Desert knowledge: integrating knowledge and development in arid and semi-arid drylands

Globalisation presents particular challenges for deserts given that their sparse populations, which are amongst the world’s poorest in an absolute economic sense, tend to be remote from major markets and have only a distant, marginal voice in political and policy decision making. Here we are defining deserts as the arid and semi-arid drylands that encompass 70% of Australia and 25% of the world’s land surfaces. The value of the knowledge that local traditions and science have generated about living sustainably in deserts is being promoted and extended through the ‘desert knowledge’ movement in Australia. The Australian research reported here, together with a contribution from Niger that offers a contrast and some lessons for Australia, is largely underpinned by a neopopulist paradigm of development stressing respect for local knowledge, participatory practice and empowerment. Research in partnership with desert Aboriginal groups is contributing to their engagement with new livelihood opportunities. The local knowledge of livestock graziers is also being engaged to support sustainable management of desert water sources and landscapes for multiple values. The research reported here also addresses opportunities and challenges for local norms, identities, knowledge systems, governance and livelihoods from broader scale processes and institutions. In doing so it contributes to a ‘neo-ideographic approach’ wherein desert people might better harness their locality, knowledge and diversity in adaptations that shape their encounters with globalisation. It also points to considerable scope to mature such an approach.     

Evidence of women’s empowerment in India: a study of socio-spatial disparities

Various national and international communities have addressed women’s issues and taken various efforts to empower them so as to enhance their social and health status and involve them in developmental activities. The Indian DHS survey (National Family Health Survey, 1998–1999) provides an opportunity to study women’s empowerment in India. The survey collected information on several dimensions of women’s empowerment from 90,303 ever-married women (ages 15–49), from all the states of India. Utilizing these data sets, four indices – household autonomy index, mobility index, attitude towards gender index and attitude towards domestic violence index – are constructed to measure the different dimensions of empowerment. Using these indices, the spatial and socio-economic and cultural disparities that exist within India are analyzed. Finally, an attempt is made to identify some important determinants for women’s empowerment using multiple logistic regression analysis. The results show that at the national level, 43% of the women have high household autonomy; 23% of the women have high freedom to move outside their home; 40% of the women have no gender preference attitude; and only 43% of the women defy domestic violence. But there are significant divergences in these indices of women’s empowerment across the different states and socio-economic and cultural settings within India. Women’s educational levels emerged as an important predictor for all the four dimensions of women’s empowerment. Additionally, media exposure and age have emerged as the important predictors for some dimensions of woman’s empowerment. This paper was presented by Prof. Kamla Gupta at the International Geographical Union Conference (IGU), held in Canada, 2002.     

Place,gender and the appeal of video lottery terminal gambling: unpacking a focus group study of Montreal youth

Youth gambling has become an important public health issue in Canada and elsewhere owing to the known associations between gambling and delinquency, family dysfunction and suicide. Modern electronic and virtual gambling activities like video lottery terminals (VLTs) may have particular appeal to youth who have been raised in social environments that are increasingly dependent on information and communication technologies. The main objective of the study was to explore why youth gamble and what makes gambling activities like VLTs popular to youth in the places where youth live, study and play. The research is framed within a population health perspective that recognizes the role of social and physical environments in influencing health-related behaviours. Group discussions were conducted with youth to explore the popularity and appeal of gambling and VLTs, and how gambling fits into the daily routines of youth and the spaces they occupy. Methodologically, this research was conscious of responding to calls in the literature to analyze focus groups as an interactive group process rather a collection of individual responses, and to exercise analytic rigour by explicitly making the research team’s positionality and the data collection process transparent. Group discussions revealed gender differences in the appeal of particular gambling activities with young males being more likely to discuss poker, dice, sports-betting and online gambling as exciting social activities, while females described lottery and scratch (instant win) tickets as fun solitary activities. Substantive results point to the need for interventions to address social aspects of gambling that appeal, in particular, to young males potentially through increased provision of healthier alternatives to social engagement and greater attention to young people’s use of space.     

Expanding horizons: Women’s voices in community-driven development in the Cameroon grasslands

Communities are increasingly becoming development spaces where members are dynamic actors in fashioning issues of common interest. This paper explores women’s efforts at building social capital for communitarian ventures in selected rural localities of the Cameroon grasslands. It is argued that effective participation in raising livelihoods and infrastructure provisioning is facilitated through women’s social networks (njangis). The paper situates the gender concerns in community participation, rekindled through village development associations (VDAs) – crucial in needs identification, prioritization and execution of identified projects. Based on focused field studies in selected localities, it is established that due to their low social status, workloads and tight schedule, women remain on the sidelines of the leadership in VDAs. However, women’s in-cash or in-kind contribution remains crucial to the successful implementation of projects. Enhancing female participation hinges on efforts at erasing cultural stereotypes that project women as domestic workers, improving literacy, increased access to productive resources especially land, direct support to women’s agricultural activity and improved rural infrastructure (roads, water supply, and electricity) that is compromising women’s participation and empowerment drive.     

