Ester Boserup´s Legacy on Sustainability

This book Ester Boserups Legacy on Sustainability: Orientations for Contemporary Research (Fischer Kowalski et al.) traces work and life of Ester Boserup, an early scholar in interdisciplinary sustainability research. Her work was ground making for two reasons, not only that she surmounted disciplinary borders within science, she also linked science and policy by working long years for UN institutions. The first two chapters by Turner and Fischer-Kowalski (Chapter 1) and Matthieu (Chapter 2) both trace her career as a scientist and as a professional in policy making institutions. While the first chapter is based on a broad synopsis of Ester Boserups publications on agricultural change, gender, and development, the second chapter is based on personal conversations between the author and Ester Boserup. Chapters 3 to 9 trace Boserups work in the fields of Agriculture, Land Use, and Development, on various temporal and spatial scales. In Chapter 3, Fischer-Kowalski et al. confirm the Boserupian version of development by demonstrating, on a global level for the 20th century, a non-linear relation of population and the use of land. Chapter 4 by Birch-Thomsen and Reenberg is an investigation of the impact of population growth on changing land use practices on a Solomon island between 1960 and 2006. Erb et al. (Chapter 5) underline in their analysis of land use intensification the need to analyse the complex interaction between social and natural systems in order to understand the change processes. Lemmen (Chapter 6) deals with the global historical transition from foraging to agriculture and shows whether Boserupian or Malthusian change factors drove this transition. Infante-Amate et al. in Chapter 7 present a long-term case study on a community in the south of Spain and ask the question, how their key dependant variable soil degradation is linked to population growth, the key variable in Boserups theory on agricultural change. Chapter 8 by Ringhofer et al. elaborate on the aspect that labour time is an important factor in Boserups basic hypothesis about drivers of technological change. They find out that the EROI is declining with growing development within local communities. Chapters 9 to 15 lay their focus on Ester Boserups visionary findings on making the relevance of gender relations for societal development visible. Lachenmann (Chapter 9) addresses the invisibility of womens work on policy levels and expresses the need of engendering development. Gooch (Chapter 10) brings an example from India where she demonstrates that female child survival rates across India are associated with the importance of female labour in agriculture. Nwakeze and Schaffartzik (Chapter 11) show in their empirical case study of contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa that there are strong positive links between gender equality, human development and income. Chapter 12 by Behrmann et al. discusses contemporary large scale land deals and the impact on gender relations of the affected local population and find out, that the impacts are complex but not necessarily in line with Boserups reasoning. In Chapter 13, Schmook et al. analyse the genderization of land rights in six Mexican communities across the last decades. Chapter 14 by Smetschka et al. presents a case study on a contemporary Austrian rural community. They show that labour time, even under conditions of industrial agriculture, and particularly of women, matters in decision making about land use as much as income does. Chapter 15 winds up this section by trying to incorporate Boserups work into the theoretical foundations of human ecology. In the last chapter of this book, Fischer-Kowalski and Reenberg sum up the two main questions that drive the editors and authors interest in Ester Boserups work: They ask, in what ways did Ester Boserups work influence the research agenda of the contributors to this volume? On the other hand, they are asking about new directions of research transgressing or challenging Ester Boserups perspectives.