17 July 2016 — Day 4
Blog post by Luis Angel Lopez Mathamba, Universidad Autónoma de Estado de México, Guatemala
During the day we analyze information about “Governance, Different ways of knowing, and The food water and climate Nexus”, all applied at rural policies.
In “Governance” we see the new way of apply the policies, that mean that all need to start with the stakeholders and improve the policy with a multidisciplinary group. It´s important to say that we see two important examples. (i) The first example shows us how the governance is not applied in the best way, because the government decide all the actions for the conservation of forest in a group of ejidos, that´s important because we learned how identify when the governance is not applied considered stakeholders.
When we discuss “Different ways of knowing” we talk how the policies are created, considering the kinds of origin of knowledge. Is important because identify that the policies are assembled mainly with academic knowledge, forgetting the traditional knowledge, especially the knowledge with intrinsic value.
In the theme The food, water and climate Nexus we discuss the efficiency of the traditional agriculture versus the industrial agriculture, based in the energy that its use. We also considered that is a good idea promote the dynamic agriculture (collect plants and hunt animals). During the class we also talk about Polanys thoughts about embedded economy, showing us that we have different ways to recognize the production of good and services for its consumptions, because it´s actually have more weight in market, over the culture, beliefs and rules.
We can say that during the day, we acquire essential concepts for create, transfer, apply and evaluate policies in rural areas, with the intention of use in the best way the natural resources and have a high level of acceptance of the local culture.
Blog post by Sarah Pohlschneider, University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness College, Scotland
Brent started the day demonstrating how innovative plans, programmes and policies enhance the carrying capacity of communities in Cascadia.
The theoretical possibilities and far too real barriers to establishing governance structures in Newfoundland and Mexico were demonstrated by Ryan and Gabino, who both saw case studies fail due to government structures. However, as Brent stressed in the next session, there are key elements to providing successful collaborative governance structures, which will make governance groups even resilient to gun-loaded hill billy intervention. Sensitive to chances, limits and structures of (un)successful governance, we were encouraged to design an approach within our focus groups.
The afternoon session focused on different ways of learning, acknowledging that conventional academic epistemology is based on a context dependent value system that is not universally applicable and discriminates against other types of knowledge. An inspiring group discussion with the panellists Sean, Mike and Robert revealed how the devil exchanged Jesus for Alabama and Georgia and, more importantly, how “the ways we use our knowledge make us wise” (Sean).
The final session dealt with the food-water- energy-climate Nexus and saw informative presentations from Marco, Tom, John and Matteo, highlighting issues in agriculture-energy relations, Nexus thinking and food waste. The day ended with a vivid interchange of ideas and questions from faculty and students.