Small-scale fisheries and agricultural trade networks are socially embedded: emerging hypotheses about responses to environmental changes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Global change is threatening the production and livelihoods of millions of smallholders. The capacity of smallholders to deal with such changes is influenced by the increasingly complex trade networks that connect them to local and global markets. Moreover, the social relationships (e.g., trust, reciprocity) in which these trade networks are embedded likely influence smallholders’ capacity to respond to change. However, the prevalence and influence of such “social embeddedness” of trading across different fisheries and agricultural small-scale food systems is still largely unknown. Here, we characterize the social embeddedness of trade networks in small-scale food systems across different production and institutional contexts. We then explore how actors in small-scale food systems could respond to environmental changes in relation to their existing trade networks. We used a methodology based on the qualitative comparison of three different case studies of small-scale fisheries and agriculture in Mexico and South Africa. We analyzed and compared expert interviews among case studies and against the backdrop of embeddedness theory and a previous empirical study. We found key similarities in the level of social embeddedness of trade networks across cases. For example, business relationships characterized by stability and trust prevailed, whereby smallholders are often interdependent through networks of connected traders. There were also differences across cases, such as the higher formalization of business relationships in the agricultural cases, and the influence of institutional and country-specific factors on trade structures. Actors mostly responded to environmental change based on their existing trade networks, although these networks were also subject to change. The findings allowed us to propose more detailed hypotheses outlining how social embeddedness in trade networks play different roles in responding to environmental changes. These hypotheses aim to inspire future research toward the improved understanding of trade networks’ influence on small-scale food systems’ resilience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".