Klara Fischer
Biographic Data
| ID | 3696531 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Klara Fischer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Klara |
| FAMILY NAME | Fischer |
| SIGNATURE | FISCHER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6590-4025 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Beyond Ebola disease
Governance challenges and unequal access in the commercialisation of honeybush
Native to South Africa, honeybush ( Cyclopia spp. ) has gained international commercial significance over the past decades. South Africa recognises indigenous groups' traditional knowledge of honeybush, and these groups are now striving to draw benefits from its commercialisation. Through a case study of a group of Khoikhoi honeybush harvesters in the Western Cape province of South Africa, and operationalising Ribot and Peluso's theory of access,…
Beyond Dualisms
Capitalism produces dualisms, and these dualisms create ruin. There is an urgent need for critical communication studies to address such harmful separations as nature versus society, or human versus nonhuman, in order to better understand and respond to contemporary crises. This paper addresses this need by assessing five dynamic principles of critical communication that underlie an eight-year programme on environmental communication research, ba…
Narratives of the future
There is growing interest in how farming practices can mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon and restoring soil health – known as carbon farming. Ultimately, the success of the carbon farming market depends on attracting farmers willing to enrol and adopt these practices. As of yet, we know little about the factors that stimulate or hinder farmer engagement with the carbon farming market. This paper contributes to filling this gap throug…
The race for carbon in farmland
Carbon farming is increasingly promoted as a strategy to achieve net-zero climate targets. This paper examines voluntary carbon market programmes through a global inventory and discourse analysis to identify key actors and how they frame and implement carbon farming. Findings show that agri-chemical firms, agri-tech companies, and new carbon farming startups mainly target large-scale farmers in the Global North. These programmes promote a ‘triple…
Citizens as consumers
Progress towards sustainable agriculture hampered by siloed scientific discourses
There is no consensus in society on how to achieve sustainability. Scientists’ limited experience in reflecting on their guiding assumptions, combined with a tendency to inflate their own research findings, hinders interdisciplinary dialogue and limits the usefulness of science. Through bibliometrics and discourse analysis, we analysed highly cited articles on agroecology and sustainable intensification. In broad terms, agroecology prioritizes di…
Social drivers and differentiated effects of deagrarianisation
South Africa's smallholders have progressively become disengaged from farming despite their lack of alternative livelihood options, resulting in the deepening of rural poverty. Farming's reduced role in rural livelihoods represents a wider trend of deagrarianisation seen across contexts and geographies. While most literature on deagrarianisation focuses on its economic dimensions, this paper places the social and cultural dimensions of farming at…
Rendering smallholders social
Drawing on 36 studies in 19 countries and three continents, conducted over forty years, this paper revisits the question of how and why smallholders – and smallholdings – persist in the Global South even under conditions of rapid social and economic transformation. The paper argues that a significant part of the answer to this question can be found by taking a social relational approach: by ‘rendering’ the smallholder social. We identify five soc…
The Covid pandemic, cultivation and livelihoods in South Africa’s Eastern Cape
South African smallholders have disengaged from cultivation in recent decades despite the lack of alternative incomes. The Covid-19 pandemic led to further rises in poverty and food insecurity. Between March and May 2022, we asked respondents from all 104 households in one village in the Eastern Cape province about how the pandemic had impacted their lives, and their perspectives on and engagement in agriculture. The majority reported that school…
The knowledge politics of genome editing in Africa
How is the promise of crop genome editing viewed by scientists working with or aspiring to work with the technology, by development experts seeking to mold public perceptions and policy attitudes toward genome editing, and by donors that provide funds for genome-editing research for agricultural applications in sub-Saharan Africa? In this article, we present data from interviews with these stakeholders to shed light on their aspirations, concerns…
Siloed discourses
Gene editing technologies are emerging as powerful tools for agricultural development, spurring both hopes and concerns in society. To understand emerging discourses and coalitions around the role of CRISPR gene editing in food and agriculture we map the main actors and themes emerging from English-speaking Twitter networks over the course of one year (2021). Scientific actors are the most active and best networked in the debate. They promote a p…
Our burgers eat carbon”
Corporate net-zero emission pledges have multiplied in recent years, with estimates suggesting that more than 1000 companies have made such commitments. While seemingly indicative of companies stepping up to address climate change, critics have argued that pledges may be mere greenwashing if they rely on excessive offsetting and legitimise business-as-usual. Considerable grey and academic literature has debated the problems of net-zero and explor…
