‘We are Scared to Say No’: Facing Foreign Timber Companies in Sierra Leone's Community Woodlands

In recent years, ‘decentralisation’ has become an increasingly prominent theme in Sub-Saharan African development theory and practice, particularly around woodland management. Although much research has illuminated challenges arising in project design and implementation, ‘external’ threats to decentralised resource management initiatives have received little attention. At the same time, however, there has been a massive increase in foreign, particularly Chinese, corporate investment in the extraction of African resources. This paper examines the importance of the interaction between these two trends to local livelihoods and resource management through a case study of illegal logging by Chinese companies in Sierra Leone.     

An open letter/review

Abstract

I first read about you and your book, The Woman Warrior, in the book review sections of several magazines and Sunday newspapers. I read Susan Brownmiller's interview with you in “Mademoiselle” magazine, Jane Kramer's review of your book in the New York Times, and Nan Robertson's interview with you, also in the Times. In addition, several white feminist friends were telling me I should read your book “because it is a powerful, feminist story by a Chinese American woman.” So I read your book.     

Myanmar's Electoral System: Reviewing the 2010 and 2012 Elections and Looking Ahead to the 2015 General Elections

Myanmar's 2010 multi-party election was the nation's first in two decades, signaling a manufactured transition from nearly half a century of military dictatorship toward parliamentary democracy. The current single-member district, plurality voting electoral system limits the parliamentary representation of smaller, ethnic political parties, and inflates the influence of larger, enfranchised parties, jeopardizing peaceful national reconciliation between various factions and the country's inchoate democratic institutions. Myanmar's Union Electoral Commission should consider electoral reforms that: (a) maximize proportional representation; (b) guarantee peace and political stability; and (c) guarantee a sufficient parliamentary majority that can govern the nascent democracy. The ideal system for the upcoming 2015 general elections is a Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) one, with one parliamentary house electing ministers by plurality in regional districts and the other with proportional representation by party list. This paper considers alternative electoral systems in light of the status quo and argues that MMP would produce the most stable and representative results for all parties concerned.     

Long-term effects of the Moving to Opportunity residential mobility experiment on crime and delinquency

Objectives

Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime.

Methods

We draw on new administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO families were randomized into an experimental group offered a housing voucher that could only be used to move to a low-poverty neighborhood, a Section 8 housing group offered a standard housing voucher, and a control group. This paper focuses on MTO youth ages 15–25 in 2001 (n = 4,643) and analyzes intention to treat effects on neighborhood characteristics and criminal behavior (number of violent- and property-crime arrests) through 10 years after randomization.

Results

We find the offer of a housing voucher generates large improvements in neighborhood conditions that attenuate over time and initially generates substantial reductions in violent-crime arrests and sizable increases in property-crime arrests for experimental group males. The crime effects attenuate over time along with differences in neighborhood conditions.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is more strongly related to current neighborhood conditions (situational neighborhood effects) than to past neighborhood conditions (developmental neighborhood effects). The MTO design makes it difficult to determine which specific neighborhood characteristics are most important for criminal behavior. Our administrative data analyses could be affected by differences across areas in the likelihood that a crime results in an arrest.     

Identification of Protected Avian Species Using a Single Feather Barb*,†

Abstract: We report on the unambiguous identification of protected avian species from as little as one barb of a feather. Many avian species are protected by international agreements and national legislation, yet they are traded illegally because of their high value. Two sections of the avian mitochondrial genome were chosen to identify bird species, being a 561‐bp section of ND2 gene and a 921‐bp section of the ND5 gene. Two different DNA extraction methods were compared for their ability to reliably isolate sufficient DNA to be detected in a subsequent PCR. Using a commercial kit supplied by QIAGEN, a complete sequence was obtained from one barb for the ND2 gene, whereas two barbs were required to reliably sequence the 921‐bp section of the ND5 gene. The process worked on all species tested using feathers from archival museum specimens, resulted in minimal damage to the specimen and can readily be adopted by a forensic science laboratory.