AUTHOR=Erwin Anna , Silva Chelsea A. , Ma Zhao 

TITLE=Self-organization for community resilience in an invisible agricultural community

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1160109

DOI=10.3389/fsufs.2023.1160109

ISSN=2571-581X

ABSTRACT=This study investigates how self-organizing efforts by residents of informal settlements, primarily migrant and informal farmworkers, shapes community resilience in Majes, a water-scarce irrigation district in the Atacama Desert of Peru. We collected 45 semi-structured interviews with residents and authorities in Majes. We analyzed findings through a framework of self-organizing. We found that self-organizing by residents of informal settlements incorporated three integral components of White’s (2019) theory of Community Agency and Community Resilience, which contends that marginalized communities increase resilience by fostering a ‘commons praxis,’ practicing a ‘prefigurative politics,’ and developing opportunities for ‘economic autonomy.’ We also found that residents self-organized into associations to increase access to resources, resulting in increased resilience. However, certain fees, corruption, and undemocratic decision-making processes can be deterrents to such self-organizing process. These results begin to reframe narratives that tend to describe migrants and farmworkers in the Global South as powerless in the face of water scarcity, climate change, and other social-ecological risks, and expand scholarship on informal settlements by highlighting how residents of agricultural spaces collectively organize to increase their resilience.