Governing Agricultural Biotechnologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany
Comparative studies of agricultural biotechnology regulation have highlighted differences in the roles that science and politics play in decision-making. Drawing on documentary and interview evidence in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, we consider how the "regulatory cultures" that guided national responses to earlier generations of agricultural biotechnology have developed, alongside the emergence of genome editing in food cro…
Beyond the Genome
Genome editing - a plant-breeding technology that facilitates the manipulation of genetic traits within living organisms - has captured the imagination of scholars and professionals working on agricultural development in Africa. Echoing the arrival of genetically modified (GM) crops decades ago, genome editing is being heralded as a technology with the potential to revolutionize breeding based on enhanced precision, reduced cost and increased spe…
From panic to business as usual
This article focuses on migrant labour in Nordic agriculture, wild berry picking and food processing. The starting point is the fear of a food crisis at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (2020) because of the absence of migrant workers. The question was raised early in the pandemic if food systems in the Global North are vulnerable due to dependence on precarious migrant workers. In the light of this question, we assess the reactions of f…
The Swedish Media Debate on GMO Between 1994 and 2018
This paper presents a longitudinal study of the debate on GMO in the Swedish media, comparing coverage of the topic in the general press and agricultural press. We studied 1399 articles about GMO in food and agriculture published between 1994 and 2018 in Sweden's daily and evening newspapers and agricultural publications. A combination of content analysis and statistical simulation techniques was used to identify structural breaks in the dataset …
Pigs as a shortcut to money? Social traps in smallholder pig production in northern Uganda
Recent decades have seen a growing market for pork in Uganda. The government and donors have promoted pig rearing as a potential route out of poverty for poor smallholders. The idea is that upscaling and commercialisation of smallholder pig production can be a successful way out of poverty. Drawing on the concepts of trust and social traps, this article describes how pig production fails as a pathway out of poverty in post-conflict communities in…
Whose transformation is this? Unpacking the ‘apparatus of capture’ in Sweden's bioeconomy
This study investigates how and by whom the Swedish (forest) bioeconomy has been shaped so far. We unpack emerging bioeconomies as discursive constructs and use the 'apparatus of capture' as a conceptual framework to understand and rethink the Swedish bioeconomy. Based on analysis of empirical data from multiple sources (e.g., online surveys, in-depth interviews, participatory observations), we identify a closed bioeconomy network structure that …
Critical Reflexivity in Political Ecology Research
It is not just the world but our ways of producing knowledge that are in crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed our interconnected vulnerabilities in ways never seen before while underscoring the need for emancipation in particular from the hegemonic knowledge politics that underpin “business-as-usual” academic research that have both contributed to and failed to address the systemic challenges laid bare by the pandemic. Political ecologists t…
A practice approach to understanding the multilevel dynamics of sanitation innovation
The political ecology of crops
Why Africa’s New Green Revolution is failing – Maize as a commodity and anti-commodity in South Africa
The South African Government has for the past two decades spent significant resources on introducing smallholders to Genetically Modified (GM) maize with the aim to make agriculture a way out of poverty. However smallholder farming continues to decline and poverty is on the rise in the country. The present paper aims to explain this failure of the government to support its smallholders by describing the intra-actions between maize, politics and t…
No legitimacy
What is needed for the private sector to successfully establish itself as a key player in delivering sustainable sanitation in the Global South? The present paper aims to offer some answers to this through the case of Peepoople AB, a company delivering a single-use biodegradable toilet bag in informal settlements. The company aimed to but failed in combining sustainable development of sanitation and financial gain for investors. We suggest that e…
Technovisions for Food Security as Sweden Restores Its Civil Defence
After three decades of demobilising the Swedish defence sector following the end of the Cold War, Sweden recently revived civil defence planning, including new instructions to plan for food security in the event of war. This policy shift has raised questions as to how farming’s vulnerability to disruptions differs today from in the Cold War era, as well as how this vulnerability might best be mitigated. This article presents and discusses key vul…
Whose transformation is this? Unpacking the ‘apparatus of capture’ in Sweden's bioeconomy
This study investigates how and by whom the Swedish (forest) bioeconomy has been shaped so far. We unpack emerging bioeconomies as discursive constructs and use the 'apparatus of capture' as a conceptual framework to understand and rethink the Swedish bioeconomy. Based on analysis of empirical data from multiple sources (e.g., online surveys, in-depth interviews, participatory observations), we identify a closed bioeconomy network structure that …
