More and more of global economic wealth and decision-making power rests with fewer and fewer people, while acute socio-economic inequities continue to afflict large rural communities in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Land inequalities remain a burning question for rural communities.
Equitable Rural Socioeconomic Change brings together original reflections on the intricacies of economic and social transformations that are unfolding in the rural areas of developing countries, and provides a fresh and authentic perspective. This compelling book revisits dominant but exhausted conceptions of rural livelihoods to expose their analytical flaws and thematic limitations. In this book, the interacting themes of land, climate dynamics and technological innovation are brought into a coherent whole through a re-examination of the lens of unequal ownership, control and use of a society’s productive means.
Equitable Rural Socioeconomic Change is the first multidimensional and integrated analysis of rural socio-economic change anchored around rising structural polarisation in the 21st century.
Product information
1. Contextualising socioeconomic change
Peter T Jacobs
PART 1: LABOUR, LAND AND FOOD
2. Improving the quality of work for chronically poor people
Lucy Scott
3. Technical change and labour absorption in large-scale commercial agriculture in South Africa
Ajuruchukwu Obi
4. Support to smallholder farmers in South Africa: Challenges of scale and strategy
Michael Aliber and Ruth Hall
5. Translating farmland redistribution project practices into policy outcomes
Tim GB Hart
6. Farm and non-farm livelihoods in the rural West Coast District, South Africa
Peter T Jacobs and Ephias Makaudze
PART 2: CLIMATE AND ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS
7. Droughts, floods, carbon footprints and agriculture: The case of South Africa in context
Peter T Jacobs and Rehema Msulwa
8. The trade in Pelargonium sidoides: Rural livelihood relief or bounty for bio-buccaneers?
Jaci van Niekerk and Rachel Wynberg
9. Natural resource pricing and climate change vulnerability: Implications for smallholder development in Africa
Ajuruchukwu Obi and Lily Kisaka
10. Participation of women in smallholder irrigated agriculture in South Africa: Constraints and opportunities
Maxwell Mudhara, Stanley Sharaunga and Sithembile Sinyolo
11. To what extent does conservation benefit local communities?
Melville Saayman, Riaan Rossouw and Andrea Saayman
12. The challenges of climate change and biofuel production in South Africa: The perspectives of smallholder producers
Ephias Makaudze
PART 3: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION
13. Rural innovation adoption pitfalls: The case of interrupted diffusion of sericulture among Rwandan farmers
Alexis Habiyaremye
14. Social technology and sewage treatment in rural areas of Brazil
Milena Serafim and Rafael Dias
15. Innovation and the dynamics of rural economic development
Lindile L Ndabeni
