Search

Social and solidarity economy and agroecology in family agriculture cooperatives in Brazil as a form of development of sustainable agriculture We urgently need to rethink solidarity and social economy strategies focused on endogenous development subjects and rural world. Social questions as food sovereignty, right to food, gender equality or small productions viability must be addressed and evaluated, among other reasons, because of their current importance in the political agendas of organisms such as the FAO or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These institutions have been warning for decades about the social and environmental need of turning the goal of food sovereignty into reality. The concept of Food Sovereignty was defined in 1996 during the FAO Summit on the Right to Food in Rome. There, the Vía Campesina movement defined Food Sovereignty as a social and political concept essential to build bridges between the agroecological and social and solidarity economy perspectives. This movement referred to the sovereignty of communities, peoples and consumers in order to decide what to eat, what to produce and how the territorial development must be according to its limitations and endogenous characteristics. This concept proposed a higher visibility for the peasant movement, taking into consideration the lack of attention paid as an intermediary agent in international forums and decision-making spaces on the World Trade Organisation or the development policies of other international institutions. the proposal of an agenda focused on concepts (endogenous development, Food Sovereignty), we need located agri-food systems which work from the logics of community economies, social-solidarity economies and caring economies. We consider that our monitoring and researching projects must reflect this need of theoretical and methodological frames. These ones combine inputs from different fields of social and environmental sustainability. Because of these reasons, this paper aims to understand how the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) as well as the Agroecology can contribute to the economic, social, ecological and political sustainability of family agriculture in Brazil. For this purpose, the dimensions and different ways for viability of selected family exploitations will be exposed. The study is about collecting how the ESS and the Agroecology dialogue on many factors related to sustainability in the production system and peasants' organisation. One of the commonest problems of many SSE experiences is how environmental protection remains at a second stage, if compared to democracy or redistribution issues. Therefore, by adopting Agroecology, the current agroecosystems artificialisation model could be changed. This system would be more suitable for social and ecological reproduction through new proposals of technical, ecological, agronomical and social production. Via this production, a sustainable management of natural resources could be achieved avoiding degradation of the environment. Another question to deal in this paper is the role developed by the short circuits of commercialisation in the promotion of agroecological strategies conceived at the same time as an answer from the perspective of social and solidarity economy. Short circuits of commercialisation are essential elements, especially for peasants and for the endogenous rural development, in order to link again production and consumption to principles of proximity, reliance, and sustainability. The adoption of short circuits as a strategy for territory sovereignty and a defence is a way of guaranteeing the economic aspects as well as the social ones in Agroecology. Our case studies are based in representative experiences of different ways of commercialisation in the Northern and Southern regions of Brazil: Associação dos Agricultores Ecologistas de Ipê y Antonio Prado (Ecologist Farmers Association of Ipê and Antonio Prado, AECIA) and the Cooperativa de Irituia (Cooperative of Irituia). The AECIA is in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul, Northeast region, in the municipalities of Antonio Prado and Ipê. These present an intermediate level of capitalisation, where the production systems integrate vegetal and animal productions, outlining the conventional and ecological fruticulture (grape, apple, peach), ecological horticulture, dairy cattle, marking livestock, pigs, birds and corn. The Cooperative of Irituia is in the Northern region of Brazil, province of Pará, municipality of Irituia, in the Northeast mesoregion. Its population mainly lives in the rural environment. Its local economy, which is based in agriculture and wood extraction and transformation, is mainly composed of family peasants that practice subsistence farming. Both belong to the tradition of family agriculture in Brazil, but they present a different approach in their ecological, community or economic perspective where they interact. Regarding the method for the case study, we have applied a qualitative approach through several social research techniques, some of them are explicative (interviews, experts panel), other are more inductive (survey based in three dimensions: Agroecology, New Commons and SSE) and other are more descriptive (secondary sources, interviews to key informers). With all this material, we have made a proposal of social-economic, social-cultural and productive sustainable indicators. In this way, we can test the sustainability approach of these initiatives in the long term. Results of the research point to the existence of differences between the analysed cooperatives regarding