Swedish Forests in the Bioeconomy
The concept of a bioeconomy has been placed central in formation of a Swedish National Forest Program (NFP). Drawing on Hajer's conceptual framework of storylines, we present a discourse analysis of the working group reports underlying the establishment of the NFP strategy. We ask what stories about Swedish forests come to dominate the NFP process, how well they reflect the commitment of balancing economic, social and environmental interests, and…
Why Africa’s New Green Revolution is failing – Maize as a commodity and anti-commodity in South Africa
The South African Government has for the past two decades spent significant resources on introducing smallholders to Genetically Modified (GM) maize with the aim to make agriculture a way out of poverty. However smallholder farming continues to decline and poverty is on the rise in the country. The present paper aims to explain this failure of the government to support its smallholders by describing the intra-actions between maize, politics and t…
Carbon-binding biomass or a diversity of useful trees? (Counter)topographies of carbon forestry in Uganda
Tree plantations in low-income countries are emerging as central tools for global climate change mitigation. However, there is growing evidence that focusing on the carbon-binding aspect of trees in such forests often oversimplifies political ecologies and constrains local livelihoods. One reason is a strong reliance on land use maps, leading to monodimensional and disconnected views of landscapes. This study examines one such climate forest, Kac…
The political ecology of crops
The Framing of Sustainability in Sustainability Assessment Frameworks for Agriculture
Various frameworks for assessing sustainability in agriculture have emerged in recent years. We analysed how sustainability is framed as a governing concept for agriculture within three such frameworks. The results suggest that in all three frameworks sustainability is perceived as a fixed, definable end goal, rather than a process, and its assumed that if all stake holders understand each other and are informed about the negative impacts of agri…
Questioning the use of ‘degradation’ in climate mitigation
An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly c…
Does raising maize yields lead to poverty reduction? A case study of the Massive Food Production Programme in South Africa
Our burgers eat carbon”
Corporate net-zero emission pledges have multiplied in recent years, with estimates suggesting that more than 1000 companies have made such commitments. While seemingly indicative of companies stepping up to address climate change, critics have argued that pledges may be mere greenwashing if they rely on excessive offsetting and legitimise business-as-usual. Considerable grey and academic literature has debated the problems of net-zero and explor…
Critical Reflexivity in Political Ecology Research
It is not just the world but our ways of producing knowledge that are in crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed our interconnected vulnerabilities in ways never seen before while underscoring the need for emancipation in particular from the hegemonic knowledge politics that underpin “business-as-usual” academic research that have both contributed to and failed to address the systemic challenges laid bare by the pandemic. Political ecologists t…
Social drivers and differentiated effects of deagrarianisation
South Africa's smallholders have progressively become disengaged from farming despite their lack of alternative livelihood options, resulting in the deepening of rural poverty. Farming's reduced role in rural livelihoods represents a wider trend of deagrarianisation seen across contexts and geographies. While most literature on deagrarianisation focuses on its economic dimensions, this paper places the social and cultural dimensions of farming at…
Rendering smallholders social
Drawing on 36 studies in 19 countries and three continents, conducted over forty years, this paper revisits the question of how and why smallholders – and smallholdings – persist in the Global South even under conditions of rapid social and economic transformation. The paper argues that a significant part of the answer to this question can be found by taking a social relational approach: by ‘rendering’ the smallholder social. We identify five soc…
No legitimacy
What is needed for the private sector to successfully establish itself as a key player in delivering sustainable sanitation in the Global South? The present paper aims to offer some answers to this through the case of Peepoople AB, a company delivering a single-use biodegradable toilet bag in informal settlements. The company aimed to but failed in combining sustainable development of sanitation and financial gain for investors. We suggest that e…
Citizens as consumers
Pigs as a shortcut to money? Social traps in smallholder pig production in northern Uganda
Recent decades have seen a growing market for pork in Uganda. The government and donors have promoted pig rearing as a potential route out of poverty for poor smallholders. The idea is that upscaling and commercialisation of smallholder pig production can be a successful way out of poverty. Drawing on the concepts of trust and social traps, this article describes how pig production fails as a pathway out of poverty in post-conflict communities in…
A practice approach to understanding the multilevel dynamics of sanitation innovation
