| dc.description.abstract | The negative impacts of modern industrial agriculture are widely recognized in academic literature, supported by growing calls for systemic change. It has become clear to rural citizens and social movements that public policies designed to foster the Green Revolution model have subjected them to external technological and monetary dependency while degrading the environment and human health. Therefore, calls for an agroecological transition have now spread among scientists, international organizations and the broader civil society.
Sustainability transitions (ST) is a field of research dedicated to studying how fundamental systemic changes in societal regimes come about. Scholars have increased efforts to study agroecological transitions in the past years. One central actor in the constellation of actors in society is the state. ST literature is adamant in positing that its active participation is required for sustainability transitions while acknowledging the capitalist state as part and supportive of the incumbent, unsustainable food regime. Therefore, it is unclear what role states actually play or can play in sustainable transitions, suggesting a relevant knowledge gap in the literature. This research, thus, responded to calls for more research on the state's role by bringing a novel theoretical perspective to ST scholarship – ecofeminism. This study developed an analytical framework originally combining ST and ecofeminism to investigate the state's role in agroecological transitions.
As a case study, it applied the framework to the recent experience of a state-supported agroecological transition in Brazil between 2012-2019. The results showed that the federal government created an institutional framing that fostered deep cooperation between state actors and civil society, allowing innovations to emerge autonomously from the protagonists of agroecological practices. In addition, the case study highlighted a less-explored aspect in the literature on agroecological transition: the importance of the types of markets the state is fostering, which should be compatible with the agroecological premise of transforming food systems and relations between producers and consumers. The addition of ecofeminist lenses to ST literature was vital for unveiling the importance of which types of markets are being nurtured.
However, the same institutional setting deemed appropriate to foster the agroecological transition proved highly fragile, supported only by government policies and not rooted in deeper state policies. Therefore, this case study has shown that states can play critical roles in helping but also hindering transformations if these transitions are not ingrained enough in deeper state institutions. | |
