Transmission of Home Garden Knowledge: Safeguarding Biocultural Diversity and Enhancing Social–Ecological Resilience

The last decades have witnessed a growing research interest of local ecological knowledge (LEK), with some research focusing on its effective transmission for natural resource management. Here we contribute to this body of research by focusing on an understudied agroecosystem: home gardens in rural...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Society & natural resources 2016-05, Vol.29 (5), p.556-571
Main Authors: Calvet-Mir, Laura, Riu-Bosoms, Carles, González-Puente, Marc, Ruiz-Mallén, Isabel, Reyes-García, Victoria, Molina, José Luis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural ecosystems
Agroecosystems
Biodiversity
children
Cultural transmission
Cultural values
Developed countries
Ecological effects
Ecology
Europe
Gardens
Gardens & gardening
home gardens
Industrialized nations
Lek
local ecological knowledge
Local knowledge
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Natural resource management
Natural resources
Parents
Parents & parenting
refuge habitats
Refugia
Resilience
Resource management
Rural areas
social memory
traditional ecological knowledge
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Summary:The last decades have witnessed a growing research interest of local ecological knowledge (LEK), with some research focusing on its effective transmission for natural resource management. Here we contribute to this body of research by focusing on an understudied agroecosystem: home gardens in rural areas of developed countries. We characterize home garden knowledge in Vall de Gósol (Catalan Pyrenees) and analyze the modes of transmission of such knowledge to discuss how such mechanisms might affect home garden resilience. We identify a diverse local home garden knowledge, which is mainly transmitted from parents to child. Members of the parental generation other than the parents and individuals of the same generation were only important for the transmission of some specific knowledge. We conclude that home gardens are biocultural refugia in a world of decreasing complex local knowledge systems and that different cultural transmission modes confer diversity and enhance social–ecological resilience in those agroecosystems.
ISSN:1521-0723
0894-1920
1521-0723
DOI:10.1080/08941920.2015.1094711