RGP Cycle Four Grantees and Projects
Sakr El-Nour: Environmentalism of Poverty and Dynamics of the Socio-Ecological System: A Study of the Relationship between Humans and the Environment in Egyptian Rural Areas
This research project aims to analyze the social and environmental transformations by exploring the relationship between production and agricultural policies, the decline of natural resources, and conflicts over the latter. The project seeks to create a deeper understanding of social and environmental transformations in the Egyptian countryside, and identify the complex relationship and dynamics between “humans” and the “environment” within a 100-year period.
The research includes an introduction combining environmental sociology, environmental history, and political ecology. Not only does this introduction address the economic, social and political dimensions of the local rural communities’ dynamics, inequality, and rural poverty, but it also covers the biological and physical dynamics of the environment and the natural landscape. The study uses new theoretical tools to explain the dynamics of eco-social relations within a vulnerable regional and local social ecosystem. The study relies on fieldwork in several Egyptian villages in the Delta, the Nile Valley and the Eastern Desert. It includes a detailed case study of an agricultural area in Wadi Nakra in Aswan in the south of the Nile valley. The choice of this region stems from the weakness of its ecosystem and the relationship between the Old Valley and the newly reclaimed lands. The fieldwork consists of a historical-ecological ethnography that combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, and social and biological analysis in a historical framework. Through this approach, we attempt to simulate the interaction between social and natural sciences to produce knowledge that contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms, forms, and elements of the relationship between humans and the environment within a complex and changing social ecosystem. By relying on field surveys and theoretical framing, the study attempts to include Egypt, in particular, and the Arab world, in general, in the discussion about the transformations of the global ecosystem. The study raises the following questions: How did Egypt enter the Anthropocene Age? How is it dealing with climate and environmental changes? How are food producers staying abreast of the speedy changes in their daily lives and in their relationship with the environment? What is the nature of the conflicts and social movements advocating access to resources and the preservation of natural and environmental resources in the Egyptian countryside?
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Saker El-Nour is a postdoctoral fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Marseille (southern France). In 2000, he received his Bachelor’s Degree in Agricultural Production from the Faculty of Agriculture in Sohag. In 2003, he obtained a Diploma in Human Development from the Institute of National Planning in Cairo, after which he joined the Department of Agricultural Economics at the Faculty of Agriculture in Minya University, where he earned a Master's Degree in Rural Sociology and Agricultural Economics in 2005. He completed his doctoral thesis in sociology at the University of Paris 10 – Nanterre in 2013; thesis title “Poverty Dynamics in Rural Areas in Egypt: A Case Study from Nazlat Salman.” Between 2013 and 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut (AUB) as part of a research project on the changing agricultural landscape in South Lebanon. He has conducted field research in rural areas in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon. His research interests include impoverishment, anti-poverty policies , access to natural resources, agricultural policies, and peasant movements.
