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At a time of widespread disillusion as to what development has in practice done to the lives of hundreds of millions of marginalised people over the past 40 years, this book seeks to reclaim development as a project of people's own autonomous agency. Born out of three decades of field experience and working with 'Third World' students, it revisits the primary question of what development ought really to be about. Raff Carmen starts from the conviction that development is too important to be left to the developers. He critically examines what has gone on under its name, finding it wanting both as an epistemological category and a sound operational practice. Instead, he presents a counter-view of development as an act of creation whereby people exercise their inalienable right 'to invent their own future' as authors of an ongoing process of transforming and humanising the landscapes they inhabit.
Clodomir Santos de Morais is to organizational and entrepreneurial literacy what his Brazilian confrere, Paulo Freire, is to ordinary literacy. This book introduces for the first time in English the experiences of grassroots development workers who have applied his ideas of the Organization Workshop (OW) and capacitation in highly diverse social settings. One of the most exciting aspects of de Morais's methods of working with the most marginalized sectors of society is their relevance not just to Third World countries, but also to Eastern Europe's economies in transition and the most deprived areas of the industrialized countries. This highly distinctive grassroots development approach to empowering socially excluded strata in economic and organizational terms holds out the prospect of becoming a very important factor in the struggle against poverty.
This volume examines a central conundrum of Latin American politics. How is that the triumph of neoliberal-inspired economic restructuring in the 1980s and 90s did not cause the political demise of populist movements? What is remarkable, as these scholars show, is that Latin American populist parties, which had long been associated with statist, quasi-Keynesian, even demagogic economic policies, have survived the transition to the much harsher era of free markets, privatisation, unemployment and increasing inequality. And without apparently losing their political popularity, in contrast both to the far left and traditional oligarchic parties. Indeed Latin American populist forces seem to hav...
"If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands." With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The Coup under the Palm Treesinterrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country's spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of "empty" lands to the centerpiece of the country's agrarian...
This collection captures the vitality and urgency of feminists' responses to the environment and development debate. The authors - researchers, activists and policy-makers from North and South - offer new ways of challenging the present dominating knowledge-systems and development institutions, and discuss the difficulties women face on the margins of the development process. Contributions on resource management, power, knowledge production, culture, development institutions and politics, health and economics, show how gender relations are not simply a footnote to our understanding of history and societies, but must be central to the development discourse. In so doing, they suggest that diversity itself is necessary to the creation of new paradigms of development that are built upon gender equity, secure livelihoods, ecological sustainability and political participation.
In New World Empire, William H. Thornton offers an alternative road map for America's relations with the Islamic world. He cogently argues that neoglobalist policies adopted after 9/11 have pushed much of the Muslim world into the enemy camp. Worse still, the White House has redefined America in stark contrast to this phantom adversary. The resulting new world empire fails to recognize that jihadic militants have their worst enemy in civil Islam. Thornton sets forth a powerful case for salvaging this vital link between America and the world it has lost. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Ecofeminism is for those who desire to improve their understanding of the current crises of poverty, environmental destruction, violence, and human rights abuses, and their causes. It is an ecofeminist analysis of modern society's dualized, patriarchal structure, showing that one-sided reductionist, masculine, and quantitative (yang) perceptions inform science, economics, and technology, resulting in subordination of holistic, feminine, and qualitative (yin) values. This yin-yang imbalance manifests as patriarchal domination of women, poor people, and nature, leading to the above crises. Since similar values inform Third World Development, its activities are also exploitative. Thus, rather than improving human well-being, development increases poverty and natural degradation in the South. Modern patriarchy manifests in neo-liberal policies that promote 'free' global economic markets and trades, generating huge profits to the political and economic elites with devastating results for societies and nature worldwide. Unless we increase our awareness and demand changes that balance the yang and yin forces, patriarchal domination will eradicate life on planet Earth.
Constructing Local Environmental Agendas draws on original contributions from specialists worldwide to argue that there is scope for local areas to improve their environments, provided local people are involved. International case studies, from UK, Europe, Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, demonstrate the importance of respect for indigenous knowledge and the need to remove layers of bureaucracy from policy making.
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The often bloody struggles of Central America have dominated news reports for a long time. Behind the headlines lies an enormous population of the desperately poor, and it is axiomatic that they are rendered even more powerless by widespread illiteracy. What actually counts as literacy is less clear. Archer and Costello describe some of the most exciting and innovative programmes designed to overcome the problem and how, as they worked with many of them, they discovered how varied and controversial they are. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia and Guatemala are all included, and for each country the authors have provided a thrilling account of the lives and circumstances of the people who both teach and learn as well as describing the varied forms that literacy teaching, even literacy itself, can take. This book is not only about literacy, but is also a guide to the societies of one of the world's most troubled regions. Originally published in 1990