PER background
Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies
The research on Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies (AFES) is partly a continuation of earlier research that took place in the second half of the previous decade on land, agrarian change, land reform and rural livelihoods.
The research theme of agrarian change since then expanded to include work on environmental degradation, political ecology and conservation[1], as agricultural and rural development became more and more influenced by resource conflicts and climate change.
Population Studies and Social Policy
The area of Population Dynamics and Social Policy (PDSP) is based on earlier work in the area of population and development, amongst others jointly undertaken with UNFPA .
By the mid-2000s the research area was expanded into innovative directions such as children, youth and development, social policy and development, gender and sexual and reproductive health rights .
Poverty studies remained important, as did population studies.
This was a change that followed important external policy foci emerging in the ‘development agenda’, and emerging trends in global debates, such as focusing on sexual and reproductive health rights and gender equity and on inter-generational issues, such as ageing and children & youth in development.
Joint focus on social and structural transformation
The two research groups have come together in the critical political economy tradition of development studies, with a focus on social and structural transformation.
The distinguishing feature of the research is a critical political economy approach that looks at population and economic transitions that have emerged from changes in agriculture and rural areas. It examines the changing nature of access to resources, environmental degradation, poverty dynamics, vulnerability, exclusion, and social/gender differentiation in these transitions.
For example, these include looking at why young people do not want to farm anymore, the shift in gender power relations in the land rights disputes, the impact of migration to urban areas, and the issue of ‘surplus population’.
This two-stream approach, which recognizes the inter-connexions between these two areas of study, is not only innovative but also allows the development and cross-fertilization of new ideas and initiatives. These inter-relationships are recognized by the draft IPRC (2012), as having 'a common epistemological and methodological foundation that holds it together.'
We plan to build further on this common foundation.
