaping the Chaco landscapes even where the land has not yet been converted to large-scale agriculture by investors. People used to rely on an extensive, forest-based livestock herding system for a living. Today, those who are not driven out of livestock herding altogether are forced to fundamentally change their production systems to adapt to an increasingly scarce land base.

It is late to alter course, as most of the land in the Paraguayan Chaco has already been appropriated and converted by large-scale actors, but securing land tenure for those families that are still on the land but do not have titles and providing legal support to those currently facing investor claims on their land should be the absolute priority for any entity seeking to support the region’s Criollo population.

The LENDEV lab was in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the Global Land Programme's 5th Open Science Meeting, an opportunity to present ongoing work and meet many interesting folks working on land use change around the world! And of course a chance to see the sights and try some local food and Mezcal!

Our new study, years in the making, is finally out! The study, in which Yann, Marie-Claude and Olivia were involved, is an outcome of the project "Socio-ecological resilience in the face of global environmental change in heterogeneous landscapes – building a common platform for understanding and action", headed by Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), in which we participated in 2019-2022.

The paper explores the use of the concept of resilience, which has gone from a relatively obscure idea to somewhat of a household item over the last couple of decades. We argue that the idea’s appeal lies in part in the fact that it is intuitive and cuts across disciplines, much like that of sustainability, for example. Yet, when the time comes of applying it to real-life contexts, not all studies use the concept of resilience rigorously. We wanted to know how empirical studies, not just conceptual or modeling work, were tackling resilience. In particular, we were curious to see how many of these studies met what we called basic operationalization criteria – criteria that indicate a minimum level of rigor and comparability in these studies –, namely, defining a system of interest, specifying disturbances, providing a definition of resilience, evaluating resilience (either qualitatively or quantitatively), and for studies that examine social-ecological systems, integrating social and ecological dimensions in that evaluation.

We found thousands of academic papers that used the word in the last couple of decades but focused on 463 that were empirical and meaningfully engaged with the concept of resilience. Among these, we found that over half (51%) failed to meet at least one of these operationalization criteria, and that among studies of social-ecological systems, a majority (54%) did not integrate social and ecological dimensions in their evaluation of resilience. Even those articles that met our criteria often did so just barely, staying relatively vague for example in their definition of the system of interest or in how social and ecological dimensions were related. To indicate a way forward, we looked at good examples in our database and suggested some “best practices” for future empirical studies of resilience.

A couple of weeks of intense* fieldwork in the Pilcomayo have allowed Yann to answer some pending questions on settlement history and land conflicts on the left bank of the Pilcomayo river in Paraguay - and, of course, generate some new ones. Next steps are creating a draft booklet of settlement history in the area to disseminate locally and starting to write all this up as academic papers, linking what is happening there to theories of agricultural frontiers, land use regime shifts, and land access changes. Stay tuned!

*) Temperatures of up to 44 degrees Celsius without fan or AC and a solid 800km on the back of a motorbike on some of the worst roads of the country will wear one out!