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Affordable housing shortage and social exclusion have become severe societal problems across the globe. Increasing numbers of people are suffering from social eviction and displacement due to urban densification, modernization, rising rents, and intense housing commodification. Vulnerable resident groups – such as old-aged or households with children – who often live in old housing stocks planned to be densified, renovated, or upgraded with higher rents, are forced to leave the urban core centers because they can no longer afford to live in central locations, or because they experience unstable or insecure housing conditions. A scenario that is highly unsustainable. So far, studies on de...
Mega-Infrastructure Projects (MIPs) represent a central element of globalized development. MIPs like the Chinese driven `Belt and Road Initiative' (BRI) include large-scale agrarian, road, rail, port and energy networks. They are complex ventures involving international capital and multiple stakeholders. Disenchanted Modernities presents 16 case studies showing that the promise of a sustainable modern development by MIPs leave many local users disenchanted: They don't profit form the MIPs but lose access to their resources often held in common. The book describes the strategies of states and companies as well as local responses to MIPs in Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe.
How representations of land and landscape perform important metaphorical labor in African literatures
With contributions from over 30 international legal scholars, this topical Research Handbook on International Food Law provides a crucial and reflective examination of the rules, power dynamics, legal doctrines, societal norms, and frameworks that govern the modern global food system. The Research Handbook analyses the interlinkages between producers and consumers of food, as well as the environmental effects of the global food network and the repercussions on human health.
This book critically examines the driving forces, discourses, and conflicts surrounding Chinese investments in overseas farmland, with a specific focus on Australia. With growing amounts of finance channeled into the purchase of overseas food and farming assets, China has become a frontrunner in the global land rush. Unlike much of the existing literature that focuses on emerging economies such as Brazil or Africa, this book examines Chinese farmland purchases in the developed country context of Australia. Based on four years of extensive field work in Australia and China, it traces the encounters and interactions between investors, regulators, deal brokers, farmers, and eaters that shape th...
Communal-level resource management successes and failures comprise complex interactions that involve local, regional, and (increasingly) global scale political, economic, and environmental changes, shown to have recurring patterns and trajectories. The human past provides examples of long-term millennial and century-scale successes followed by undesired transitions (“collapse”), and rapid failure of collaborative management cooperation on the decadal scale. Management of scarce resources and common properties presents a critical challenge for planners attempting to avoid the "tragedy of the commons" in this century. Here, anthropologists, human ecologists, archaeologists, and environment...
This book examines a large-scale land acquisition project for rice production in Ghana’s Volta Region, which has been purported by some to be a social and ecological showcase of a company entering a "community–private partnership" with affected communities. Celebrated by national and international media, the project has received substantial amounts of funding from various donor organisations and claims to empower women through its much-lauded outgrower project. Although discourses of "development", "sustainability" and "women’s empowerment" are used by the investment company, the state and the customary authorities to legitimise the large-scale land acquisition, this book highlights ho...
This volume focuses on how, in Europe, the debate on the commons is discussed in regard to historical and contemporary dimensions, critically referencing the work of Elinor Ostrom. It also explores from the perspective of new institutional political ecology (NIPE) how Europe directly and indirectly affected and affects the commons globally. Most of the research on the management of commons pool resources is limited to dealing with one of two topics: either the interaction between local participatory governance and development of institutions for commons management, or a political- economy approach that focuses on global change as it is related to the increasingly globalised expansion of capi...
Large quantities of water are appropriated to produce the feed annually consumed in global livestock production. Rising concerns about increasing competition for water resources and projected increase in demand for livestock products make it imperative to look for strategies to sustainably increase livestock production, with water being one key natural resource to consider. Using a combination of different datasets, a mechanistic livestock model, and a dynamic vegetation model, we estimate the annual consumptive water use (CWU) in the global livestock sector associated with crops and fodder cultivated on cropland and grazed biomass from pastures.
This volume provides up-to-date information on what has happened in the African ‘land rush’, providing national case studies for countries that were heavily impacted. The research will be a critical resource for students, researchers, advocates and policy makers as it provides detailed, long-term assessments of a broad range of national contexts. In addition to the specific questions of land and investment, this book sheds light on the broader international political economy of development in different African countries.