Coping with Complexity: Adaptive Governance in Desert Australia

Governance in Aboriginal settlements in desert Australia is changing at an unprecedented rate. Aboriginal leaders and community managers describe the change as bewildering, with ever-revolving agents and agencies and increasing quantities of administration. Governments are preoccupied with finding linear ‘solutions’ to new conceptualisations of the ‘problem’ and packaging these for top-down implementation. However, governance in practice involves multi-dimensional interactions of a complex system, which are difficult to predict, let alone to control for outcomes. Through the lens of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory, this paper argues that there is potential to improve governance as an adaptive system through three principles that enhance local feedback: (1) application of the subsidiarity principle to different levels in the governance system would realise a better match between decentralised functions and local capacity; (2) connectivity would improve information flows and relationships between agents in the system, as a necessary precursor for informed decision-making; and (3) accountability, when taken beyond simplistic notions of financial reporting, would identify power relationships across the system and indicate where agents may exercise greater influence in the system. Consideration of these principles will help promote a shift from the perspective that assumes the system to be linear and manageable from the top-down to a perspective that embraces the notion of adaptive governance as a means of recognising the capacity of agents to influence the system that they inhabit.     

Sophistication at a country pace: community sustainability and amenity-based development

There is a lot at stake in the control of landscapes; not only rights and access to resources, but also the symbolic construction of community identities. Having one’s identity represented in the landscape is critical to understanding one’s position within that community—either as an insider or outsider. This paper examines Great Barrington, Massachusetts as a case study of the links between discourses of landscape and community and their relations to processes of social exclusion during amenity-based development. Building upon conceptions of community as a process of creating boundaries between insiders and outsiders, this paper argues that the sustainability of a town cannot be assessed merely from inside a particular community identity but must situate that town within complex multi-scalar processes to determine if it is merely externalizing its unsustainable aspects, people and practices. I extend this argument by examining the ways to concept of multifunctionality has been used both in Great Barrington and in international discourses to promote sustainability through processes of exclusion. The research for this paper was done in collaboration with the Alliance for a Healthier Great Barrington.     

Re-conceptualising desert landscapes: unpacking historical narratives and contemporary realities for sustainable livelihood development in central Australia

Desert landscapes of central Australia have inspired various narratives for nation building. These narratives, based upon discourses of land as a commodity for the colonial project, include the inferior peripheral wastelands of the colonial centre; the wild and pristine haven of ‘noble aborigines’; and the frontier home of heroic explorers and pastoralists. These narratives continue to influence land management policy and practice. However they do not reflect the diverse contemporary realities of individuals living in the region. In this paper I juxtapose these narratives and realities to reveal the multitude of ways in which desert landscapes are known and understood. A case study of a fire management project that involved Aboriginal, pastoral and conservation land managers from the southern Tanami region of central Australia provides evidence as to why desert landscapes should be re-conceptualized as cultural, contested and dynamic. To conceive of these spaces and places in this way can facilitate open discussion and dialogue between land managers from the region. It is the first step in working towards the process of cultural hybridity that I argue is necessary for equitable and sustainable environmental governance and management in Australia.     

“[W]e do not lose our treaty rights outside the... reserve”: challenging the scales of social service provision for First Nations women in Canadian cities

Recent work in political geography has emphasised how scale plays a role in constituting relationships and identities. Historically, the Canadian federal government has taken responsibilities for social services for First Nations people on reserves, leaving this responsibility to provinces for First Nations people in cities. This constitutes First Nations women as individuals with Aboriginal rights only on reserves, and as part of mainstream society in urban areas. First Nations women have challenged the definitions of their identities embedded in these scales of service provision. In presenting alternative geographies for organising the provision of services, they demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the diversity of women’s everyday geographies in the city. This is a phrase from Vicki English’s (1993) presentation to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, where she argues that treaty rights to housing, education, medicare and other services should not be confined to the boundaries of reserves. I use the term “First Nations” to refer to people who identify themselves as such, including people who are and are not registered pursuant to the Indian Act. By “Aboriginal peoples” I mean the descendants of the indigenous people in Canada, including First Nations people, Métis and Inuit. The Census of Canada uses the term “North American Indian” to refer to First Nations people, and I employ this terminology for clarity in some cases.

