Examining Nepalese Forestry Governance from Gender Perspectives

This article examines Nepalese forestry governance from gender perspectives. We argue that gendered institutional norms and values are associated with forest-governing institutions, such as forest bureaucracies, shaping the nature, and extent of women’s involvement in decision-making processes in the Nepalese forest bureaucracy. Studies on Nepalese forestry reveal that substantial progress has been made in forming policies and initiating activities for including women in forestry governance of Nepal; however despite this, gendered dynamics create difficulties for women to enter and progress in the forestry profession, thereby creating gendered employment territories through institutional, legislative, normative, and infrastructural measures.     

Poverty and Disasters: Do Remittances Reproduce Vulnerability?

Abstract

In many low-income countries, remittances are important in sustaining people’s livelihood and become even more significant during disasters. Meanwhile, the literature suggests that remittances are mainly accessible to middle and upper-income households, rather than to the poorest, thus implying differential capacities amongst households to overcome crises. The present study uses cyclone Evan that hit Samoa in December 2012 as a case study to test this hypothesis. It focuses on the village of Tafitoala and draws on interviews and participatory activities undertaken with the poorest households of the community. It indicates that the poor receive little to no remittances and that they struggled more than the rest of the community to cope with and recover from the cyclone. Their lack of access to remittances had negative consequences on the security and sustainability of their livelihoods. We conclude that remittances reproduce or even increase both inequalities and vulnerabilities existing within the community of origin.     

Recalling Extra Data: A Replication Study of Finding Missing Markets

We re-examine some of the strongest evidence supporting agricultural commercialisation, a highly touted yet under-researched development intervention. Our replication study re-examines Ashraf, Giné, and Karlan’s ‘Finding Missing Markets’ paper. Using the previous paper’s raw data, our research generally reproduces the original findings. We explore the evaluation’s theory of change, focusing on the result that first time export crop adopters benefit more from agricultural commercialisation than previous adopters. We also examine recall bias questions and provide sample size guidance for future researchers. Similar to the original paper, we find that the intervention mostly benefits households just entering the agricultural production value-chain.     

Factors Associated with the Performance of User Groups in a Participatory Forest Management around Dodola Forest in the Bale Mountains,Southern Ethiopia

This study analysed and determined factors associated with performance in collective action of a forest under participatory forest management in Southern Ethiopia. Data were collected in 22 user groups and a performance index was computed using indicators including forest cover change, households' perception of the change and satisfaction in their livelihoods, management activity, and length of overdue rent payment. The results show that heterogeneity, level of forest dependence and geographical variables such as altitude and distance to town are important variables that may affect the performance of user groups. The findings indicate the importance of taking into account the needs of members of user groups, differences among local people in dependence on forest income, and differences in values attached to the forest in the design of participatory forest management.     

Coping and Resilience during the Food,Fuel, and Financial Crises

This article aggregates qualitative field research from sites in 17 developing countries to describe crisis impacts and analyse how people coped with the food, fuel, and financial crises during 2008–2011. The research uncovered significant hardships behind the apparent resilience, with widespread reports of food insecurity, debt, asset loss, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, with women often acting as shock absorbers. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, community-based and religious organisations with formal social protection and finance less important. The traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted as the crisis deepened, pointing to the need for better formal systems for coping with future shocks.     

Networked poverty in rural Russia

This article attempts to apply major ideas developed in Anglo-American ‘network analysis’ to enlarge geographical constructions of the rural ‘problematic’ in Russia. It interrogates complex understandings of ‘poor people’ via a study of social networks in two villages in Central European Russia, focusing on connections between different actors embedded in social contexts in the countryside, different forms of associations between rural people, and the ways in which specific forms of their interrelations affect poverty. In so doing, the article attempts to reconnect different positions of rural people in Russia and different transitory aspects of ‘poor’ identities (i.e. of people in poverty), as well as to broaden understanding of differentiated experiences of rural poverty.     

