First name:
Sophie
Last name:
Lieberman
Class Year:
2022
Advisor:
Michael Dove
Essay Abstract:
Approaches to tropical forest restoration are an ongoing conversation between actors on a global and local scale, bringing together networks of funding, knowledge, and power to spark land use change with crucial implications for protecting biodiversity, renewing ecosystem health, mitigating climate change, and supporting resilient livelihoods. Focusing was directed towards one component of this vast project, farmers associations, and the way in which they act as conduits for international restoration efforts on agricultural land in the tropics. A case study of the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative at Yale University took account of their work with a cattle ranchers association in the Azuero Peninsula of Panama through institutional ethnography. Insight revealed that a farmers association implementing land interventions through agroforestry is touched by the motivations and assumptions of its institutional partners on collaboration, knowledge production, and social dynamics, leading to an arrangement that offers small farmers access to significant amounts of funding and farther-reaching networks of knowledge, but open to influence from and dependent on outside interests.