Research

The LENDEV lab studies how people make choices about land use and livelihoods, and what these choices mean for environmental sustainability and human development, particularly in rural areas of the Global South. We have a general, but not exclusive, focus on Latin America.

Some questions at the center of our inquiry are:

How do agricultural commodity frontiers emerge and expand, and can a better understanding of the decision-making of farmers and investors pushing these frontiers help us anticipate new ones?
What are the strategies developed by different groups of actors to cope with rapid changes in frontier environments, and can we support them for greater sustainability?
What is the role of culture in shaping land-use changes?

We use a variety of methods from geography and land systems science to answer these questions, including remote sensing and geographic information systems, ethnographic fieldwork, household surveys, statistical modelling and qualitative analysis. We work at small to medium scales, from the household to the firm and the municipality or region. We strive to integrate approaches in order to provide a complete picture of the topic considered.

Understanding the expansion of agricultural commodity frontiers
The challenges and contradictions of sustainable development are nowhere more apparent than in agricultural commodity frontiers — places where commodity agriculture expands over natural environments —, which some see as an opportunity for economic growth, while other experience as an ecological and social catastrophe. Agricultural commodity frontiers have been studied for a long time, but their dynamics are changing: in recent decades they have been increasingly driven by capitalized agriculture operating with minimal government intervention. We study the nature and implications of this shift through the case of the Gran Chaco, a dry woodland ecosystem that has experienced among the highest deforestation rates in the world over the last two decades (see our papers on commodity frontiers and on transnational producer cohorts in the Gran Chaco).

Livelihood resilience and sustainability in frontier landscapes
The expansion of agricultural commodity frontiers causes rapid changes in social and environmental conditions. Smallholders who inhabit frontier areas often cannot compete on equal terms with expanding commercial agriculture. While some manage to halt expansion locally, e.g., by successfully filing land claims, in many cases they are forced to develop alternative livelihood strategies to accommodate these new landscapes. In this line of investigation, we try to understand the many ways in which these people adapt their livelihoods in order to persist in rapidly evolving frontiers (see our papers on smallholder access restrictions in commodity frontiers and their impacts on smallholder livelihoods, and our review of the empirical applications of the concept of resilience).

The role of culture in land use change
Studies of land use change commonly assume that decisions to use land in a certain way are made by economically rational actors trying to maximize profits. This assumption ignores the fact that many of the decisions people make are influenced by values, beliefs, norms - things that fall under what we call "culture". In order to approach the question of how culture influences land-use, we study the land-use dynamics of Low-German Mennonites, a religious group with a long history of migration and territorial expansion in Latin America. Looking at the way that religious and cultural imperatives guide land-use decisions in this particular community can, we believe, help scholars of land use change better understand how culture may shape land-use decisions worldwide (see our papers on the role of culture in land system science and on Mennonite expansion in Latin America).

Land governance and forest conservation in a connected world
In response to rapid deforestation associated with agricultural expansion, various countries have increased restrictions on forest conversion to agriculture. However, these restrictions are mostly local, whereas large agricultural companies often operate in several regions or countries, and tend to move capital in response to changes in investment conditions. Trade and capital flows connect distant places in ways that make it harder to predict what the effect of local changes in regulations will be. In this line of research, we take various angles on the challenges posed by this connectivity to land governance (see our papers on the influence of land-use policies on agricultural frontier investments and the role of supply-chain initiatives in reducing deforestation, and Marie-Claude's thesis on leakage in a forest carbon project in Panama).

Some recent coverage of our research in the media

If these topics spark your interest, and you'd like to explore them with us, see the Join the lab page!