Do land reforms have adverse impacts on the livelihoods of poor land users? Evidence from the Nkoranza South Municipality,Ghana

Poverty reduction is the overarching goal of most development interventions in the developing world. From 2004, Ghana has been implementing a land reform policy/programme that seeks to improve tenure security and reduce poverty. The present study uses qualitative methods to analyse the extent to which land reforms are enabling or inhibiting poor land users in Ghana to exit poverty and improve their living standards. The study finds that Ghana’s land reform system redefines customary land governance resulting in a breakdown of the trusteeship ethos of the chieftaincy institution, increasing land sales, insecurity of land tenure for the poor and disappearing commons. These factors subsequently have adverse impacts on the ability of poor people to meet their livelihood needs. The study concludes that, for land reforms to work proactively for the poor, they must be pursued as part of broader, holistic and integrated development initiatives.     

Poor Practices: contestations around ‘Below Poverty Line’ status in India

This article has two objectives. First, it interrogates the normative understanding of the identification of poor people as a technical process confined to the domain of experts. The paper analyses the construction of Below Poverty Line (bpl) status in India, and provides evidence for how this is contested at multiple levels of the policy process, through both formal and informal policy practices. Second, the paper uses a case study of a major anti-poverty policy, the Suvarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, to demonstrate how the cumulative outcome of formal and informal policy practices is the erosion of the redistributive intent of policy. The paper emphasises the importance of foregrounding within policy discourse the politically contested nature of the processes of identifying poor people, and of determining their eligibility for anti-poverty policy resources. The typology of policy practices generated calls for deeper recognition of the significant influence of informal policy practices on the policy process in India.     

Morton's Fork: “Democracy” Versus Neopatrimonialism in Developing Countries

It is argued that conditions for social justice in developing countries are deficient under both state capitalism (“democracy”) and neopatrimonialism. Development assistance is similarly constrained, but it also has shortcomings in relation to “democracy” promotion. Political economy analyses can provide authentic insights into how poor people negotiate for public goods, but such interactions seem unlikely to yield sustainable social justice for most citizens. The assessment calls for a reconfiguration of power relations and a more egalitarian distribution of public goods within and between countries, which is what most people are predisposed to want and are entitled to expect and enjoy.     

Building up French blackness through an Afrocentric lens?

The French national historical narrative, epitomized by the anthem ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, has long been a monochrome one. Despite a long black presence, Blackness was ignored. Black people were considered as outsiders. After the 2005 riots in the suburbs and the 2007 presidential election, they gained attention as a community significant to the constructing of a multicultural society. Black communities seize this time as an opportunity to remedy their political and social invisibility. One way chosen by some black people is to look back at history. Whether calling for an ‘African-centered’ or ‘black-centered’ perspective or knowledge, some now define their approach as Afrocentric. Though the ideas and concepts carried by Afrocentrism are not new in France, they now gain popularity among people of African descent as a means to challenge black people's outsider/insider status in French society.     

Justifying military intervention: Yemen as a failed state

The Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen began on 26 March 2015, and it has largely been supported by the international community despite resulting in the world’s largest current humanitarian disaster. The paper explores the emergence of the failed state concept, particularly as it has impacted the norm of sovereignty. It shows how being defined as a failed state can undermine the norm of sovereignty. This article argues that Saudi Arabia has utilised the failed state concept to legitimise its military intervention into Yemen by framing the intervention as necessary to establish a strong executive power and protect the Yemeni people.     

Community Participation in Spatial Planning: Exploring Relationships between Professional and Lay Stakeholders

The literature that explores relationships between lay and professional stakeholders in community participation generally suggests that professionals perceive five main difficulties in working with lay people: it is unnecessary within democracies; lay people lack expertise; they are not representative; there is commonly a lack of trust, and decision-making is made more complex. In respect of spatial planning in South West England, from survey evidence these difficulties are not so apparent except in respect of complex decision-making. It is likely that the variation between the literature and the survey is influenced by the longer heritage of community participation in the spatial planning process in England, than in most other local authority services.     

The Circulation of Secularism

Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because it enables sharing and, hence, community, across the cultural boundaries erected by religious belief. For this reason, some governments have embraced the concept and incorporated it into official state discourse. Other governments, in turn, have copied the language of secularism not for its intended meaning but for pragmatic purposes—namely, to proclaim a position within the community of modern nations. State discourse, however, irrespective of the reasons for which it was adopted, affects how ordinary people reason about religion. Reasoning from the possibility of alternative religions opens a space for unbelief. Through an analysis of constitutional language, census data, and interviews, the paper concludes that secularism has more to do with the circulation of discourse and the reasons behind it, than with an immanent versus transcendent solution to the puzzle of existence—the transcendent solution being the foundation for the circulation of religious belief itself.     

