Issues in population pressure,land resettlement,and development: The case of Nepal

This analysis considers the question of whether resettlement schemes really relieve population pressure or help achieve a better regional balance between population and resource distribution in a manner consistent with Nepal's national objective of agricultural growth with social justice. The 1st part of the analysis discusses population pressure, followed by the conceptualization of ecodemographic relations and sociodemographic relations. The 2nd part of the analysis considers Nepal's agrarian economy along with a case-study examination of its contemporary resettlement project in Chitwan district. Finally, information is presented from a field survey conducted in Chitwan in 1979, which support the assertions that: the sociodemographic relations -- not population pressure as such -- are the primary roots of agrarian development problems in a country like Nepal; and resettlement schemes, when implemented without due consideration of the pervasive sociodemographic relations, are a deficient technical fix to imbalances in ecodemographic relations. Nepal provides a typical example of ecodemographic imbalances in the regional distribution of population and resources. Although the Hill and Mountain regions make up almost 60% of Nepal's total population, they share less than 30% of the total land under cultivation. The Tarai region, which is the northern extension of the Gangetic Plain in India, occupies over 70% of the cultivated land and supports only slightly over 40% of the population. As the case study illustrates, development strategies such as land resettlement are invariably formulated and implemented as a technical solution within the framework of ecodemographic relations. Little attention is directed to addressing the social dimension of these programs, i.e., the structual problems directly associated with the existing sociodemographic relations. Development, or land resettlement in the present case, is not simply a technical issue concerned with land reclamation and its management. It is also a social issue, because the sociodemographic relations determine significantly the direction (or directions) that resettlement programs take. When development policies make little effort to tackle the underlying forces of these relations, resettlement schemes result in the reconstitution of class divisions and disparity in the ownership of resources in newly resettled areas.     

From domestic to international: the politics of ethnic identity in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia

This paper examines two contrasting cases of ethnic-group political activism in China – the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the Mongols in Inner Mongolia – to explain the former's political activism and the latter's lack thereof. Given similar challenges and pressures, how can we explain the divergent patterns in these two groups' political behavior? This paper forwards the argument that domestic factors alone are not sufficient to account for differences in the groups' political behavior. Instead, international factors have to be included to offer a fuller and satisfactory explanation. The paper illustrates how three types of international factors – big power support, external cultural ties, and Uighur diaspora community activism – have provided opportunities and resources to make the Uighur political activism sustainable. In Inner Mongolia, its quest for self-determination reached the highest fervor in the early half of the twentieth century, particularly with the support of imperial Japan. However, since the end of WWII, Inner Mongolia has not received any consistent international support and, as a result, has been more substantially incorporated into China's geopolitical body.     

加强周边交往促进经贸升级--内蒙古自治区代表团出访俄罗斯、蒙古国纪实

2004年9月28日-10月13日,应俄罗斯联邦有关共和国、州、区及蒙古国工贸部的邀请,内蒙古自治区政府主席杨晶率领内蒙古自治区政府代表团访问了俄联邦赤塔州、布里亚特共和国、克拉斯诺亚尔斯克边疆区(以下简称克区)、伊尔库茨克州(以下简称伊州)及蒙古国.这是内蒙古自治区第一次由主席率规模大、层次高团组出访毗邻国家和地区的重要活动,对巩固和深化内蒙古与毗邻国家、地区的友好往来和经贸合作关系具有重要意义.     

Environmental administration,the courts and public policy, 1980-1989

Of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's seven major enabling statutes, six contain citizen suit provisions which reward anti-EPA plaintiffs. This fact, coupled with the agency's increasing use of the courts to bolster its enforcement efforts, yield a multitude of avenues through which courts have affected the policies and administration of the agency. This article discusses how the courts have affected the EPA in the 1980s and then briefly assesses the implications of such court-agency interaction for the successful operation of public agencies in the next decade. ^{? ?}This paper, particulary sections three and four, draws heavily upon a more detailed presentation examining the impact of federal court decisions on the policies and administration of the EPA from 1970 through 1988, published as O’Leary, R. Administrative Law Review, vol. 41. no. 4 (Fall, 1989).      

埃及、西班牙、蒙古三国反腐倡廉机构和举措

2009年6月13—27日,中共中央政治局常委、中央纪委书记贺国强率中共代表团访问埃及、西班牙、约旦和蒙古四国期间,随行的中央纪委副书记、监察部部长兼国家预防腐败局局长马馼同志与埃及、西班牙和蒙古三国的监察或反腐败机构进行了对口交流,双方围绕信息沟通、经验共享、加强合作等内容深入交换意见。通过会谈会见,     

建国前毛泽东四次未成行的访苏之旅(上)

在全国解放战争时期,毛泽东曾不止一次地提出赴莫斯科,与斯大林磋商重大问题,但是由于种种原因均未行成。 一     

African diasporas,development and the politics of context

This article seeks to add to the debate on the role of diasporas in development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa by considering why diasporas are not apparently as effective as development agents in an African setting as they have proven thus far in other regions. It argues that changing diasporic engagement and activities on the continent should be examined against the backdrop of the emergence of a ‘liberalisation from below’ which emphasises local ownership of development outcomes, the historical variety of African state forms and the continuities in the exercise of power and the nature of these states. In so doing, it brings into focus the ongoing transformation in state–society relations whereby the dependence—of elites and ordinary citizens alike—on external resources continues to deepen, and the importance of this context in drawing any conclusions about the role of diasporas as agents of transformation.     