Commentary on the paper by Lyons and Westoby “Carbon colonialism and the new land grab
Does raising maize yields lead to poverty reduction? A case study of the Massive Food Production Programme in South Africa
Commentary on the paper by Lyons and Westoby “Carbon colonialism and the new land grab
Questioning the use of ‘degradation’ in climate mitigation
An urgent need to stop degradation is frequently cited as support for climate mitigation efforts involving forests. However, lessons learnt from social science research on degradation narratives are not taken into consideration. This creates a risk of problematic degradation narratives being used to legitimise forest carbon projects. This study examined a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forest plantation in Uganda, where incomplete and partly c…
The Framing of Sustainability in Sustainability Assessment Frameworks for Agriculture
Various frameworks for assessing sustainability in agriculture have emerged in recent years. We analysed how sustainability is framed as a governing concept for agriculture within three such frameworks. The results suggest that in all three frameworks sustainability is perceived as a fixed, definable end goal, rather than a process, and its assumed that if all stake holders understand each other and are informed about the negative impacts of agri…
How well is farmers’ social situation captured by sustainability assessment tools? A Swedish case study
Recent research indicates that sustainability assessment tools (SAT) for farms need to be contextually adapted to be acceptable and useful. Focusing specifically on social sustainability, this study sought to identify important aspects of relevance for Swedish (livestock) farmers’ social situation and compare these aspects with social indicators used in three existing SATs (RISE, SAFA, IDEA). A survey revealed that social issues of key importance…
Carbon-binding biomass or a diversity of useful trees? (Counter)topographies of carbon forestry in Uganda
Tree plantations in low-income countries are emerging as central tools for global climate change mitigation. However, there is growing evidence that focusing on the carbon-binding aspect of trees in such forests often oversimplifies political ecologies and constrains local livelihoods. One reason is a strong reliance on land use maps, leading to monodimensional and disconnected views of landscapes. This study examines one such climate forest, Kac…
Technovisions for Food Security as Sweden Restores Its Civil Defence
After three decades of demobilising the Swedish defence sector following the end of the Cold War, Sweden recently revived civil defence planning, including new instructions to plan for food security in the event of war. This policy shift has raised questions as to how farming’s vulnerability to disruptions differs today from in the Cold War era, as well as how this vulnerability might best be mitigated. This article presents and discusses key vul…
Swedish Forests in the Bioeconomy
The concept of a bioeconomy has been placed central in formation of a Swedish National Forest Program (NFP). Drawing on Hajer's conceptual framework of storylines, we present a discourse analysis of the working group reports underlying the establishment of the NFP strategy. We ask what stories about Swedish forests come to dominate the NFP process, how well they reflect the commitment of balancing economic, social and environmental interests, and…
Critical Reflexivity in Political Ecology Research
It is not just the world but our ways of producing knowledge that are in crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed our interconnected vulnerabilities in ways never seen before while underscoring the need for emancipation in particular from the hegemonic knowledge politics that underpin “business-as-usual” academic research that have both contributed to and failed to address the systemic challenges laid bare by the pandemic. Political ecologists t…
A practice approach to understanding the multilevel dynamics of sanitation innovation
The political ecology of crops
Why Africa’s New Green Revolution is failing – Maize as a commodity and anti-commodity in South Africa
The South African Government has for the past two decades spent significant resources on introducing smallholders to Genetically Modified (GM) maize with the aim to make agriculture a way out of poverty. However smallholder farming continues to decline and poverty is on the rise in the country. The present paper aims to explain this failure of the government to support its smallholders by describing the intra-actions between maize, politics and t…
No legitimacy
What is needed for the private sector to successfully establish itself as a key player in delivering sustainable sanitation in the Global South? The present paper aims to offer some answers to this through the case of Peepoople AB, a company delivering a single-use biodegradable toilet bag in informal settlements. The company aimed to but failed in combining sustainable development of sanitation and financial gain for investors. We suggest that e…
The Swedish Media Debate on GMO Between 1994 and 2018
This paper presents a longitudinal study of the debate on GMO in the Swedish media, comparing coverage of the topic in the general press and agricultural press. We studied 1399 articles about GMO in food and agriculture published between 1994 and 2018 in Sweden's daily and evening newspapers and agricultural publications. A combination of content analysis and statistical simulation techniques was used to identify structural breaks in the dataset …
Pigs as a shortcut to money? Social traps in smallholder pig production in northern Uganda