Grounding the State: Devolution and Development in India's Panchayats

Decentralisation is commonly defended on the grounds that it will bring government closer to people, thereby creating political structures that are more transparent and accountable to poor and marginal groups in society. However, a problem that is well recognised in the decentralisation literature is that the devolution of power will not necessarily improve the performance and accountability of local government. Indeed, in many cases, decentralisation simply empowers local elites to capture a larger share of public resources, often at the expense of the poor. Reflecting on these relatively long-standing problems, an important strand of scholarship has argued that central government can play a central role in counterbalancing the forces that tend to disfavour the poor. In this article, we aim to inform this scholarship by reflecting on the interface between local government and local people in two Indian States: Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP). Drawing upon 12 months of primary research, we argue that although the government of AP did not devolve power to the extent that proponents of decentralisation would have liked, its populist approach to certain forms of poverty reduction empowered the poor in ways that the more ambitious decentralisation agenda in MP did not. This, we argue, was due in part to the fact that MP's decentralisation process failed to challenge the well-entrenched power of the village chiefs, the sarpanches. But the discrepancy can also be explained in terms of the historical evolution of ‘development populism’ in AP. In particular, we argue that the strong performance of programmes aimed at subsidising rice for low income households and providing credit to women's ‘self-help groups’ (SHGs) was part of the State government's wider political strategy of enhancing and maintaining electoral support among women, scheduled castes and the poor.     

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Holy Land

ABSTRACT

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church community has had a presence in the Holy Land for at least several hundred years. Throughout most of this period it was composed of a small ecclesiastical corps of monastic clergy who sought to protect the national church’s rights at various holy places in the region of Christianity’s birth. Only in the twentieth century, were these clergy joined by lay people. In this paper, I discuss the way the type of food served at church celebrations and the rhythm of fasts and feasts emphasize the shared national origins of the small diaspora. At the same time, where people sit when eating, and in what order they are served, expresses distinctions within the ranks of the clergy, between clergy and lay people, between men and women, and between Ethiopians and their former compatriots from Eritrea.     

The politics of purity: discourses of deception and integrity in contemporary international cricket

The International Cricket Council and civil prosecutions of three Pakistani cricketers and their fixer brought player corruption in cricket to public scrutiny once more. A range of English media commentators and the sentencing judge referred to cricket’s loss of innocence because of the deception of the Pakistani cricketers. However, commercialisation, racism and dealings with corrupt political regimes have all exposed cricket as less innocent than many of its English defenders would admit. Furthermore, the demonisation of Pakistani cricketers as cheats blurs the boundary between individual responsibility and cultural characteristics with negative consequences for Muslims in the post-9/11 world.     

Navigating Risk: Understanding the Impact of the Conflict on Children and Young People in Northern Ireland

Twenty years on from the 1994 cease-fires, Northern Ireland is a markedly safer place for children and young people to grow up. However, for a significant number, growing up in post-conflict Northern Ireland has brought with it continued risks and high levels of marginalization. Many young people growing up on the sharp edge of the transition have continued to experience troubling levels of poverty, lower educational attainment, poor standards of childhood health, and sustained exposure to risk-laden environments. Reflecting on interdisciplinary research carried out since the start of the “transition” to peace, this article emphasizes the impact that embedded structural inequalities continue to have on the social, physical, mental, and emotional well-being of many children and young people. In shining a light on the enduring legacy of the conflict, this article moves to argue that greater attention needs to be given to the ongoing socioeconomic factors that result in limited lifetime opportunities, marginalization, and sustained poverty for many young people growing up in “peacetime” Northern Ireland.     

Migration,gender, and mobility: Ethiopian–Israeli women's narratives of career trajectories

ABSTRACT

Most studies on the Ethiopian community in Israel discuss the difficulties in its social, cultural, occupational, and educational integration. Too little attention has been paid to the young professionals in the community who are experiencing upward mobility and to the women in particular. As opposed to stereotypes of Ethiopian–Israelis as poor, uneducated, and marginalized, this article explores socio-economic advancement of Ethiopian–Israeli women in Israel. We look at their integration in the labour market and their professional mobility in the areas of arts, business, religion, the army, and education by analysing the factors that play a role in their success. This study allows us to explore Ethiopian women's worlds by looking at their background and the steps they have taken to succeed in their careers.