Wild property and its boundaries – on wildlife policy and rural consequences in South Africa

Against the backdrop of post-Apartheid neoliberal reform, South African landowners have gained the option to acquire full ownership over wild animals on their land. Corresponding with this, approximately one sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production (i.e. hunting, ecotourism, live trade and venison production). This article analyzes the institutional process in which authority concerning access to wildlife is being restructured, and argues that the unfolding property regime leads to an intensified form of green grabbing. To demonstrate this, the article singles out three particular wildlife policy institutions which make clear (a) how private property rights to wildlife are negotiated and implemented, (b) how wildlife ownership is firmly interlocked with land ownership, (c) how natural entities are being converted to robust political and economical assets, and (d) what social consequences this has for rural South Africa.     

浅析新形势下工会工作的发展方向

从1978年改革开放的号角吹响开始,我国经济的发展就步入了一个新的阶段。如今,经历30多年的发展,我国的市场经济体制正逐步发展和走向完善,伴随着这些发展的还有我国企事业单位的改革。改革必然会产生各种各样的新问题和新矛盾。在这种情况下,作为单位思想灵魂的工会组织就起到了至关重要的作用,它是单位和职工沟通的桥梁,更是维护单位稳定的最大保障,所以,如何在新形势下确立好工会工作的发展方向值得探究。本文针对新形势下工会工作的发展方向提出了立足根本,不断完善工会基本职能;发挥好工会的监督功能,重视活动的民主性;提高工会组织能力的建设及创新是增强工会工作源泉的四点建议。     

中日贸易的新发展、新变化及问题

新世纪以来,中日贸易规模进一步扩大,贸易商品结构也发生了新的变化。由于中国经济崛起而日本经济低迷,中国在日本对外贸易中的地位迅速提高,而日本在中国对外贸易中的地位却明显下降。中日贸易发展对中日两国经济都产生了积极的作用和影响,也存在一些不可忽视的问题,必须认真对待,尽快解决。     

追求个人发展的新生代务工人员

新生代务工人员最基本特征是"追求个人发展"。而"追求个人发展"与现行"限制个人发展"的体制发生剧烈冲突。"限制个人发展"体制的转型是必然的。     

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.     

Issues of local ownership in Kosovo’s security sector

Local ownership represents an overarching concept in international development. However, its core principles have been occasionally neglected in the practice of state-building such as in the case of Kosovo. This paper explores relations between the international community and local actors in the process of Kosovo security sector development after 2008, when the country declared its independence. This article finds that externally-driven models were imposed in some phases of security sector development. The actions of the international community disregarded the local context and created distrust by the local actors. The study relies on extensive face-to-face interviews with relevant national and international stakeholders, a public opinion survey with a sample of 1102 respondents, focus group and personal observation.     

Priorities for International Co-operation with Libya: A Development Perspective

This article provides a development co-operation perspective on the challenges facing Libya during its post-Qadhafi transition. Four key areas for international co-operation are outlined: peace, reconciliation and justice; governance and public administration; economic diversification; and migration. While concrete initiatives in all of these areas depend on Libya’s domestic security situation, they need to be part of a long-term, holistic strategy for one of the most fragile and conflict-affected countries in North Africa. Assuming that Libya’s domestic power-brokers decide that a modern, prosperous country is what they want, patient and committed international support can help turn Libya into a success story.     

Empowerment,Deliberative Development,and Local-Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power

The salience of the concept of “empowerment” has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups’ capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. “Deliberative contestation” refers to marginalized groups’ practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites’ monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used “mobilizational contestation” to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.

Institutions and Caribbean Economic Performance: Insights from Jamaica

We explore the impact of social institutions on economic performance in Jamaica through a reinterpretation of the plantation economic model. In its original form, the plantation model fails to develop a causal link between the plantation legacy and persistent underdevelopment. Despite its marginalization, the model remains useful for discussions on growth and development. Consequently, we offer a reappraisal using the causal insights from Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman. We use two examples to demonstrate how inequality encourages the formation of institutions that are inconsistent with growth, and an empirical analysis to confirm the hypothesized relationship between inequality, institutions, and economic development. Since inequality is expected to influence growth indirectly, we use a structural specification, which follows William Easterly’s recent test of Sokoloff and Engerman’s argument. Our reliance on a time-series specification is unique. We demonstrate that the expectation that, on average, inequality and growth is negatively related and that institutions may compromise growth are accurate for Jamaica, the most cited Caribbean nation in the current discourse. Our results carry several policy implications, including support for the recent calls in Jamaica for political restructuring. However, both the paucity of similar studies and the importance of the implications for sustainable growth and development demand further analyses.

工会的四种模式与中国特色社会主义工会

工会发展的模式大体上可以概括为四种：工团主义工会,革命性工会,生产辅助型工会和中国特色的社会主义工会。每种模式都嵌入特定的社会制度并且反映其存在的时代背景。中国特色社会主义工会也是依据中国现阶段的基本国情而形成的,既有工会的共性,又有其独特的内涵。