Two Sides of the Same Coin: Formal and Informal Institutional Synergy in a Case Study of Wildlife Governance in Ghana

Abstract

There has been the call to forge a synergistic relationship between local ecological knowledge and formal institutions in the governance of natural resources. How do informal institutions complement the efforts of formal state regulation of natural resources? How does this complementation foster a regularized human–wildlife interaction? Adopting an ethnographic design, this study assesses the role of institutional complementation in natural resource governance using the case of Boabeng–Fiema Monkey Sanctuary (BFMS) in Ghana, West Africa. We purposively selected 33 informants relevant to the BFMS governance process. The study observes that the synergy between formal and informal institutions strengthens wildlife protection in BFMS and the surrounding villages. The usefulness of informal rules is enhanced if appropriately complemented with a formal institutional arrangement. Over time, it becomes necessary for informal rules to grow in dynamism to depict the principles of collaboration, inclusivity, and benefit arrangements.     

The nation-state and the city: introduction to a debate

In recent years, the urban political landscape has become infused with a potent and incendiary mixture of popular-democratic, anti-globalisation, and separatist rhetoric. One central process driving this has been the problematic relations between the nation-state and the city. This Debates and Interventions forum aims to prompt a debate about where the city should be situated intellectually in respect of the nation-state. Four questions are addressed: (1) How do contemporary processes of urban development reflect changing national geopolitical priorities? (2) To what extent are struggles around immigration, citizenship and recognition conducted within cities rather than around the nation-state? (3) To what degree does the city (as e.g. a physical form, social environment or discourse) help to mobilise, propel and/or contest this new urban politics? And (4) Is the concept of a “post-national” global order appropriate for understanding the city and urban politics today?     

Exploitation or 'Wise Use' of the Coongie Lakes,South Australia: Issues arising from a petroleum exploration proposal

The exploitation of natural resources within areas that are valued for their environmental qualities raises competing emotions. This paper considers a proposal to undertake petroleum exploration in an area of recognised environmental value, namely, the Coongie Lakes of far north-east South Australia. In development cases such as this, the level of inquiry needs to address environmental, social, cultural and economic issues from a range of interest groups; therefore, the process of assessment is a crucial factor in minimising conflict and meeting the wishes of the stakeholders. In the example of Coongie Lakes, the chosen method failed. This paper discusses the perspectives of the major stakeholders, the process of assessment undertaken, and the criticisms directed at this process. The apparent inadequacies of the assessment process undertaken are then highlighted, and an alternative assessment procedure suggested.     

Urban resilience for whom,what, when,where, and why?

ABSTRACT

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom?” This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these “five Ws” to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.     

Qualitative Health Research: Negotiating Life with HIV/AIDS

In this paper, I look at the use of qualitative methods in health geography. I focus on two projects using in-depth interviews with people with HIV/AIDS. Drawing from feminist work on qualitative methodologies and the production of knowledge, two questions are posed. First, what insights do interviews offer about people's daily experiences with HIV/AIDS? Second, given that interviews involve direct contact between interviewer and respondent, what are the implications of using this methodology? Projects reveal that living with HIV/AIDS involves a complex series of negotiations. These include negotiating one's own identity within medical discourse, dealing with health care professionals, and choosing how to use medication. The projects also indicate that qualitative research itself involves a process of negotiation. Researchers' preconceptions, interview settings and formats, and relationships established during research can effect research outcomes andresearch participants. I argue that a willingness to reflect critically on the use of qualitative methods is needed to safeguard against these unintended consequences.     

China’s Food Safety Institutional Reform: Evaluation Issues

China’s compartmentalized food safety supervision and administration system has long been blamed for recurring food safety incidents. In response, the State Council launched a major institutional reform that aimed to realize whole-chain-based food safety supervision and administration, to strengthen grassroots capacity and to adapt to a society that is complex, risk prone, open and pluralistic. According to the State Council’s mandate, the institutional restructuring at various local levels should have been completed by the end of 2013. However, there have been no systematic, open evaluations that have examined progress, effectiveness or effects. This study attempts to explore issues concerning evaluation of the institutional reform: how to understand the role of evaluation in the policy cycle? What are important evaluation questions in different phases of the policy cycle? How to identify evaluation priorities? Specifically, a target group effectiveness evaluation framework was established and applied in Guangzhou city to assess how local government departments responded to the three principal mandates of the State Council’s reforms: integration of mechanisms and functions, integration of resources, and the enhancement of regulatory capability. The results show that such an evaluation framework is a valid way to examine the main goals and components of the reform, but that the indicators and evaluation criteria need be made more context-specific.     

DYNAMICS IN THE STRUCTURAL FORM OF PROPERTY TAXES∗

Because the property tax is structurally tied to market values of dwellings through the assessment function, rapidly increasing market values may beget rapid increases in property taxes. Public awareness of this process was instrumental in California's 1978 passage of the Jarvis-Gann Amendment. Millage rates should be indexed to counterbalance changes in market values.     

