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Understanding Farmers’ Adaptation to Water Scarcity
This study was undertaken to analyze farmers’ adaption to water scarcity in the command area of a secondary canal in the Nile Delta of Egypt. The results revealed that farmers’ responses were driven by a multiplicity of factors, beyond water scarcity or profit maximization. These additional factors include food security of the family, risk management, social capital and history of farmers, and most unexpectedly the collective dimension of crop choice. The findings of this study expose the limitations of projects, modeling exercises or policy recommendations that are too often based on the oversimplified view of profit maximization as the basis of farming system dynamics.
Bureaucracy and Development
The fall of the New Order government in 1998 and the political reform that followed posed substantial challenges for Indonesia's bureaucracy to continue fulfilling its mandate. This book analyses the process of bureaucratic reform in the irrigation sector. Using Irrigation Management Transfer policy as the entry point for analysis, it documents and analyses the irrigation bureaucracy’s ability to sustain its power and prominence in the sector’s development, amidst and against national and international pressures for reform. The book argues that bureaucratic reform in the irrigation sector, rather than attempting to change the bureaucracy's functioning in the image of national and global (good) governance perspectives and priorities, should instead focus on linking the irrigation bureaucracy's everyday practice more effectively with farmers’ needs and aspirations. Reform efforts of the past decades show that Indonesia’s irrigation sector development cannot be redirected without the irrigation bureaucracy’s knowledge, experience and cooperation, and without strengthening its downward accountability to farmer-irrigators.
God's Camp
God's Camp is a story about change; fundamental change. It is about the end of structured Christianity and the introduction of a new belief system; beliefs that could change reality. Christianity had the same capabilities, but was so rarely achievable; those that were able to do so were considered saints. This new belief structure permitted everyone such capabilities'¦ everyone!
Out of the Mainstream
Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American commu...
Rethinking Environmentalism
A multidisciplinary examination of alternative framings of environmental problems, with using examples from forest, water, energy, and urban sectors. Does being an environmentalist mean caring about wild nature? Or is environmentalism synonymous with concern for future human well-being, or about a fair apportionment of access to the earth's resources and a fair sharing of pollution burdens? Environmental problems are undoubtedly one of the most salient public issues of our time, yet environmental scholarship and action is marked by a fragmentation of ideas and approaches because of the multiple ways in which these environmental problems are “framed.” Diverse framings prioritize different...
Controlling floods and droughts through underground storage: from concept to pilot implementation in the Ganges River Basin
The concept of ‘Underground Taming of Floods for Irrigation’ (UTFI) is introduced as an approach for co-managing floods and droughts at the river basin scale. UTFI involves strategic recharge of aquifers upstream during periods of high flow, thereby preventing local and downstream flooding, and simultaneously providing additional groundwater for irrigation during the dry season for livelihood improvement. Three key stages in moving UTFI from the concept stage to mainstream implementation are discussed. An analysis of prospects in the Ganges River Basin are revealed from the earliest stage of mapping of suitability at the watershed level through to the latest stages of identifying and setting up the first pilot trial in the Upper Ganges, where a comprehensive evaluation is under way. If UTFI can be verified then there is enormous potential to apply it to address climate change adaptation/mitigation and disaster risk reduction challenges globally.
Private Politics and Peasant Mobilization
This book explores how different corporate governance strategies affect community mobilization and the scope for influence when an area’s population is faced with the arrival of the extraction industry. Drawing on ethnographic research into Peruvian mining localities, the author analyses a series of relationships which are characterized by confrontations, clientelism, demobilization and strategic collaboration. By presenting a detailed account of micro practices and showing how these processes are interpreted by different groups, Gustafsson offers a refined understanding of the multiple layers and informal workings of power between transnational corporations and local communities.
Demonstrating complexity with a roleplaying simulation
Rural people in Nepal and other developing nations are part of complex, social-ecological systems. Efforts to provide assistance to these people must integrate knowledge from a variety of perspectives. This report documents the use of a role-playing game, supported by an agent-based model, to demonstrate the interaction between migration, social capital and the effectiveness of water storage. The importance of these interactions was highlighted by fieldwork conducted at several sites in the Koshi River Basin. The model underlying the game was a stylized representation based on the Indrawati Subbasin northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal. The report highlights that (a) role-playing tournaments can be an effective way to engage technical and policy experts with the complex interactions between the social and physical dimensions of watershed management; and (b) migration and the economic changes which drive these interactions are forces that need to be accepted, and investments in water storage need to be selected depending on how they fit into these trends.
National Performances
In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies. Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.
The Middle East
The Middle East: Crises, Conflicts, and Wars aims to evaluate the Middle East through international politics with diverse theoretical frameworks. Chapters have been written by many contributors who explore the Middle East from multiperspectives. The scope of this book is very comprehensive and many relevant issue areas are examined. In addition to focusing on the different perspectives of international relations, current problems are considered, especially in the axis of classic, modern and post-modern security studies. The main issues of Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the UAE, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Israel and Turkey are included. Maritime disputes, the Arab Spring, energy transfer, migration, the EU, hydro-politics, Green Sukuk (green Islamic bond), youth policies and strategic investments in the Middle East, are a number of the topics examined.
