Actors' perspectives, motivations and aspirations in the emergence and reconfiguration of territorial development pathways: Insights for transformations to sustainability through green microfinance plus.

The research project addresses the need to transform the allegedly environmentally and socially undesirable and destructive dynamics in Nicaraguan agricultural frontier. It focuses on the possible role of providers of credit, technical assistance and other complementary services. It aims to acknowledge the risks and limitations of mainstream technical-economic approaches that tend to understand transformation to sustainability as a straightforward linear process, with clear consensual objectives to be achieved by top-down manageable strategies of farmers and other relevant actors. The research adopts a "territorial development pathways" approach, to address the political nature of processes of transformation to sustainability. It aims to identify the structural underpinnings driving territorial dynamics and explicitly takes into account farmers' interrelated perspectives, motivations and values. This perspective contributes to the design of embedded financial strategies towards more inclusive and environmentally sound transformative changes of current territorial dynamics. The research is based on a mixed methods approach, highlighting the importance of the active involvement of different actors and the collective construction of knowledge as a key mechanism for the transformation of territorial pathways.

Keywords:SUSTAINABLE FINANCE, GREEN MICROFINANCE, DEVELOPMENT POLICY, NICARAGUA

Disciplines:Agricultural and natural resource economics, environmental and ecological economics, Financial economics, Development planning and policy, Social change