Community mobilisation for improved livelihoods through tree crop management in Niger

Effective natural resource management requires interrelated technical practices and social arrangements that are appropriate to a region’s biophysical characteristics and that address protection and sustainable management of resources. This is illustrated from our experience in the Republic of Niger, West Africa. In 1980 barren plains, infertile soils, drought, dust storms, severe fodder shortages, and agricultural pest outbreaks were normal occurrences in Niger’s rural regions. In general, despite large investments of time and funding, conventional reforestation efforts had little impact. However by 2008 over five million hectares of once barren land had been transformed through wide adoption of an agroforestry method known as ‘Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration’ (FMNR), introduced in 1983. In the Aguie Department, the practice of FMNR was formalized through the Desert Community Initiative (DCI), addressing interrelated technical and social issues in resource management. New governance structures, which include marginalized groups, implement monitoring and enforcement systems enabling communities to manage land and regenerating trees. These, together with technical solutions that build on local knowledge and skills and use previously undervalued indigenous tree species, have generated a sustainable fuel-wood market for the first time. Increased linkage and compatibility between institutions at local and national levels and strengthened social capital have been crucial to these impacts. Food security and community resilience to drought have been markedly enhanced and local incomes have increased. The experience provides important lessons for approaches to addressing environmental degradation and poverty in other semi arid areas and facilitating the spread and adoption of new agroforestry systems.     

Tackling social exclusion in European neighbourhoods: experiences and lessons from the NEHOM project

Disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods with their complex social, economic and physical situations have increasingly become the focus of governmental policies in the EU. The emphasis has shifted from improving physical qualities to building opportunities for social groups in these areas. While physical upgrade is easier to achieve, at least in the short run, initiatives often fail in outcomes on communities and local participation. This paper aims to improve understanding on how to tackle area-based social exclusion and create socially coherent communities. Building on the results of the NEHOM project, the focus is on examining how various interventions have impacted local communities and their opportunities for better inclusion. A comparison between neighbourhoods shows that mixing social groups to a certain degree is likely to be a necessary step towards opening long-term opportunities for a disadvantaged neighbourhood. The planned initiatives should at the same time directly benefit local communities, and the involvement of local groups in the planning and implementation process helps to guarantee that the overall changes are accepted by the local community. However, the proposed guidelines do not provide a universal recipe for a successful renewal suiting each neighbourhood—the contextual matters should always be a starting point when planning an initiative.     

Transforming Atlantis, South Africa, through local economic development

The concept of Local Economic Development is gaining widespread acceptance in South Africa. There are at present few examples of local communities which have developed and applied concrete strategies and programmes. One major exception is that of the apartheid created coloured town of Atlantis near Cape Town. The removal of state support and associated economic and social problems galvanised the local community into action. With the assistance of outside agencies a Local Economic Development strategy was identified and is currently being implemented. Modest success has been achieved and the basis for sustained local development is being laid. The experience of Atlantis serves to illustrate the potential which South African communities have to initiate a process of locally-driven development.     

Prosperity and the New Economy in Canada’s major city regions

Canada’s three large city regions—Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver—have been relatively successful in retaining their Manufacturing bases, while at the same time adding substantial numbers of New Economy job opportunities. Deindustrialization appears to have occurred primarily in the Montréal CMA (Census Metropolitan Area) and in some smaller communities where motor vehicle manufacturing was significant. Growth in New Economy jobs has occurred in the larger CMAs; the smaller urban areas have had little success in attracting these jobs. For the most part, these trends appear to be path dependent: prosperous communities with substantial proportions of New Economy jobs are likely to remain prosperous and to attract more such jobs. The lack of significant correlation between Economic Health and the presence of immigrants, same sex couples, performing and visual artists suggests that local economic development strategies based on these factors may have limited success.     

Putting adaptive capacity into the context of people’s lives: a case study of two flood-prone communities in Puerto Rico

Recent developments in the vulnerability literature have contested the use of technical solutions as the sole adaptive strategies to reduce natural hazard impact; this literature emphasizes the need to attend to the wider everyday risks to which people are exposed and that aggravate hazard vulnerability. Using a case study of two flood-prone communities in Puerto Rico, this article supports and enhances that literature by placing floods within a wider context of other risks and determining how everyday risks influence people’s perceptions of and capacity to adapt to floods. Participatory methods are used to elicit the everyday risks that concern community members. The analysis reveals that participants perceive floods as one of their risks, but they see them as neither the most important nor most severe risk in their lives. Instead, they find other concerns—health conditions, family well-being, economic factors, and land tenure—more pressing. These competing risks limit adaptive capacity and increase vulnerability to natural hazards. The results suggest that addressing these multiple risks, mainstreaming flood management and adaptation into the wider context of people’s general well being, and increasing risk perception will strengthen adaptive capacity to present and future floods.     