productive, social, political and economic viability, not only from the SSE but also the Agroecology. Because of this, the AECIA offers better values in all the studied items instead of the Cooperative of Irituia. At a theoretical level, this work demonstrates a more complex approach to the short circuits in the agri-food channels. Furthermore, from a common agroecological and SSE point of view, those are introduced as an umbrella for democratisation of our agri-food systems, meanwhile defending the right to food as well as a sustainable and healthful production suitable to the physical and cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public procurement is the process by which both the government and other agencies that are regulated by public law acquire products, services and public works. The final aim of these procurements can vary from the mere replenish of office supplies to measures related with national policy objectives, such as stimulating economic activity, protecting national industries or eliminating regional disparities. Traditionally, a considerable effort has been devoted to define a legal framework that guarantees the transparency of these public contracts and also the efficient use of taxpayers' money. Therefore, for many years, public contractors have not considered the characteristics, impacts and environmental costs, nor the social justice of products, services or works acquired. In recent decades, however, economic and political conditions and priorities have changed: as a result of the growing importance of the sustainable development and human development approaches, the sustainability and the social dimension is increasingly being included in strategies, policies and directives related to public procurement. In other words, some horizontal public goals have come into play, such as the fulfilment of environmental targets (green public procurement) and / or social criteria (socially responsible public contracting) as well as the promotion of R&D and innovation (innovative public procurement). Although public procurement is subject to a legal framework it presents advantages over private purchasing when demanding sustainable criteria for products, services or public works. Moreover, sustainable criteria have been recommended by the latest EU public procurement directives and different guidelines about how and where to include them have been published. These channels of intervention, known as socially and environmentally responsible public procurement, have a significant impact on the activity and development of the Social Economy entities (Monzón and Chaves, 2008). However, as Chaves and Monzón (2001) pointed out, the implementation of these measures in favour of the Social Economy has not been homogeneously applied throughout EU countries. On the other hand, the university plays a fundamental role in the value of territorial assets. Moreover, although teaching and research are its two fundamental activities, in recent times a "Third mission" has also been ascribed to the university, i.e. its involvement in the socio-economic development of its area. This new function, which links the university to its surrounding area, has been intensified since the end of the 20th Century mainly due to the importance of the knowledge economy, which underlines the strategic nature of knowledge as a key element of the economic system (Florida, 1999). Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyze the role played by the public procurement process of the UPV / EHU in the promotion of the Social Economy. That is, it aims to present a diagnosis of the role of the Basque Social Economy as a provider of goods and services for the UPV / EHU during the budget years 2012, 2013 and 2014. Towards that aim, the paper provides 1) a brief review of the literature to approach the evolution and the legislative changes of the Socially Responsible Public Procurement at a global level, within the context of Sustainable Consumption; 2) the main aspects of the role played by the university in the regional socio-economic development; and 3) the main characteristics of the organizational structure of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). To achieve the objective of the article, a systematic review of the tenders awarded between 2012 and 2014 has been carried out. These are published in the Tenders Electronic database of the UPV/EHU, which was created in 2012 and it is updated by the UPV/EHU. It contains all active calls for tenders and also provides access to those documents of awarded tenders. Initially, 265 document sets of the tenders awarded between 2012 and 2014 were collected. However, for some document sets the corresponding resolution of the award was not available and for others it was not possible to determine the awarded amount in the document sets. Given that the objective of this paper is to account for the amount awarded to the Social Economy, in the final sample 172 documents sets were considered. Our results show that 15 out of 172 public procurement contracts have been formalized with entities of the Social Economy sector in 2012-2014. Several conclusions can be drawn from these results: 1) 5.66% of all the public contract formalized by UPV / EHU has been with Basque Social Economy entities, 2) 472,094.23 € out of 49,209,956.46 € have been awarded to the entities of the Social Economy, which represents 0,95% of the total amount awarded, 3) with regards to the procedure, the vast majority, in terms of number and amount awarded, have followed a negotiated procedure, which corresponds with the most common practice of public administrations and 4) according to the entity