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News of the lab

New paper: "who defends us?"

2/28/2025

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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.
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LENDEV LAB AT the GLP OSM 5 conference

11/12/2024

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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!
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paper: Agricultural expansion & water access

7/22/2024

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New paper by former LENDEV lab member Patrice Matthews! In "Troubled Waters", Patrice shows how agricultural expansion in the Gran Chaco is leading to the marginalization of smallholders through reduced water access. Many smallholders in the Chaco critically depend on access to surface water, such as rivers, for themselves and their livestock. In the Pilcomayo basin, Patrice shows that the average distance to surface water for smallholder living in homesteads in the forest has increased a lot between 2000-2018, mostly due to agricultural expansion. Read the paper here!
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Paper: Frontier constellations in the Pilcomayo

7/1/2024

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In a new paper published in the Geographical Review, Yann explores the land-use history of the Pilcomayo River basin in the Paraguayan Chaco over the last century. Mobilizing the concept of "land-use regimes", he shows that the region has one through a series of distinct regimes with different logics, functions, and actors over its history. This leads to a discussion of the notion of regimes as a heuristic to discuss long-term land-use change. Check it out here!
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LENDEV lab members present @ CLAG Puerto Rico

5/26/2024

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Lab members Marie-Claude and Olivia, and lab PI Yann, presented their research at the 2024 Conference of Latin American Geography in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from May 22 to 26! They talked about capturing land control dynamics in early commodity frontiers (Olivia), about spillovers in forest carbon projects (Marie-Claude), and about smallholder strategies in the face of large-scale land acquisitions in the Gran Chaco.
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Another field season in the pilcomayo

5/18/2024

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Yann conducted another field season in the Pilcomayo River area in the Paraguayan Chaco in April/May. He first disseminated a booklet summarizing the history of the region, adapted from a paper about to be published - a promise he had made on earlier visits. He also continued inquiring about land-use dynamics, particularly the question of land-use intensification through pastures, and the moral economy of land. Fortunately, this time, the temperature was much more bearable, although rains made transportation difficult at times - the roads in the Pilcomayo turn to a very slippery mud as soon as it rains!
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How do we study resilience? New paper

3/10/2024

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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.

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Olivia's fieldwork update

10/20/2023

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Olivia is back in the office after five months of fieldwork in the Argentine Chaco. Between May and July, she spent most of her time talking with people that have recently migrated away from the forest towards a rapidly growing town, to understand the pressures acting on families living through the expansion of soy and maize monoculture in the region. Then, in July and August, Olivia made her way into the forest to work with charcoal producers. By examining the supply chain of this nationally important commodity she's found that there are fascinating (albeit worrying) feedbacks happening between agricultural expansion and charcoal production in the region (stay tuned!). Finally, in September, Olivia gave a workshop (aimed at exposing youth living in rural communities of Santiago del Estero to concepts in Ecology) in twelve primary schools. During these, she had a chance to interview many teachers - inarguably the experts on the dynamics of outmigration happening in the region. What's next? Lots of data analysis for the next couple months, and then hopefully a return trip to continue the workshops in April and May!
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yann back from the Pilcomayo

10/18/2023

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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!
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fieldwork in paraguay this fall

9/20/2023

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In September and October, Yann will be heading back to the Pilcomayo River basin in Paraguay to continue working on reconstituting the history of land use and livelihoods prior to the arrival of the cattle frontier. The area has experienced important transitions over its history, from a territory dominated by mostly nomadic Manjui and Nivaclé people before the Chaco War, to one where they cohabited with Guaraní and Argentine criollo families as well as  military posts and some large estancias after. Recently, the massive expansion of large cattle ranches has again transformed the region. With this new visit, Yann hopes to shed some light on remaining questions about that history, and on the recent land conflicts that have arisen from the expansion of the cattle frontier.
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