Key barriers to community cohesion: views from residents of 20 London deprived neighbourhoods

The notion of community has been central to the political project of renewal of New Labour in the UK. The paper explores how the discourses of community are framed within New Labour and discusses these in the light of the results from research which focuses on how people within urban deprived areas construct their community. It draws upon the results of one part of a larger research project (the ‘Well London’ programme) which aimed to capture the views of residents from 20 disadvantaged neighbourhoods throughout London using an innovative qualitative method known as the ‘World Café’. Our results show the centrality of young people to the development of cohesive communities, the importance of building informal relationships between residents alongside encouraging greater participation to policy making, and the need to see these places as fragile and temporary locations but with considerable social strengths. Government policies are only partially addressing these issues. They pay greater attention to formally encouraging citizens to become more involved in policy making, largely ignore the contribution young people could make to the community cohesion agenda, and weakly define the shared norms and values that are crucial in building cohesive communities. Thus, the conclusion is that whilst an emphasis of the government on ‘community’ is to be welcome, more needs to be done in terms of considering the ‘voices’ of the community as well as enabling communities to determine and act upon their priorities.     

What kind of countryside do the public want: community visions from Wales UK?

This paper assesses how far community led rural visions accord with the current thrust of rural planning policy delivery in the UK. Adapting conventional visioning methods, qualitative techniques were used on eight different communities across urban, exurban and rural Wales to elicit views relating to the kind of local countryside(s) that were desired. The results show that the communities’ visions reflect an emerging consensus around local countryside priorities: multifunctionality, integration, wider countryside protection, development based on need, and local distinctiveness according with the thrust of current planning policy at national and local levels. However, there is a clear dichotomy between this and the reality of what communities actually experienced in developments affecting their countryside. Here, universal criticism was encountered over the type, pace and scale of development, the lack of rural specificity and the failure to take account of local community needs and priorities. It is hypothesized that tensions between national and local politics and stakeholder power relations are playing a crucial role in distorting the delivery of town and country planning. It is recommended that rural policy delivery must become more “joined up” and rural proofed at national and local levels concomitant with a change in the operational culture of agencies at the forefront of rural delivery. Essentially, effective engagement of top down approaches synergising with bottom up community led ideas is long overdue.     

Public participation in China’s green communities: Mobilizing memories and structuring incentives

In recent years, there has been heightened interest in creating more environmentally sustainable forms of urban development in China. Central in these greening initiatives has been increased attention on promoting public participation in community-based environmental activities. Focusing on China’s green community initiatives, we examine the production and effects of participation in a state-led development program. Our analysis considers how incentives for program organizers and participants are structured by broader political and economic imperatives facing Chinese cities. We also consider what influence China’s history of neighborhood-based mobilization campaigns had on the meanings and methods of participation in green communities. To understand how urban development processes and memories of mobilization influence participation at the local level, we present two examples of the community greening process from the city of Guangzhou, comparing policy outcomes between a new and older neighborhood. This article seeks to demonstrate that the participatory processes associated with such an urban environmental initiative cannot be adequately understood without reference to earlier participatory practices and broader policy priorities guiding development in Chinese cities.     

Double transformation at the eastern border of the EU: the case of the Euroregion pro Europa Viadrina

One of the major means to foster European integration is the establishment of border spanning regions (‘Euroregions’). This is particularly important on the Eastern borders of the EU, e.g. in Eastern Germany. There, however, a double transformation to post-socialist society is taking place, both inside and outside the EU. Tensions arise between objectives on local and higher political levels, intensified by totally different economic structures and access to EU funds on both sides of the border. This is particularly true for the case of the emerging Euroregion Viadrina. Problems in preserving old industrialised localities in East Germany (e.g. steel) and attempts to resurrect the urban fair place Frankfurt/Oder, clash with transition in agriculture and consumer industries and with new concepts in tourism development and environmental protection in the Polish border zone. In region building, political, economic and ideological goals compete with each other. Local initiatives and higher political governance may both support and hamper each other. The same holds true for the interdependence of cultural integration and economic development. The paper concludes that regional economic development can only be expected if, via the building of the Euroregion, the interplay of these factors leads to compromise and harmonization between the different parties involved. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ethnic enterprises and community development