Recent decades have seen a growing market for pork in Uganda. The government and donors have promoted pig rearing as a potential route out of poverty for poor smallholders. The idea is that upscaling and commercialisation of smallholder pig production can be a successful way out of poverty. Drawing on the concepts of trust and social traps, this article describes how pig production fails as a pathway out of poverty in post-conflict communities in…
Whose transformation is this? Unpacking the ‘apparatus of capture’ in Sweden's bioeconomy
This study investigates how and by whom the Swedish (forest) bioeconomy has been shaped so far. We unpack emerging bioeconomies as discursive constructs and use the 'apparatus of capture' as a conceptual framework to understand and rethink the Swedish bioeconomy. Based on analysis of empirical data from multiple sources (e.g., online surveys, in-depth interviews, participatory observations), we identify a closed bioeconomy network structure that …
The Covid pandemic, cultivation and livelihoods in South Africa’s Eastern Cape
South African smallholders have disengaged from cultivation in recent decades despite the lack of alternative incomes. The Covid-19 pandemic led to further rises in poverty and food insecurity. Between March and May 2022, we asked respondents from all 104 households in one village in the Eastern Cape province about how the pandemic had impacted their lives, and their perspectives on and engagement in agriculture. The majority reported that school…
The knowledge politics of genome editing in Africa
How is the promise of crop genome editing viewed by scientists working with or aspiring to work with the technology, by development experts seeking to mold public perceptions and policy attitudes toward genome editing, and by donors that provide funds for genome-editing research for agricultural applications in sub-Saharan Africa? In this article, we present data from interviews with these stakeholders to shed light on their aspirations, concerns…
Siloed discourses
Gene editing technologies are emerging as powerful tools for agricultural development, spurring both hopes and concerns in society. To understand emerging discourses and coalitions around the role of CRISPR gene editing in food and agriculture we map the main actors and themes emerging from English-speaking Twitter networks over the course of one year (2021). Scientific actors are the most active and best networked in the debate. They promote a p…
Our burgers eat carbon”
Corporate net-zero emission pledges have multiplied in recent years, with estimates suggesting that more than 1000 companies have made such commitments. While seemingly indicative of companies stepping up to address climate change, critics have argued that pledges may be mere greenwashing if they rely on excessive offsetting and legitimise business-as-usual. Considerable grey and academic literature has debated the problems of net-zero and explor…
Governing Agricultural Biotechnologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany
Comparative studies of agricultural biotechnology regulation have highlighted differences in the roles that science and politics play in decision-making. Drawing on documentary and interview evidence in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, we consider how the "regulatory cultures" that guided national responses to earlier generations of agricultural biotechnology have developed, alongside the emergence of genome editing in food cro…
Beyond the Genome
Genome editing - a plant-breeding technology that facilitates the manipulation of genetic traits within living organisms - has captured the imagination of scholars and professionals working on agricultural development in Africa. Echoing the arrival of genetically modified (GM) crops decades ago, genome editing is being heralded as a technology with the potential to revolutionize breeding based on enhanced precision, reduced cost and increased spe…
From panic to business as usual
This article focuses on migrant labour in Nordic agriculture, wild berry picking and food processing. The starting point is the fear of a food crisis at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (2020) because of the absence of migrant workers. The question was raised early in the pandemic if food systems in the Global North are vulnerable due to dependence on precarious migrant workers. In the light of this question, we assess the reactions of f…
Progress towards sustainable agriculture hampered by siloed scientific discourses
There is no consensus in society on how to achieve sustainability. Scientists’ limited experience in reflecting on their guiding assumptions, combined with a tendency to inflate their own research findings, hinders interdisciplinary dialogue and limits the usefulness of science. Through bibliometrics and discourse analysis, we analysed highly cited articles on agroecology and sustainable intensification. In broad terms, agroecology prioritizes di…
Social drivers and differentiated effects of deagrarianisation
South Africa's smallholders have progressively become disengaged from farming despite their lack of alternative livelihood options, resulting in the deepening of rural poverty. Farming's reduced role in rural livelihoods represents a wider trend of deagrarianisation seen across contexts and geographies. While most literature on deagrarianisation focuses on its economic dimensions, this paper places the social and cultural dimensions of farming at…
Political science (21 works) · Economics (18 works) · Agriculture (16 works) · Geography (14 works) · Business (12 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (10 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Engineering (8 works)