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Integrated Community-Based Disaster Management Program in Taiwan: A Case Study of Shang-An Village

Taiwan has long made efforts to increase community emergency response capability, due to its vulnerability to earthquakes, typhoons, landslides and debris flows. Not until recent major natural disasters, such as the 1999 Chi–Chi Earthquake, Typhoon Toraji and Typhoon Nari, has the government reformed its policy toward empowering the community to take actions in hazard mitigation, emergency preparedness and emergency response. A new initiatve, Integrated Community-Based Disaster Management Program (ICBDM), was launched in 2001 by the Executive Yuan to achieve the goal of strengthening community resistance. The paper, taking Shang-An Village as an example, describes Taiwan’s new community-based disaster management program. Through a participatory process, community residents have learned how to analyze vulnerable conditions, discover problems, develop solutions and establish an organization to implement disaster management tasks. Further, basic response training courses and a disaster scenario were held in order to improve their emergency response capability. Based on the case study, a phased process, including initiation, assessment, planning and practice, is generalized.     

Contextualising gender empowerment at the grassroots: a tale of two policy initiatives

The policy environment on gender is fraught with contradictions and contestation of varying degrees in India that does not disappear even as recent transformative mode of participatory initiatives seem to place women’s agency at the core of empowerment agenda. Drawing from two collaborative projects at the grassroots, the paper argues that even well conceptualised projects miss the cutting edge distinction between women and gender and continue to engage with an instrumental logic of women’s development and empowerment at the expense of issues of gender equality and equity in translating the intention into action. It is also observed, however, that spatially embedded social and cultural specificities impact policy discourse resulting in very different outcomes of conceptually comparable policy formulations. According to the author acknowledging spatiality of experiences provides a vantage point to critically engage with context-specific strategies to resolve gendered conflicts and tensions resulting from confining social relations and normative gender codes.     

Contesting Chinatown: Place-making and the Emergence of ‘Ethnoburbia’ in Brisbane,Australia

This paper juxtaposes the actual areas of settlement and settlement activities of Chinese migrants in Brisbane’s southern suburbs since the mid-1980s, with the concomitant, ‘government planned’ construction of the city’s Chinatown as an ‘exotic,’ ‘ethnic,’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ landmark. It argues that while the latter, as with Chinatowns in other Australian and world cities, has continued to appropriate the symbols of so-called ‘Chineseness’ to sell the locale to non-Chinese, the former, in recalling the notion of ‘ethnoburbia,’ significantly evinces actual Chinese migrants’ agency and role in place-making. In the process, these migrants have not only established a local, ethnically meaningful environment, but also challenged the still current metonymic Western image of the Chinese as preferring life in ‘ethnic’ urban enclaves that had its origin from early Chinese settlement and fundamentally detached from the lives of other ethnic groups per se. Indeed greater recognition and comprehension of such locales may go a long way to illustrate that many Chinese living in Australia today do not fit the territorial, place-based identity often associated with them in the imagination of mainstream society.     

Analyzing empowerment: An ongoing process of building state-civil society relations - The case of Walnut Way in Milwaukee

Arguments regarding citizen involvement and empowerment within neoliberal urban politics are ample in geographic literature. Existing discussions often define and evaluate empowerment as either some social, political, or economic end-product of a specific event. Such singular conceptualization is problematic. First, different kinds of social, political, and economic changes can simultaneously empower/disempower communities in contradictory ways. In addition, the view of empowerment as an end-product of a present event obscures a more nuanced understanding of empowerment as an ongoing process of state-civil society relation-building. An in-depth assessment of such a process is only possible with reference to the past and the potential future occurrences. Elwood’s (2002) multi-dimensional conceptualization of empowerment recognizes the limitations of a singular definition of empowerment. However, it falls short of operationalizing empowerment as a temporal process with a historically and geographically contingent past, dynamic present, and future in the making. Therefore, in this paper I expand on Elwood’s framework to show how a process-based view as opposed to a narrow end-product-based or event-based one can provide a deeper understanding of state-civil society interaction and community empowerment. This paper analyzes the interaction between the City of Milwaukee, the residents of a predominantly black inner-city neighborhood, the Walnut Way, and their community organization, the Walnut Way Conservation Corp. within a land-use dispute related to the development of a park space into a housing project. Using data collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews, archival research, and participant observation, this paper emphasizes that despite methodological limitations of collecting long-term data, community empowerment can and should be studied as a process with reference to the past, present, and potential future state-civil society interactions.     

Grassroots “flexible specialisation” in Brisbane’s West End: towards a politics of economic possibility

The focus on ‘flexible specialisation’ in the 1980s and 1990s marked an important turning point in framings of economic agency and diversity within economic geography. This article deconstructs the ways in which subjects were framed as ‘flexible’ in both the flexible specialisation literature and later work on the Diverse Economy (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2002, 2006), seeking out particular examples of the ways in which different projects of subjection appear to frame different views of economic possibility. Drawing richly on a case study of residents in an inner-city neighbourhood of West End, Brisbane (Australia), this paper uses resident’s articulations of their everyday practices to reinvigorate some of the ideas of the flexible specialisation literature and challenge, defamiliarise and rework existing ideas of economic life in “First World”, urban contexts.     

