Background: Indigenous Knowledge Systems of rural Campesino communities in the Peruvian Andes are critical for ongoing maintenance and conservation of local food systems, supporting communities’ food and nutrition security while stewarding native potato genetic diversity. These knowledge systems face multi-level, compounding threats of erosion and remain misunderstood and misrepresented in research. To respond to and address these threats, these Indigenous Knowledge Systems must be understood not as static, but as dynamic processes of production and reproduction.

Methods: Original research was conducted with two Campesino communities in the Peruvian highlands, Huancachi and Quilcas, both recognized for continued use of the ancestral system of ‘turno’ cultivation, a communal land management strategy and system of sectoral fallowing, and their stewardship of native potato biodiversity. Data was collected using mixed-method Participatory Action Research. This study uses systems thinking to examine, map and understand dimensions of local knowledge systems in both communities and how they underpin Turno cultivation, examining the relationship between knowledge systems and native potato conservation.

Results & Conclusion: Results from this study suggest the integral role that land, culture and worldview play in sustaining and reproducing Indigenous Knowledge for Turno cultivation, as well as the role of external actors in shaping relationships between systems elements. This study found that as access and ownership over land is threatened, the power and influence of external actors over these local knowledge systems is increased, which in turn shapes relationships and functions of the knowledge system.

Based on extensive literature review, and semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions with informal waste collectors in Maputo, Mozambique, this paper explains the importance of informal workers in the plastics recycling value chain, and identifies challenges that they typically face. It then discusses the use of digitally-enabled services in the plastics recycling sector, focusing on whether such services can help waste pickers address these challenges. As many governments and international agencies promote formalization of the waste picking sub-sector, the article differentiates between formalization and inclusion, and examines the role of digitally-enabled services in more equitable inclusion of informal waste pickers in the recycling value chain. The example of Mozambique demonstrates that digitally-enabled systems in the recycling sector can provide useful services to informal waste pickers even in countries where phone ownership is not widespread and where ICT infrastructure is limited.

Policymakers herald the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) as a “triple-win” for development: addressing underemployment in the Caribbean and Mexico, facilitating Global North-to-South cash flows and skills transfer, and supplying labour for Canadian agriculture. However, scholars demonstrate that SAWP reproduces systemic inequalities by fostering exploitative labour conditions and neocolonial power dynamics. The literature primarily focuses on the first two “wins,” yet the third—SAWP’s purported benefits to Canadian agriculture—remains underexplored. This research uses a policy lens to examine how legitimating narratives shape Canadians’ perceptions of farm labour in Canada. Through post-structural policy analysis, the study deconstructs how framing labour shortages as a simple supply-demand issue obscures systemic barriers to meaningful agricultural livelihoods, including low wages, substandard working conditions and family separation. Initial qualitative research findings from 16 semi-structured interviews reveal that certain narratives likely uphold the use of precarious migrant labour and even facilitate deskilling in the domestic labour force and global devaluation of farming careers. By interrogating these narratives, this project argues that discourses have implications for the policy interventions that affect labour practices and sectoral sustainability. It fills a critical analysis gap on SAWP’s purported benefits and urges a reexamination of Canadian labour policies to prioritize worker rights and long-term agricultural development, domestically and in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although currently a work in progress, the paper is projected to be completed in April 2025.

The structure of property rights has implications for both the creation and consolidation of democracy. The focus of this paper is on the influence of land tenure systems on the propensity of democracies to consolidate. In particular it maintains that in the case of Ethiopia, community or associative land tenure system enhances democratic consolidation and reduces the risk of reversal to dictatorship. The theoretical explanation for community ownership of land in stabilizing democracy will be elaborated on by a case study of a traditional democratic system in Ethiopia. Specifically, the paper will show how the economic institutions of the indigenous democratic system of the Oromo people of Ethiopia, known as Gada, helped consolidate democracy among sections of the Oromo over long periods of time.