Institut für Sozialwissenschaften des Agrarbereichs

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hohpublica.uni-hohenheim.de/handle/123456789/18

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Browsing Institut für Sozialwissenschaften des Agrarbereichs by Journal "Frontiers in sustainable food systems"

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    Coping and social cohesion mechanisms in addressing climate change and land degradation in Ghana
    (2025) Amankwah, Harry Quaye; Ndah, Hycenth Tim; Schuler, Johannes; Abdulai, Alhassan Lansah; Knierim, Andrea
    The West Africa sub-region is faced with major interlinked challenges in ensuring sustainable livelihoods in the context of climate change and land degradation. To ensure sustainable food production and resource use, agriculture needs to be resilient through the application of responsive adaptation and coping strategies. While many studies have explored coping and adaptation strategies employed by farmers, little attention has been paid to the farmers’ indigenous practices and the role of social cohesion mechanisms. Using the sustainable livelihood framework, this study addressed this gap by exploring coping strategies and social cohesion mechanisms used by smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. It made use of a mixed-method approach, including a household survey, focus group discussions, expert interviews, field observations, and key informant interviews. Data was collected from 60 households in 6 communities across 3 districts in the study region. The results showed that social assets such as membership of self-help groups were the most important source of coping, particularly for the most vulnerable households. Such membership enabled farmers to secure micro-loans and receive aid from fellow members during extreme climate events such as floods. Farmers’ tacit knowledge emerged as pivotal in coping with climate change and enhancing soil fertility, encompassing traditional weather forecasting, the making of bio-pesticides, and sustainable land management (SLM) practices such as ridge and bund creation as well as intercropping. Key coping practices reported by the study participants included reduction of food consumption, off-farm jobs, selling livestock, charcoal making and reliance on remittances. The results further revealed that social cohesion mechanisms or collective action play a key role in helping farmers cope and adapt to climate change while improving soil fertility. Social cohesion is mainly reflected in two different structures depending on gender. While diverse challenges of innovation adoption exist, socio-cultural barriers differ by gender. The study recommends the integration of farmers throughout the innovation development process and proposes the need for a concerted effort to strengthen land tenure security policies, ensuring equitable access to farmlands for all genders.
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    Food justice in public-catering places: mapping social-ecological inequalities in the urban food systems
    (2023) Hoinle, Birgit; Klosterkamp, Sarah
    Departing from reflections and observations raised by Food Policy Councils (FPCs) within North America specifically, this article explores the complex material, discursive, and governance aspects of food provision on the urban-regional scale by highlighting recent accounts of public food provision within state-funded public-catering places in Germany. Based on a fieldwork in Southern Germany, and grounded in a methodological approach guided by participatory action research (PAR), participatory observation, feminist GIS, and 17 interviews with different actors within the regional food systems involved we would like to form the basis for pushing these new approaches further toward more food democracy and food justice as we are elevating the key factors and rewards, but also the downsides and challenges of food provision in public catering places regarding social-ecological inequalities. In doing so, the global intimacies of the urban food system on the local scale, their different modes of inclusions and exclusions, and their intersections of inequalities are unpacked by also shifting the focus to the economic and political entanglements at stake within the global sphere of food provision. By amplifying how producers, meal providers, and consumers within the urban food systems perceive (and perhaps contradict) issues of food justice and by coalescing their perspectives about local food system transformations and desires toward food justice and sustainability, not only the challenges at place but also the promises of hope within public-catering places are illustrated.