The importance of cross-scale social relationships for dealing with social-ecological change in agricultural supply chains

作者：Blanca González‐Mon, María Mancilla García, Örjan Bodin, Willem Malherbe, Nadia Sitas, Catherine B. Pringle, Reinette Biggs, Maja Schlüter‬ · 发表于：Journal of Rural Studies · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.103191 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Agricultural Innovations and Practices、Global trade, sustainability, and social impact、Organic Food and Agriculture

Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. These systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face challenges in responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic change. Most studies on how actors respond to change have focused on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems to markets, to understand how social relationships across the supply chain influence how actors respond to multiple types of changes. We used a participatory network mapping method to interview actors across a fruit supply chain in the Western Cape, South Africa, that is connected to both global and national markets. We identified droughts, climatic variations, changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and other social shifts as the most important changes affecting the production and trade of fruit in this region. We also identified three types of responses to these changes: i) responses concerning the dynamics of trade relationships (e.g., changing or maintaining trade relationships); ii) responses based on changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in farm management); and iii) responses based on social relationships (categorized into four types, namely collaboration, knowledge transfer, financial assistance, and marketing coordination). Within these four types, we found that different types of social networks, that include actors operating at dif...