Ethnic enterprises are growing rapidly in urban areas across the United States. Anecdotal evidence from around the country reports many success stories of how ethnic businesses transform communities; however, researchers have not provided a systematic review of the role of ethnic businesses in community developing. In practice, ethnic businesses have not been formally incorporated in local planning and development process. This article provides a systematic review of the multi-faceted ways ethnic businesses contribute to community building and neighborhood development. In addition to surveying the current literature, we also chose three communities for a focused review: Buford Highway in Atlanta, Monterey Park in Los Angeles, and Sunset Park in New York. A framework is developed to evaluate the economic, physical, social/cultural, and political effects that ethnic businesses exert on communities. We find that ethnic businesses can serve local economic interests and community-level cohesion and accrue economic, social, physical, and political benefits to their respective communities. These include serving the unmet market needs of certain neighborhoods and households, creating job opportunities and generating revenues, revitalizing and fueling the commercial development of abandoned communities, organizing and promoting social life and cultural diversity, as well as contributing their collective interest and voice in local communities. We argue that ethnic businesses should be better incorporated into urban policies in community economic development.     

‘Think globally,act locally’: sustainable communities,modernity and development

This article sets out to explore the political relationship between the global and the local through the prism of the sustainable development. The ideal of sustainable communities is explored in the context of evolving political fictions that define alternative conceptions of modernity. While the article uses Ireland (reputedly the most globalised society in the world) as a microcosm of development, the context is firmly located within the wider sphere of European and planetary politics. It is argued that the ideal of sustainable communities offers the opportunity of reviving the civic republican tradition of democracy (the Ancient Greek agora) as a metaphor for the public sphere in the conditions of late modern society. The agora in Ancient Greece provided a site of political assembly, based upon participation (citizens’ engagement in decision-making) and deliberation (a process of reached argument). Today, concepts such as ‘participatory civility’ and ‘discursive democracy’ seek to revive these classical ideals, as the basis for building sustainable communities in a transforming modernity that searches for a new logic of development.     

Power and privilege in alternative civic practices: Examining imaginaries of change and embedded rationalities in community economies

Community economies can be considered as examples of the diverse economies growing outside common capitalist logics of private accumulation and profit, seeking to bypass or reconfigure dominant global trends of societal and economic organization. Yet, these communities seem to fit quite well under a neoliberal program in which responsibilities are shifting downwards, favoring multi-level governance over State intervention and accountability. This binary character makes imperative an open and critical discussion on the development of community initiatives, including on the motivations and visions of citizens practicing alternative ethical consumption. This article explores the neoliberal rationalities embraced by community members within the imaginaries of change they frame and examines how these rationalities contribute to (re)producing neoliberal conditions and forms of governance. Our analysis builds on semi-structured interviews conducted among the members of 11 initiatives in 5 EU countries and on participant observation. We argue here that communities articulate an “alternative imaginary” of change that appears imprinted by core neoliberal rationalities around questions of individual responsibility, the role of the State, and civic participation and equity. It is an imaginary related to the construction of CBEs to by-pass existing socio-political and economic configurations. This imaginary more often than not responds to neoliberal promises of individual freedom and autonomy and seems to undermine CBEs' more radical possibilities at the same time obscuring more diverse voices of transformation.     

Locating social capital in resilient community-level emergency management

This paper distinguishes between two types of emergency management at the local scale—municipal government responsibilities and community-level initiatives. It argues that these are interdependent, but separate aspects of emergency management. Communities, whether or not tied to particular places, are posited as being key, but often overlooked resources in both proactive and reactive phases of emergency management. Of particular importance within communities are the social capital resources (networks of strong and weak ties) that may work to improve a community’s resilience to risks and hazards. Two cases studies, the 2003 electricity power blackout in the eastern parts of both Canada and the United States and the 2000 water-borne disaster in Walkerton are utilised to demonstrate the concepts developed in the paper.     

Placing voluntarism within evolving spaces of care in ageing rural communities

Guided by a theorisation of voluntarism as a critical process shaping local outcomes of changes underway in health care systems and in rural communities, this paper re-analyses qualitative results from previous case studies of rural ageing to deconstruct the multifaceted role of the voluntary sector in facilitating the emergence of homes and communities as ‘new’ spaces of care. The specific focus is on the lived experience of voluntary sector care providers from the perspectives of non-profit organisations, community groups and families as well as elderly residents of rural communities in Canada and New Zealand. The findings confirm the local dynamics of voluntarism as a crucial yet neglected component of sustainable rural services and communities. More importantly, they reveal the voluntary sector as a major source of resistance to both the short-term changes mandated by restructuring and longer-term changes associated with rural ageing and service decline. It is through resistance that voluntary organisations and volunteers are seen to be engaging most intensely with the challenge of ageing in place within evolving spaces of care. A more nuanced understanding of their complex role is a prerequisite for developing informed policy on rural ageing and care provisioning.     