type, 10 out of 15 contracts have been for cooperatives, whereas, 5 out of 15, for Special Employment Centers or Insertion Companies, all of them belonging to service contracts. According to the results, the participation of the Basque Social Economy as a supplier of goods and services for the UPV/EHU still holds a reduced share. In addition, cooperatives are the entities that concentrate the largest number of public contracts and the largest participation quota of the amount awarded by the UPV / EHU for the period studied. If the contractual nature of the contracts awarded by UPV/EHU is considered, service contracts have been awarded most frequently, particularly "Lift maintenance services" and "Garden and park maintenance services". However, working contracts belonging to "Installation work on buildings" category is the most important if the amount awarded is considered. There are some limitations in our study that should be stressed. On the one hand, those contracts that have not been awarded to the Basque Social Economy universe have not been reviewed in order to study whether among the bidders stand companies from this universe. Another limitation relates to the difficulty in obtaining data corresponding to the amount awarded, especially for those cases in which the awards have been defined on the basis of unitary prices. The accessibility to the latter data would be useful to advance in the results obtained so far. In spite of these limitations, the paper provides evidence on the UPV/EHU purchasing governance challenges of moving towards an approach which recognizes the capacity to promote the Social Economy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of corporate strategies based on CSR is at an early stage in Ecuadorian companies. This paper explains the impact that greater implementation of CSR policy would have on the strategic plans of companies. To this end, the authors conducted a survey of 70 entrepreneurs working in strategic industries in the city of Guayaquil. To improve CSR implementation in Ecuadorian companies, specifically those located in Guayaquil (Ecuador's most populous city and busiest port), the authors propose a new management model based on social responsibility. The benefits of its implementation could improve not only the living conditions of professionals working in companies, but also those of the population as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are living through a deep financial and economic crisis that is calling many aspects of the conventional economic model into question and, at the same time, through a wide-ranging environmental crisis as a result of the clash between that economic model and the biophysical limitations of our planet. All this has repercussions for the forms taken to date by the institutions and values of that model. This paper highlights the problem of sustainable degrowth, of inequality and its impact on environmental unsustainability, and its effect on the economic crisis, ending with a few remarks on the role that the social and solidarity economy can play at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversification of the agrarian activities towards different branches of the economy seems a viable alternative to clear the gray horizon of this type of organizations. An emergent activity, Rural Tourism, appears as a very interesting option to complement partners' income, as well as the effective development of these companies. To demonstrate the viability of both activities within an organization, as well as to obtain the ideal cooperative profile for the development of theses activities, or better still, to establish the form to reach it, are some of the goal pursued with this paper. We follow an empirical analysis based on a qualitative and quantitative methodology, on the agrarian cooperatives integrated in the Hojiblanca group, and pertaining to Antequera, a Spanish region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a conceptual review of the term "sustainable development", bearing in mind its current applicability to social matters and public decision-making. Taking the well-known definition of sustainable development coined by the Brundtland Commission over twenty years ago, we consider the consequences of adopting weak and strong sustainability criteria for continued development and the importance of conserving so-called critical natural capital. We also examine the relationship between sustainable development and equity. We then present a concept of development that integrates the three areas of economic, social and environmental sustainability. Finally, we discuss the main forces that currently surround the problem of achieving sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High mountain tourism poses a dilemma for an increasing number of those concerned due to the conflict between recreational enjoyment of the area, its economic exploitation and conservation of the fragile areas that will inevitably be affected by it. This is a particularly important issue in the Pyrenees mountains. This paper looks at the impact on the environment of High Mountain Recreational Tourism Centres (CTRAM) and the concept of sustainability. We propose ways to improve the situation, describing the nature of the relationships between the different stakeholders and their differing degrees of bargaining power when taking decisions regarding the creation of sustainable value. Within this context, participation through Social Economy has a significant role, as it encourages and increases the involvement of the local population and different agents in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]