Call for contributions

Tunisia, like most of the global South, is exposed to the worst consequences of ongoing climate change.

These phenomena have been largely triggered by the economies of the North, which concentrate the most capital, technology, and industries, including the most polluting among them, and which use the most energy and the most industrialized and intensive agriculture. Historically, the North is responsible for almost 80 % of carbon emission worldwide, but the South is paying the price.

In this context Tunisia, as with most of the global South, lacks means of protection against such “climatic” disasters that is visible everywhere in the country, and it first affects the most vulnerable social classes, communities and group of people, especially the women.  The rural communities are unarguably one of the most affected categories by this disaster in different levels; their agriculture is directly threatened by the diminution of arable land, rarefication of water source and their salinification.

Meanwhile, we strongly believe in the importance of local knowledge and women's involvement in facing this crisis, as we want to document and to put under the spotlight these stories of resistance in Tunisia and in the global south.

Between adaptation, resilience, resistance, and climate change narratives, OSAE in its collaboration with Hivos is pursuing a new research for action program titled “Food sovereignty and climate emergency in Tunisia” within which we aim to:

• Study the processes of marginalization of Tunisian peasantry and food insecurity at the family, local and national scale; understand climate change processes at the global and local scale and identify their various impacts on local food security and global food sovereignty.
• Document, through a gender-based approach, the place and role of women farmers in small-scale farming and how they contribute and secure the family food security and the local knowledge’s “keeping” development (through experiencing) and transmission.
• Identify possible axes aimed at strengthening the capacity of local farmers to better protect biodiversity and local natural resources and to better consolidate their resistance to the foreseeable consequences of climate change. In this context, we will strongly insist on the role of small farmers (men and women) in the protection, re-production and dissemination of local seeds and varieties for more local and family food security.
• Elaborate a new model of agricultural development based on peasant agriculture and aiming for a global agreement for a “green new agrarian deal” that ensures local food security and protection of natural resources and which advocates for biodiversity, social, environmental, and ecological justice, and global food sovereignty. In addition, the new agrarian Green New Deal will aim to limit as much as possible the processes of climate change and reduce their ecological and social impacts.

“Starting from local evidence and leading to global syntheses” is the main idea of the project; we will be investigating local communities and their local knowledge as a tool to resist climate change.

OSAE welcomes contributions from all relevant social science domains (sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, political science…), we encourage contribution from African / southern researchers (or working on Africa and the global south) that investigates local communities with a special focus on women roles within these groups and their contribution to fight climate change.