The LUDEMO Team (Patrick Meyfroidt, Focas Bacar, Alina Bychkova, Fairlie Kirkpatrick Baird, Mégane Pourtois, Gabriel Soyer) will give this seminar, organized by the ELI-C department. 

Abstract

Land use and land systems, i.e. how human societies manage and interact with land through social-ecological systems, are at the core of sustainability issues. 

Democratic backsliding, i.e. the decline or degradation of the institutions and social norms that sustain democratic societies, is a widespread and impactful trend, with strong but understudied two-ways linkages with land use dynamics. 

In this talk, we present the ERC LUDEMO project, which aims to assess and explain the linkages between these issues. 

We will first present the general context of democratic backsliding and what we know about its linkages with land use dynamics and sustainability issues. 

We will then present the work already done and in progress on the three focal cases of reactionary forces and agrarianism in Europe’s consolidated rural areas, extractive populism in Canada’s Northern frontiers, and agrarian authoritarianism in Mozambique’s smallholder landscapes, as well as on analyzing discourses linking these issues, and cross-country econometric studies.