In this paper we analyze how new actors, interests, and resources become salient to food system governance and how the domain of food system governance transforms as a result. Specifically, we focus on how the boundaries of food systems are redefined and new institutions are developed through the explicit recognition of distal interactions and feedbacks—telecoupling—operating in the food system space.

Smallholder agricultural systems, strongly dependent on water resources and investments in shared infrastructure, make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. These communities are being increasingly integrated into the global economy and are exposed to new global climate-related risks that may affect their willingness to cooperate in community-level collective action problems. We performed field experiments on public goods with private and collective risks in 118 small-scale rice-producing communities in four countries.

In the tropics, some agricultural lands are abandoned for economic or technical reasons, leading to the recovery of woody vegetation. Our research aimed to identify the main drivers of spontaneous recovery of vegetation in a basin located in the Colombian Andes. This was done by combining spatially explicit environmental and socioeconomic variables at landscape (e.g. distances to human settlements, to roads, and to forests and mean annual precipitation) and local scales (e.g. depth of the organic layer, soil bulk density, and canopy openness).

This paper provides an overview of recent forest tenure reform in rural China and a summary of findings from a series of surveys and research papers. The research papers cover several broad themes, including the impacts of enhanced policy stability, expanded farmer household forestland holding, and longer contract periods as well as a richer bundle of tenure rights, on farmers willingness to invest in money terms and labor inputs in forestry activities.