Second homes and local development: Issues arising from Cape Town's De Waterkant

The paper aims to make a contribution towards addressing the current paucity of academic reflection on second home development in South Africa. The paper focuses on the intersection between tourism, second homes and local development, as embodied in the empirical realities of a Cape Town neighbourhood — De Waterkant. It is argued that this particular case study presents an example of the types of local development impacts that second home expansion holds for host communities. These impacts include employment generation, urban conservation, a range of forward and backward economic linkages, as well as a flexible tourist accommodation supply. Moreover, the case study elucidates an interesting example of second homes as sites of simultaneous tourism space production and consumption at work. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Resilient capacity assessment for geological failure areas: examples from communities affected by debris flow disaster

This study establishes a novel method for assessing the community resilient capacity of debris flow disasters with appropriate parameters, such as responding, monitoring and communication capabilities. This study adopts eight communities in Taiwan, namely Nangang, Tongfu, Jhongyang, Laiyuan, Chingfu, Sinsheng, Shangan and Jyunkeng, as examples. First, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied to establish the framework of the community resiliency capacity, including the community’s resources for disaster resilience and resident capabilities. The community’s resources for disaster resilience are identified by surveying the community leaders via checklists. Resident capabilities are determined using questionnaires. The community resilient capacity refers to the sum of the results from these two investigations. The two investigations have similar weights, indicating that they are equally significant when evaluating community resilient capacity. Second, FLO-2D software is utilized for hazard analysis by simulation results of deposited areas for debris flows, and then these areas were categorized according to hazard degrees. Finally, the vulnerability of communities is classified based on the land use type. In summary, the values of capacity, hazard and vulnerability are integrated to determine the risk of debris flow for each community. A risk map is then generated.     

Factors of poultry farming adoption in Oyo State,Nigeria: A study in agency- and infrastructure-based diffusion

In this paper, use is made of the multiple regression technique in an attempt to provide explanation for the pattern of adoption of intensive poultry farming technique — an agency and infrastructure based innovation. This paper deals with two aspects of the diffusion. The first examines the factors of spatial pattern of adoption and the second, the adoption intensity. The paper then turns to consider the planning implications of these factors. In Oyo State, market factor expressed as the population size of towns, distance to agency location and from previous adopters largely account for the spatial variation in the time of adoption of ‘modern’ poultry farming technique. The intensity of adoption (poultry population) on the other hand is influenced by the number of adopters, distance to infrastructure, profitability considerations, literacy factor and the time of adoption.     

“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.     

Ethnoscapes, entertainment and ’eritage in the global city: segmented spaces in Singapore’s Joo Chiat Road

This case study considers the early development and recent changes that have occurred in the vicinity of Joo Chiat Road, Singapore, which can be described as a ‘linear activity corridor’ linking the districts of Geylang, Katong and Marine Parade, immediately east of Singapore’s urban core. Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has declared Joo Chiat to be a ‘Conservation Area’, reflecting local-born Peranakan and Eurasian cultures, with similar status to other more central historic sites such as Chinatown, Kampong Glam, Little India and Emerald Hill. But the story of Joo Chiat has evolved along a somewhat different trajectory from the more prominent, tourism-related, heritage areas, with a multiplicity of interactions operating at the margins of the planning process. This has led to the spatial infusion of potentially discordant, globally related, ‘entertainment and recreational’ activities into an area of established urban identity and multiple attachments. When a policy of police containment was found to be inadequate in protecting local residents from undesirable impacts, changes were eventually brought about through a combination of neighbourhood activism and local political initiative. Through detailed land use inspections, press reports and strategic interviews, backed up by secondary sources, the study highlights the impingement of marginalised, potentially disruptive ‘global’ elements into a local heritage conservation area, and the importance of strong neighbourhood identity and community involvement as active components in the process of conflict resolution.     

Youth empowerment and information and communication technologies: a case study of a remote Australian Aboriginal community

In spite of a ‘digital divide’, Aboriginal groups in Australia, as internationally, are increasingly using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to maintain their cultures, communicate, archive knowledge, empower their communities, develop skills and generate income. Each community uses the technologies differently in accordance with their particular needs and the opportunities available. The use of ICTs in Aboriginal youth empowerment is illustrated through a case study of an initiative undertaken by the Walkatjurra Cultural Centre in Leonora, remote Western Australia. A participatory process was used to engage the Centre’s young people and they were given individual assistance to develop their ICT related capacity. The community conceives this youth empowerment to be part of a broader youth participation process that will contribute to the Centre’s overall objectives.