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A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides

Abstract

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:07 Faculty of Science > Institute of Geography
Dewey Decimal Classification:910 Geography & travel
Scopus Subject Areas:Life Sciences > Agronomy and Crop Science
Uncontrolled Keywords:Agronomy and Crop Science
Language:English
Date:1 June 2024
Deposited On:01 Sep 2023 15:08
Last Modified:30 Oct 2024 02:35
Publisher:Springer
ISSN:0889-048X
OA Status:Hybrid
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10492-w
Project Information:
  • Funder: University of Zurich
  • Grant ID:
  • Project Title:
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  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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