The climatic impacts of land use and land cover change compared among countries

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) strongly influence regional and global climate by combining both biochemical and biophysical processes. However, the biophysical process was often ignored, which may offset the biogeochemical effects, so measures to address climate change could not reach the target. Thus, the biophysical influence of LULCC is critical for understanding observed climate changes in the past and potential scenarios in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the mechanisms and effects of large-scale LULCC on climate change through changing the underlying surface, and thus the energy balance. The key scientific issues on understanding the impacts of human activities on global climate that must be addressed including: (1) what are the basic scientific facts of spatial and temporal variations of LULCC in China and comparative countries? (2) How to understand the coupling driving mechanisms of human activities and climate change on the LULCC and then to forecasting the future scenarios? (3) What are the scientific mechanisms of LULCC impacts on biophysical processes of land surface, and then the climate? (4) How to estimate the contributions of LULCC to climate change by affecting biophysical processes of land surface? By international comparison, the impacts of LULCC on climate change at the local, regional and global scales were revealed and evaluated. It can provide theoretical basis for the global change, and have great significance to mitigate and adapt to global climate changes.     

Understanding Causes of Conflict Over Common Village Pastures – A Comparative Analysis of Property Rights in Azerbaijan and Georgia

Abstract

Conflicts in the management of renewable natural resources are situations in which actors have diverging opinions on issues of natural resource use. In the literature, among the causal factors for conflicts discussed are resource wealth or scarcity and the role of governance. The evidence, however, is contradictory. In order to analyze the role of governance in more detail, we propose a combined analysis of property rights and conflicts. In this way, an improved understanding of the causes of local conflicts over renewable natural resources can be achieved. We use comparative case study data from pasture management in the Caucasus region, first, to classify conflicts according to the bundle of property rights approach and, second, to explore how the causal factors resource scarcity and current governance contribute to those conflicts.     

Norwegian school geography and geographical education: A new research field?

Despite having a long-standing relationship, teacher education and geography in primary and secondary education in Norway has received little attention as a research field within academic geography until recently. The author asks: How has Norwegian school geography related to geography taught at universities? Where does research on school geography and geographical education stand today and where should it go from here? She examines the development of the role played by academic geographers in the field from the 1970s until the present. Some potential future venues for this emerging research field are suggested on the basis of an examination of what themes are current focal points for research and comparing them to what other countries consider essential in their teacher education.     

Heidegger's philosophy of space and place

The purpose of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time ( BT ) is to recover the experience of Being that lies concealed behind the dominant modes of Western thought. BT represents a well-founded phenomenological attempt to interpret the everyday understanding of Being that Dasein always already has. Much of the contemporary discourse in human and social geography, such as on class, race and gender, centres on issues that can generally be described as grounded within a socio-political context. However, while recognising their value, these approaches are often unsatisfactory in that they fail to consider Dasein's Being-in-the-World as a unique and peculiar phenomenological problem. Dasein's spatiality is used expressly to establish that Dasein is spatial and Dasein can be spatial only as care. Dasein's spatiality, or place, expresses the bounded and lived spatiality that characterizes Being-in-the-World. Heidegger's body of philosophy should be of great interest to geographers in their attempts to understand themselves as part of the studies of the interaction between man and world. This is what hermeneutic phenomenology is all about, and is what geographers such as Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan and John Pickles try to tell us in their many works on humanism, phenomenology and geography.     

Development Of City Size Distributions For The Egyptian Urban System, 1897–1960 1

Two scenarios of CO₂-induced climatic change and projections of population and consumptive use of water to the year 2035 are utilized in a climate impact assessment of future water resources in the Great Lakes basin. When expressed as a streamflow/population index, results indicate a sharp decline of this index. Future index values are projected to be similar to those presently recorded for the Colorado River basin.     

Making the Connections: Infusing the National Geography Standards into the Classroom

Abstract

How will the National Geography Standards change the way teachers teach? The Standards will provide teachers with a geographic perspective that will enable them to teach improved geography content while building geographic skills and knowledge that will benefit their students for the rest of their lives. By taking a fresh look at the content in the curriculum from a geographic perspective, teachers can make connections between the Geography Standards and our own classrooms. The Standards provide information and strategies for teaching geography. They can be used to create lessons which offer opportunities for students to “do” geography and apply the skills they are learning.     