“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.     

Sociospatial aspects of Australian aboriginal underdevelopment. Empirical evidence from the East kimberley

Prior to the penetration of the European capitalist economy into central and northern Australia, the Aboriginal mode of production was one of hunting and gathering. Spiritual, economic and social relationships betwen people and land produced a spatial distribution of small bands of people living on their traditional lands. To the incoming white settlers the low population density and type of land use appeared uneconomic. This observation was used as ideological justification for the expropriation and development of the land for commercial pastoralism. This paper discusses the articulation of the Aboriginal and European modes of production in the East Kimberley region of northwest Australia. It argues that the introduced capitalist economy virtually destroyed the Aboriginal means of subsistence, incorporating Aborigines into the new mode of production within various subordinate roles. The exploitation of Aborigines, formerly as labour and now predominantely as consumers, is fundamental to the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production in pastoral areas. The spatial effects of the dominant mode of production have been to centralise Aborigines in locations suited to the various phases of development of the European economy, undermining the traditional Aboriginal social-spatial structure. The centralisation of the Aboriginal population also enhances the opportunities for the further development of the mining industry, which is in direct competition with Aboriginal interests in land. Aboriginal resistance to these spatial tendencies is intense in many quarters, but efforts to return to living on traditional lands and to develop alternative ways of living are hampered by the dominant mode of production.     

Gender equality and poverty in Ghana: implications for poverty reduction strategies

Poverty trends in Ghana show a decline over the last two decades. However, the period also shows evidence of the intensification of vulnerability and exclusion among some groups, including women. Among several variables accounting for women’s vulnerability to poverty are gender inequalities, which it is argued, undermines development and the prospects for improving standards of living. Therefore it has been suggested that policies, which aim at reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development must integrate gender equality, equity and women’s empowerment in its goals. Despite these, the interconnections between a reduction in gender inequality and a reduction in poverty are complex. The paper explores the gender dimensions of poverty in Ghana, and how gender inequalities are manifested and implicated in the reproduction of poverty. It also assesses the extent to which these have been taken into account in poverty reduction strategies and policies to enhance the situation of women. It concludes that if strategies to engender poverty reduction programmes are to be sustainable it is important to recognize unequal gender relations and the structures of power that women confront at all levels in Ghana and how these increase women’s vulnerability to poverty.     

Nebkha development and its relationship to environmental change in the Alaxa Plateau,China

Extensive nebkha areas develop mainly under the control of aeolian processes, and their sediments record information on regional environmental changes during different periods. Such areas have developed on the dry riverbeds and deserted arable lands of China’s Alaxa Plateau, Taklimakan, and Kumutage deserts. In this paper, we studied nebkhas that had developed in the Heicheng–Juyan region to determine their CaCO₃ contents, particle size distributions, and creation dates. Extensive human activities have occurred in this region since at least in the late Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad). Although historical records show that most of the region’s rivers dried up around 1372, surface water persisted in some areas until the early Qing Dynasty (1644–1911 ad). After the 1600s, extensive nebkhas began to develop due to drying of the region’s rivers. The early stages of nebkha development were controlled by both the sediment supply and the regional wind regime, whereas late stages were controlled primarily by variations in wind activity. In the Alaxa Plateau, it took about 100 years for arable lands and riverbeds to evolve into gobi deserts, and during this time, several phases occurred with different levels of wind activity. The land degradation processes in this region are mainly controlled by surface water resources, and the impact of human activities such as reclamation on land degradation appear to have been overestimated in previous studies.     

Tourist behaviour,local values,and interpretation at Ulu<Emphasis Type="Underline">r</Emphasis>u: ‘The sacred deed at Australia’s mighty heart’

This paper explores issues relating to multiple and changing values and uses of desert landscapes in the context of tourism at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (UKTNP), co-managed by Aboriginal people and the Australian Government agency Parks Australia. More than 400,000 people visit the park each year, drawn mostly by the massive red monolith. To the local Aboriginal people, Anangu, this rock is Uluru, a complex of places with great spiritual importance. Since co-management, UKTNP has become a symbol of the reconciliation process between Aboriginal and settler Australians. Climbing the rock is a popular activity. Aboriginal co-managers ask visitors not to climb Uluru but rather to learn about their culture and home through their eyes. Park management aims to discourage climbing. This research investigated how visitors respond to the Anangu request not to climb, and why some climb while others do not. We argue that spatial and experiential aspects of the park support climbing at the expense of participation in other activities more attuned to Aboriginal understandings of landscape at Uluru.     

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.