You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
For the past two decades, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been the dominant paradigm in water resources. This book explores how ideas of IWRM are being translated and adapted in Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Grounded in social science theory and research, it highlights the importance of politics, history and culture in shaping water management practices and reform, and demonstrates how Africa has clearly been a laboratory for IWRM. While a new cadre of professionals made IWRM their mission, we show that poor women and men may not have always benefitted. In some cases IWRM has also offered a distraction from more critical issues such as water and land grabs, privatisation, the negative impacts of water permits, and a range of institutional ambiguities that prevent water allocations to small and poor water users. By critically examining the interpretations and challenges of IWRM, the book contributes to improving water policies and practices and making them more locally appropriate in Africa and beyond.
The academic study of Indigenous Religions developed historically from missiological and anthropological sources, but little analysis has been devoted to this classification within departments of religious studies. Evaluating this assumption in the light of case studies drawn from Zimbabwe, Alaska and shamanic traditions, and in view of current debates over 'primitivism', James Cox mounts a defence for the scholarly use of the category 'Indigenous Religions'.
Three years after the advent of Zimbabwe's Inclusive Government in February 2009, the country still awaits the elections that people hope will lead to a more enduring political settlement. Zimbabwe: Mired in Transition reviews the experience of recent years assesses the progress that has been made. What is the public mood, and how has it changed? What steps have been taken to reform the media? How important is a new constitution. Although the economy has stabilised to some extent with the adoption of a multi-currency regime, industrial and agricultural production are depressed, and investment inflows are limited; what spaces exist for fiscal reform? Are local authority structures and the sta...
The book discusses the reproduction and legitimization of racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. She documents how calls to save nature have only deepened and naturalized inequality.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid iden...
The lack of sufficient access to clean water is a common problem faced by communities, efforts to alleviate poverty and gender inequality and improve economic growth in developing countries. While reforms have been implemented to manage water resources, these have taken little notice of how people use and manage their water and have had limited effect at the ground level. On the other hand, regulations developed within communities are livelihood-oriented and provide incentives for collective action but they can also be hierarchal, enforcing power and gender inequalities. This book shows how bringing together the strengths of community-based laws rooted in user participation and the formalized legal systems of the public sector, water management regimes will be more able to reach their goals.
Co-published with UNESCO A product of the UNESCO-IHP project on Water and Cultural Diversity, this book represents an effort to examine the complex role water plays as a force in sustaining, maintaining, and threatening the viability of culturally diverse peoples. It is argued that water is a fundamental human need, a human right, and a core sustaining element in biodiversity and cultural diversity. The core concepts utilized in this book draw upon a larger trend in sustainability science, a recognition of the synergism and analytical potential in utilizing a coupled biological and social systems analysis, as the functioning viability of nature is both sustained and threatened by humans.
As the world continues to grapple with a range of practical development challenges that are directly linked to livelihood concerns about human well-being and declining living standards, often overlooked is the human right to development, which remains largely unfulfilled. In the face of successive global initiatives seeking to remedy these challenges, it has become urgent to ask what the universal recognition of the right to development implies if it cannot be translated into improved well-being for impoverished peoples around the world. The contributors in this timely volume argue that setbacks to development are deeply rooted in the failure to implement the right to development, which by nature guarantees equality of opportunities and equitable redistribution of the resources that contribute to better living standards. Assessing policy and practical measures (or the lack thereof), they offer practical suggestions for implementation that will make the right to development a reality for everyone.
The Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe has emerged as a highly contested reform process both nationally and internationally. The image of it has all too often been that of the widespread displacement and subsequent replacement of various people, agricultural-related production systems, facets and processes. The reality, however, is altogether more complex. Providing new and much-needed empirical research, this in-depth book examines how processes such as land acquisition, allocation, transitional production outcomes, social life, gender and tenure, have influenced and been influenced by the forces driving the programme. It also explores the ways in which the land reform programme has created a new agrarian structure based on small- to medium-scale farmers. In attempting to resolve the problematic issues the reforms have raised, the author argues that it is this new agrarian formation which provides the greatest scope for improving Zimbabwe’s agriculture and development. Based on a broader geographical scope than any previous study carried out on the subject, this is a landmark work on a subject of considerable controversy.