Local traditions as a means for commercial production of historical beers: The case of Vossaøl,Norway

The aim of the article is to analyse challenges facing the commercial production of historical beers, which are ‘extinct’ beers. The concept of ‘fictive terroir’ is introduced to emphasize these challenges. The author addresses the following questions: What kind of knowledge is needed to produce historical beers? How can this knowledge be acquired? How can it be used commercially in craft breweries? The studied case is Vossaøl, a craft beer imitation of a beer produced in the early 19th century. The data were obtained from written sources and interviews with local home brewers and brewers at Voss Brewery in Norway. The study revealed the need to reconstruct the terroir in the early 19th century. Additionally, Voss Brewery had to acquire knowledge about how to process and combine the ingredients, which included the traditional yeast (kveik). Involving traditional home brewers was crucial to determine how ingredients could be combined to produce Vossaøl. The author concludes that a synthetic knowledge base was a useful point of departure in this respect. Participation in the traditional culture of brewing proved an important means when working with this knowledge base. The results are interesting in the broader context of the reconstruction of beverages and food.     

干旱区城市化与生态环境交互胁迫过程研究进展及展望

城市化进程与生态环境之间客观上存在着种种矛盾与胁迫作用,在干旱区表现的尤为突出。本文系统总结了当前国内外关于干旱区城市化与生态环境交互胁迫过程研究在理论、观点、方法与实践等方面取得的最新进展,提出了干旱区城市化与生态环境在交互胁迫中相互促进的观点,指出了当前该领域研究的薄弱环节,并展望了未来主要的研究方向。研究认为,国际学者普遍关注城市化与生态环境交互作用关系的研究,涌现了一系列研究城市化与生态环境关系的理论;非常重视城市化与生态环境交互作用机理的研究,主要从城市人口集聚、经济增长、空间扩展等层面分析城市化对生态环境的胁迫作用;从生态条件、资源条件、环境污染等层面探讨生态环境对城市化的束缚作用;广泛采用“3S”技术和定量分析方法来评价城市化与生态环境的交互响应过程;逐步加强对干旱区城市化与生态环境可持续发展途径的研究。国内学者主要对干旱区水资源紧张及生态恶化原因,城市化与生态环境交互胁迫机理,城市化与生态环境之间的EKC模型、双指数模型和耦合度模型等定量分析手段,城市化发展模式等进行了研究。当前单独研究城市化或生态环境的较多,将二者结合起来的较少;实证研究较多,规律总结较少;定性分析较多,定量研究较少;胁迫效应研究较多,约束效应研究较少,至今尚未形成独立的理论体系。从发展趋势来看,多学科融合、与实践紧密结合、新技术方法的应用与动态模拟化将是今后国内外研究的主要发展方向。     

Road network simplification with knowledge-based spatial analysis

A typical requirement in digital society is the rapid distribution and effective application of digital products. Geographical data bases are far more complex than other ones in that both attribute and spatial data have to be stored and handled under the same framework. On the other hand, the number of end users of digital cartographic data is explosively increasing, ranging from professional map makers to vehicle drivers and individual tourists. Thus arises a question: how can a data supplier give the “best” service to each user? In nature it involves such difficult problems as cartographic generalization and map simplification. In this paper, the author argues that the visual knowledge or perception experience can be effectively exploited and used to guide the process of data simplification. We have developed a prototype system with a subset of the vector road database covering Munich city.

     

Is GIS appropriate technologyquest;

Abstract

Appropriate technology (AT) has become an integral part of the programmes for decentralized regional development in the Third World. ‘Appropriate’ techniques are usually low in capital costs; they can be maintained without a high level of expertise; and they do not involve patents, expensive copyrights and royalties. By these criteria a commercial geographical information system (GIS) is not an appropriate technology to be used in decentralized development However, the use of local renewable resources involves the adoption of end-use analysis for matching end-uses to specific sources so as to minimize the consumption of material and energy (i.e., minimize entropy). This matching requires much information which leads to what may be called the 'information-entropy trade-off; minimization of entropy requires an inverse increase in information. In this respect computers and GIS have an important contribution to make to decentralized regional planning. Drawing on a case study in Sri Lanka, this paper presents some ideas on how to incorporate GIS into local-level planning information systems.     

On the search for an urban definition at the European level

At the European level (meaning in this context members of the European Union) one is trying to clarify the concept of the town and to define urban units. The need for statistics related to urban areas is clearly expressed, since 80‰ of the population of the Union live in urban areas, and several community policies are directed at or affecting urban areas.

But one main problem still remains: what is an urban unit? Sometimes it is used about administrative units of considerable size (100 000 inhabitants or more), embodying the whole or parts of what is traditionally thought of as a city. When talking about urban areas in general, the confusion is obvious. It is unclear to what extent separate small, densely built-up units are included, and how, for instance, suburban areas are treated. Is the urban unit administrative, morphological or functional? Since no common urban definition is implemented in Europe, there is a fundamental lack of comparability of urban statistics at this level.     

Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” Lord Kelvin ca. 1895, British Mathematician and Physicist²“But what ... is it good for?” Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.³