TY - JOUR
T1 - Reconciling agency and structure in empirical analysis
T2 - Smallholder land use in the Southern Yucatán, Mexico
AU - Chowdhury, Roy Rinku
AU - Turner, B. L.
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was supported by a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellowship (NGT5-30197), a Dissertation Im- provement Grant from the Geography and Regional Science program of NSF (BCS-9907026), and the 2002– 2003 Horton Hallowell fellowship from Wellesley College. The research was embedded within the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region (SYPR; http://earth. clarku.edu) project with principal sponsorship from the NASA-LCLUC (Land Cover and Land Use Change) program (NAG5-6046 and NAG5-11134), the Center for Integrated Studies of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, Carnegie Mellon University (NSF SBR 95-21914), and the NSF Biocom-plexity program (BCS-0410016). We thank the project’s members for their assistance. We are especially grateful to the editor and five anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
PY - 2006/6
Y1 - 2006/6
N2 - The agent-structure binary in human-environment relations has historically ascribed primacy to either decision-making agents or political-economic structures as the anthropogenic force driving landscape change. This binary has, in part, separated cultural and political ecology, despite important research weaving structure and agency in each of these and related subfields. The implications of approaching explanations of land use using this binary are illustrated systematically, drawing from empirical research on smallholder land use in the southern Yucatán of Mexico, a development frontier and environmental conservation region. The land-use strategies of mixed subsistence-market smallholder cultivators are explored through agent, structure, and integrated agent-structure models addressing parcel allocations to a suite of regionally evolving and/or extant land uses. The models are compared to illustrate what understanding is missed by a focus on either approach alone and what is gained by joining them. Results suggest that focusing on structure or agency alone may lead to inadequate and even erroneous characterizations of the variables that are of interest to the chosen approach. A sectorally disaggregated approach can identify suites of factors that drive particular land uses.
AB - The agent-structure binary in human-environment relations has historically ascribed primacy to either decision-making agents or political-economic structures as the anthropogenic force driving landscape change. This binary has, in part, separated cultural and political ecology, despite important research weaving structure and agency in each of these and related subfields. The implications of approaching explanations of land use using this binary are illustrated systematically, drawing from empirical research on smallholder land use in the southern Yucatán of Mexico, a development frontier and environmental conservation region. The land-use strategies of mixed subsistence-market smallholder cultivators are explored through agent, structure, and integrated agent-structure models addressing parcel allocations to a suite of regionally evolving and/or extant land uses. The models are compared to illustrate what understanding is missed by a focus on either approach alone and what is gained by joining them. Results suggest that focusing on structure or agency alone may lead to inadequate and even erroneous characterizations of the variables that are of interest to the chosen approach. A sectorally disaggregated approach can identify suites of factors that drive particular land uses.
KW - Cultural and political ecology
KW - Land use
KW - Land-change science
KW - Mexico
KW - Regression models
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U2 - 10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00479.x
DO - 10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00479.x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33751093035
SN - 0004-5608
VL - 96
SP - 302
EP - 322
JO - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
JF - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
IS - 2
ER -