The political economy of agroecological transitions

Agroecological transitions are fraught with challenges. Not only are there structural and institutional barriers or ‘lock-ins’ that uphold an unsustainable global food system, agroecological transitions require rethinking how we work with ecosystems and involve a shift in productive and reproductive relations in agriculture.

In this seminar, Ben McKay will argue that agroecology problematizes prevalent relations of production in industrial agriculture. It seeks to shift control over the labour process and value appropriation, while working to repair epistemic and metabolic rifts by prioritizing farmers’ knowledge and strengthening the co-production of human and non-human nature.

But what are the factors that may facilitate or restrict agroecological transitions?

He uses a political economy approach to focus on several key interrelated aspects for analyzing agroecological transitions which he believes can contribute to understanding the possibilities for, and challenges to, food system transformations.

About the speaker

Ben M. McKay is Associate Professor of Development and Sustainability at the University of Calgary in Canada.

His research focuses on the political economy and ecology of agrarian change in Latin America, agrarian extractivism and food sovereignty alternatives. He is the author of The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism: Lessons from Bolivia (Fernwood, 2020) and co-editor of the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies (Edward Elgar, 2021), and Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America (Routledge, 2021).