State formation,development, and the politics of self-help in Kenya

Issues of rural development, state formation, and political effectiveness are of paramount importance in Africa today. Analysis of Kenya's Harambee self-help approach to development contributes to our understanding of these issues by clarifying not only the ways in which political and economic concerns are linked in one African nation in a hierarchy based on a patrimonial model of political behavior but also some facets of elite behavior and peasant-state relationships. This paper argues that self-help is central to Kenyan politics and hence to the operation of this model of political behavior, serving the interests and needs of both Kenyan elites and rural communities. Through their self-help projects rural Kenyans neither reject the state retreating into the economy of affection nor permit elites exclusive access to the benefits of both public and private resources. Rather, using elite networks to gain support for self-help projects, residents of rural communities improve their access to highly valued collective goods. These processes are currently being modified in some important ways by the Moi government.     

Fertility,development, and family planning

Earlier studies by Tsui and Bogue (1978) and Mauldin and Berelson (1978) suggested that family planning efforts account for 3-4 times the variance in fertility than is explained by indicators of socioeconomic development. This paper replicates, extends, and revises these analyses. Selection of a different set of countries for sampling was found to have little effect on the earlier results. In addition, neither factor scaling nor the addition of distributional variables had a substantial effect. However, weighting countries by population size was found to produce a decline in explained variance. It was found that although family planning has a stronger direct effect on fertility than any other variable when countries are considered, the effect of education is stronger when people are considered. When more developed countries were included in the analysis, the combination of prior fertility and mortality explained almost all the variation in current fertility. This finding suggests that fertility is more responsive to longterm, stabilized changes in mortality than to short-term changes. 4 methodological conclusions are derived from these analyses: 1) unless a sample of countries is overtly biased, the selection of a sample on the basis of available data has little impact on the results; 2) stepwise methods can be utilized to avoid the inclusion of a large number of variables in a regression equation; 3) weighting of cases has a substantial impact on results; and 4) since most variables have little direct influence on fertility change, analysis should be extended to examine indirect influences. These results suggest a policy which invests economic resources in education and mortality reduction as well as family planning efforts. Investments in primary and secondary education may reduce mortality as well as fertility.     

Society, community, and economic development

Studies of economic development and economic history have long been concerned with the relationship between the transparent and supposedly anonymous forces of markets, rules, and bureaucracies, on the one hand, and membership in groups, such as local communities, associations, or networks on the other. Economists are quite divided about these latter forces: for some, they are necessary underpinnings for the market, providing trust and social capital which in turn reduce transaction costs and moral hazards and hence promote development; for most, they are seen as archaic, leading to nepotism, rent seeking, and institutional rigidity. Indeed, throughout the social sciences, there is an opposition between the roles assigned to what may be called the “societal” and the “communitarian” bases of social and economic development. But each position in this theoretical standoff underestimates the contributions of either society or community to economic development. This is because both society and community have potentially positive and negative effects; together, however, they can act as mutual checks and balances on their potentially negative effects, while reinforcing the positive contributions of each to economic efficiency. Different levels and types of society and community, in interaction, define complex contexts of choice and incentives in economic development, and allow us to see more clearly the basis of different institutional configurations in relationship to development. Michael Storper is professor of regional and international development in the School of Public Affairs at UCLA; professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics; and professor of economic sociology at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in Paris. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.     

Civic Environmental NGOs,Civil Society,and Democratisation in China

This paper examines the potential role of civic environmental NGOs in China's democratisation. Based on interviews with 31 NGO officials, the paper examines the origins, structures, and functions of civic environmental NGOs in China. It also examines how various political and resource constraints have shaped their development. While having made progress in organising educational campaigns and specific conservation projects, civic environmental NGOs have been less successful in influencing government decisions and official behaviours. Most recently, some NGOs have made limited progress on these fronts by maintaining a largely non-oppositional stance towards government and by utilising various formal and information channels for influencing government decisions. NGO leaders will have to negotiate with different party-state entities in defining their precise roles in the political process.     

Psy-expertise,therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development

Expertise stemming from the psy disciplines is increasingly and explicitly shaping international development policy and practice. Whilst some policy makers see the use of psy expertise as a new way to reduce poverty, increase economic efficiency, and promote wellbeing, others raise concerns that psychocentric development promotes individual over structural change, pathologises poverty, and depoliticises development. This paper specifically analyses four aspects of psy knowledge used in contemporary development policy: child development/developmental psychology, behavioural economics, positive psychology, and global mental health. This analysis illuminates the co-constitutive intellectual and colonial histories of development and psy-expertise: a connection that complicates claims that development has been psychologized; the uses and coloniality of both within a neoliberal project; and the potential for psychopolitics to inform development.