The gender agenda: NGOs and capitalist relations in highland Cambodia

Cambodia’s mountainous northeastern province of Ratanakiri, which only twenty years ago was home to mainly indigenous minority groups largely focused on subsistence production, has undergone rapid ecological, social, and economic transformation. Deforestation and land alienation in the context of large-scale plantation agriculture, land speculation, and smallholder cash cropping have led to concerns that indigenous communities are being alienated from their land and not benefitting from economic changes. This has resulted in a significant number of NGO and government programs that attempt to protect and “empower” indigenous people, particularly women. This article examines a one-year research project which explored the relationship between indigenous women and land change in two indigenous villages. It discusses how indigenous women as well as Khmer and landless Cham immigrants have dealt with the commoditization of land and labor. It focuses on the differentiated way capitalist relations have pushed men, women, landless laborers, and increasingly wealthy landowners on increasingly divergent life trajectories. Compelled by donors to focus on gender and indigenous women as an object of governance, the NGO that directed this project struggled to keep up with the realities of capitalist relations on the ground.     

Stealing into the wild: conservation science,plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures

Faced with pressing climatic changes, scientific and industrial interests are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods and shifting pest regimes. Increasingly, they look for solutions in an unlikely place: the gene pools of wild plants. Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species closely related to crops, including their ancestors – offer breeders the allure of retracing the domestication bottleneck, infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Yet wild relatives also confront threats from climate change, urbanization and expansion of industrial agri-food. Thus, CWR, seen as both salvational and threatened, have become an international conservation and food-security priority. It is my contention that, in their common project to harness wild-relative potential, conservation and breeding science are co-evolving to extend seed commodity relations into new spheres. I examine enclosures along two fronts: first within ‘systematic CWR conservation’, where ‘in situ’ approaches, typically regarded as empowering and sustainable alternatives to ‘ex situ’, instead may support a complementary system of value extraction; second, in breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new value for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities. An important finding is that although today’s ‘ex situ-centric’ complementarity favors dispossession, an ‘in situ-centric’ approach could foster democratic renewal of biocultural diversity.     

People must change before institutions can: a model addressing the challenge from administering to managing the maltese public service

The Maltese public service is currently undergoing major organisational changes to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness in its service delivery. The great majority of these changes have focussed on re‐organising the macro‐level, namely strategy, processes and structures. This is not an easy feat as local external power forces leave their impact in the process. It is argued, however, that one way to circumvent these resisting forces is to empower the real agents of change: the administrators of the public service. For some reason, the micro‐level has been neglected and has been generally absent from the agenda of the major change programme with a few exceptions. This article throws light on this level by proposing an intrapersonal, psychological and pedagogical model for change that may complement and accompany the larger macro changes. The authors suggest that the model can be developed in a practical way to motivate change from within the person and not just push change around the person. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Climate change: the risks of stranded fossil fuel assets and resources to the developing world

Under the Paris Agreement, 80% of all proven fossil fuel reserves become stranded resources and investments already made in such resources turn into stranded assets. Much of the existing literature focuses on equitable burden sharing; only a few articles examine the risks for developing countries that invest in new fossil fuels. Hence, this paper addresses the question: What are the risks of investing in fossil fuels for developing countries? In doing so, it examines Kenya, a prospective fossil fuel producer, and China, an investor in fossil fuels. In terms of short- to long-term risks, ignoring new fossil fuels and investing in renewables is favourable and politically, socially, ecologically and economically more rewarding, not least because latecomers to development run the risk of having to compensate investors when new fossil fuel assets strand prematurely and become unrecoverable.     

苏联剧变是信仰危机还是体制危机——兼与杨金华商榷

苏联剧变是20世纪影响世界的大事,其根本原因在于苏共的社会主义实践出了问题。经过70多年的探索,苏共并没有找到适合苏联特点的社会主义建设之路,因此,戈尔巴乔夫的改革发展成改向,在抛弃斯大林模式的同时,也放弃了社会主义道路。这一教训值得共产党人深刻总结,但把苏联剧变的主要原因归为信仰虚无主义危机,是本末倒置。苏联剧变不是信仰虚无主义的问题,是放弃对苏联模式的社会主义的信仰,转而信仰其他选择的问题。发生这一切的根本原因不在于公开性、民主化,而在于原有的信仰空洞无物,未给民众带来实惠。     

社会性别和气候变化

气候变化已经成为一个重要的可持续发展问题和全球问题。已有的研究和事实显示：气候变化使本已存在的性别不平等进一步加剧。在应对气候变化过程中纳入社会性别视角的重要性已得到国际社会的认可和重视．一系列国际公约、宣言、纲领等国际法律和文件中已将社会性别主流化纳入其中。将性别平等纳入应对气候变化政策和行动的重点关切领域包括：适应行动、缓解行动战略、技术发展战略、气候变化筹款机制。当今在全球，社会性别主流化在气候变化和减少灾害风险方面取得了一定进展，这种国际趋势、价值观和良好做法，对于我国应对气候变化、推进性别平等和履行国际责任具有积极的意义。     

租:公共政策的意蕴

本文从布坎南关于"租"的论述出发,运用新制度主义方法重新审视"租"的公共政策意蕴,认为公共政策是一种正式制度安排,本质上是关于规定个体和集体选择集的制度安排结构;在制度变迁中,由于不同体制、权利和组织设置而获得的额外收益就是"租",这是公共政策存在的理由;寻租是有成本的,表现为政治交易费用,政府创租和利益集团寻租是不同的两种政治交易过程,表现为公共政策议程;有效率的公共政策选择依赖于制度结构,是制度结构赋予成本和收益以意义。     

Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.     

新中国成立初期知识分子政策出现反复的原因探析

知识分子政策是党的政策的重要组成部分。20世纪50年代我国知识分子政策出现失误的主要原因有：一是知识分子问题上的“左倾”思想根源，二是没有制定科学的知识分子政策，三是在全社会没有形成尊重知识、尊重人才的良好风气。因此，制定正确的知识分子政策，重视和发挥广大知识分子的聪明才智和作用，关系到中国社会主义现代化建设的进程和改革开放事业的成败，也关系到中华民族的盛衰。