Comments Sheet【FR1】February 27, 2014
Title of the Project
Research Term

Long-term Sustainability through Place-Based, Small-scale Economies:
Approaches from Historical Ecology
FR1Project Leader

HABU Junko

General advice and comments of the PEC:
The PEC noted strong progress in the research, in particular in collecting archeological data. This is amajor achievement. There is, however, a pervasive view among PEC members that the integration ofthe teams and strands of work, with different goals, is a major challenge, especially in view of the shorttime frame. There does not seem to be an articulated methodology for bringing the strands together.
The sharpening of concepts could be useful here. This includes terms central to the project
conceptualization such as subsistence, sustainability, small-scale, range of exchange, locality, and therelation between food diversity and resilience. Coherent integration of the archeological work and thecontemporary work ultimately will depend on the strength of the concepts used.
Some members voiced lingering concerns about how to conceptualize contemporary small-scaleeconomies (which are open systems) in the context of large food systems, national economies andglobalization.
It might be considered to invite one or two PEC members with relevant expertise to engage more withthe project and provide in-depth advice.

Reply
We are pleased to hear that the Project Evaluation Committee (PEC) evaluated the progress of ourresearch in a positive manner. Below are our replies to the four main concerns expressed by theGeneral comments from PEC:
1. Integration of the Three Research Groups: Our project proposes that diversity, network, and scale
are the three key concepts to understand the long-term sustainability of socioeconomic systems. Thistheoretical framework will provide a conceptual link between the three research groups, enabling at
the same time the sharing of the projects’ core questions. Our main hypothesis is that a highly
specialized subsistence strategy can support a larger community for a short period of time, but adecrease in subsistence and food diversity makes the production system and its associatedcommunity more vulnerable in the long-run. The first research group (Longue Durée Group) is
testing our main hypothesis by making use of the unique long-term perspective offered by thearchaeological data from northern Japan, California, and other parts of the North Pacific Rim. The
second group (Contemporary Society Group) is aiming to identify, via interviews, surveys, andbiological/chemical studies, the advantages and challenges faced by contemporary small-scale foodproducers (farming and fishing communities as well as indigenous communities) during and after themid-20th century. This group will also discuss and evaluate the future of these communities in an
increasingly globalized world. The third research group (the Implementation, Outreach and Policy
Proposal Group) is a natural extension of several sub-projects of the Longue Dureé and theContemporary Society Groups. It will provide concrete suggestions inspired from the research
output, promote small-scale food production, and also identify environmental problems caused bylarge-scale production and solutions to mitigate these. In short, the activities of the three researchgroups complement each other from the research to the outreach/implementation stage of the project.
2. Sharpening of the key concepts: Most of the key concepts are defined in our Year 1 report. For
the purposes of this project, a “small-scale economy” is defined not solely on the basis of theabsolute size of the economic unit, but rather in terms of the relative scale of food production withina given socioeconomic context. Our definition of small-scale economy addresses the range of
networks that enable food production, distribution, and consumption in a given locality without
precluding links to the outside economy. The importance of local autonomy based on place-based
production and consumption (chisan-chisho) is also a key when studying the resilience of relatively
small-scale economic systems.

Resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb

disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.” Sustainability is defined as “thecapacity to create, test, and maintain adaptive capability.” Food and subsistence diversity can bemeasured in multiple ways, but, in each sub-project, we will make it clear how diversity is measured
and why a certain measure is more appropriate than the others in the context of the each sub-project.
3. Concerns about how to conceptualize contemporary small-scale economies (which are opensystems) in the context of large food systems, national economies and globalization: Asindicated in our report, being connected in an open economic system is a different matter from thesmallness of the scale of food production and consumption at the level of individual communities.
It should also be emphasized that globalization is not necessarily a new phenomenon, and that pastsmall-scale communities were also linked to the larger outside societies. The difference is theintensity and the speed of the linkage. Our preliminary results suggest that even in contemporarysocieties there are practices and resource uses that are implemented at a local level without being
directly converted to large-scale market economy.

Our research so far has revealed that this isespecially the case in Japan, where a large number of small-scale food producers are still active.
4. Invite one or two PEC members with relevant expertise to engage more with the project: We
will be happy to do so, and we have started talking with several PEC members.