Demographic and Environmental Change and Social Change in Ayacucho, Peru: A Case Study of Chuschi and Quispillacta.

This paper presents the findings of recent field research in Peru?s southern Andes on the impact of demographic change and human-induced environmental change on peasant livelihoods in the latter half of the 20th century. My research in the communities of Chuschi and Quispillacta is a component of my dissertation which is seeking to explore whether environmental scarcities and demographic change have played a role in rural unrest and peasant revolts in Peru over the last half century. For several decades concern about the impact of human-induced global environmental change has spurred scholarly attempts to map out the complex interactions between humans and their natural environment. Since the early 1990s, one stream of this research has focused on investigating the impact of environmental stress and demographic change on our social, political, and economic systems, and whether environmental stress and demographic change contributes to the outbreak of violent conflict. My dissertation research falls within this tradition. Several recent reviews of environment-conflict literature have highlighted the need for scholars to head out into the field to conduct fine-grained analysis of environmental conflict linkages. My work in Ayacucho Peru is an attempt to advance research in this field through deeper field research on these linkages. More specifically, this paper will outline the results of my study of the impact of environmental stress and demographic change on peasant livelihoods over the last half-century in the Rio Pampas river valley in Cangallo province, Ayacucho - an area of Peru?s southern highlands that has witnessed some of the worst violence in recent years during Peru?s dirty war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian military. My study is exploring the local impact of environmental stress and demographic change in these two communities, while also situating these effects within the broader context of changes taking place in Peru s highlands in the late 20th century. The first portion of the paper sets out a general theoretical framework describing the social effects on rural livelihoods of differing levels of environmental scarcity and integration into markets - the two key factors that I believe are essential for explaining differing social effects of scarcity and the possible types of conflicts involving natural resources. Areas with abundant local renewable resources (low environmental scarcity) are frequently attractive targets for groups or elites wishing to capture those resources to sell them in national or international markets. Low environmental scarcity and high interaction with markets, in other words, can spur greedy groups to capture valuable resources, often leading to outright conflict with competing interests, and the progressive impoverishment of displaced sectors of society. There are various examples in the literature on environmental conflict of these so-called ?greed-induced? environmental conflicts. Such situations can be contrasted with the situation in Cangallo, a place with a high degree of local environmental scarcity and low interaction with markets. This part of Peru has been relatively isolated from the national and international market, and the peasants have struggled to deal with the impacts of demographic change and resource scarcity on their subsistence livelihoods. In this situation - with high environmental scarcity and low market interaction - local resource conflicts between communities or groups have been a recurring historical reality. The second portion of the paper details my findings on how demographic change and environmental scarcities have increasingly stressed the subsistence livelihoods of peasants in the communities of Chuschi and Quispillacta... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]