A coevolutionary understanding of agroenvironmental change. A case-study of a rural community in Brazil

This paper studies the coevolutionary ecological-economic dynamics of agro-environmental change. The case study is Santa Rosa (Brazil) and the modernization of subsistence agriculture followed by the more recent emergence of organic farming. We use coevolution as an integrative framework for explaining how and why economic production changed over time in Santa Rosa in interdependence with the ecosystem resulting in a mosaic of diverse farm practices. A coevolutionary framework expands the explanatory breadth of prevailing accounts of agro-environmental change that rely on a notion of shifts from one singular, homogeneous production economy to the next. It unveils the complex processes driving agro-environmental change, instead of focusing on the structures resulting from it. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.