The social relations of catfish production in Vietnam

The growth of intensive export-oriented Pangasius catfish production in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is unparalleled in terms of rapidity and scale by any other agricultural sector, with production climbing from a low base to more than 1 million tons in a single decade. This paper examines the effects of this remarkable change on the rural class structure in locations where catfish farming has boomed, and analyses the role of local state-society relations in mediating outcomes resulting from the integration of local actors into the global value chain. We conclude that private economic activity is deeply embedded in informal relations with the state bureaucracy in Vietnam, with the result that the expansion of catfish aquaculture has generally acted to reproduce and entrench existing class relations rather leading to a radical reconfiguration of the rural class structure.     

论虚拟企业

网络的出现和广泛运用，以及企业间的跨越了行业间的藩篱，推动了业际化的进程；业际化与网络相结合促使企业组织形式发生质变，出现了虚拟企业。与大工业时代的企业相比较，虚拟企业具有了全新的特征、类型、经济形式和生产模式，其经济效益提升到一个新的平台。     

"政社分开"大背景下社会组织创新发展的思考与建议 ——以海洋社会组织为例

党的十九大以来,随着我国社会组织的不断发展和政府职能转变的逐步推进,社会组织面临着前所未有的机遇与挑战。文章以海洋社会组织为例,研究在"政社分开"过程中遇到的问题。研究表明,"政社分开"后,社会组织遇到的困难一是失去物质资源,难以正常开展活动;二是失去"主心骨",难以建立公信力;三是失去主要业务来源,发展内生动力不足。为新形势下社会组织如何更好地健康发展,提出了建立健全社会组织法律法规、加强对社会组织的扶持力度、拓展社会组织经费来源结构等对策建议。     

地理信息系统的社会公共功能

地理信息系统已经成为商品走进人们的生活 ,它所具有的社会公共功能正引起人们越来越多的关注。     

Issues and options for a Martian calendar

In the past 125 years, more than 70 authors have published ideas for keeping time on Mars, describing how to divide the Martian day and Martian year into smaller units. The Martian prime meridian was established in the mid-19th century, and the design of the Martian clock has been standardised at least since the Viking missions of the 1970s. Scientists can tell time on Mars; however, despite the constant stream of data that is downlinked from Mars these days, there is still no standardised system for expressing the date on Mars. Establishing a standard epoch—at a specific time of year on Mars, and a specific Martian year—should be the next priority in Martian timekeeping as a minimal system required for the physical sciences. More elaborate ideas, including the number and length of weeks and months, and names thereto, can be deferred for the present, but may become important considerations in coming years.     

Social capital and community preparation for urban flooding in China

Social capital can enhance community resilience to environmental change. Productive and trusted relations among social actors and effectual social norms can help local residents share resources, information and risks. The main objective of our study is to understand the ways in which social attributes and risk considerations influence adoption of resilient economic measures by individuals for reducing potential losses due to catastrophic rainstorm and flooding. This article provides evidence from China on how social capital contributes to anticipatory adaptation to environmental change. The inquiry is based on structured interviews with local residents of Tianjin, a flood-prone port city in China, and a standard regression analysis. Findings show that the intention to make preparation increases with the levels of social expectation, social relationship, and institutional trust. Perceived risk and damage experience, however, have no significant impacts. This suggests that building social capacity and trust will be more effective in enhancing community resilience than merely increasing awareness of hazard risks. We call for greater efforts on strengthening the capacity of formal and informal communal institutions. The structural changes required, however, are challenging.     

Experimenting with spaces of encounter: Creative interventions to develop meaningful contact

To-date geographical research on encounters has primarily comprised observation of naturalistic settings (both micro publics and everyday public spaces) or narrative accounts of encounters generated by conventional methods, this paper focuses on a contrived spatial experiment to create meaningful contact across difference. Inspired by, and drawing on insights from, Architecture – a discipline relatively neglected by geographers in recent times – we use a creative form of spatial play to stimulate groups of people to explore their differences and to develop shared understandings. Whereas previous studies have identified the importance of material objects in art projects and home spaces in mediating relations between people, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the physical configuration of space in work on encounters, despite the fact that geography is a spatial discipline. Here, we engage directly with the role of the form and function of space. Our spatial experiments demonstrate how paying attention to the materiality of micro-spaces rather than social relations alone, can provide insights into the generation of positive interactions by contributing to a greater understanding of how meaningful encounters happen, and what can be done to facilitate them. Specifically, by exploring the size and configuration of space, issues of ownership and surveillance, the relationship between primary and secondary space, and aural architecture this research identifies how working together to create a shared private or intimate space – might facilitate a sense of empowerment and the production of social relations characterised by democracy and inclusion.     

Novel insights on intensity and typology of direct human-nature interactions in protected areas through passive crowdsourcing

Recent advances in geotagging, sharing and automatically analyzing online content from Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer unprecedented opportunities for the analysis of human-nature interactions. Previous studies in this field, however, offer limited insights regarding the benefits of automated content analysis especially at large scales, biases arising from the selection of SNS sources, and the predictive power of visitation models based on SNS data. We explore quantitative and qualitative aspects related to intensity, interests and sentiments associated with on-site experiences in 568 protected areas in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We analyze counts and content of >100,000 photographs and tweets from four different SNSs, calibrate visitation models and predict visitation in unmonitored sites, cluster sites based on the typology of human-nature interactions reflected in online photographs, and characterize the polarity of sentiments associated with experiences in individual sites and clusters thereof. We find benefits in combining data from multiple sources and controlling for biases related to sites’ photogenicity and type of human-nature interactions. Our results suggest that current best estimates of visitation in unmonitored sites underestimate by 39% the actual number of visits. We discuss how the techniques and findings in this study are applicable in the broader context of the management and conservation of sites of environmental or cultural interest.     

Impact of justice and solidarity variables on the acceptability of managed realignment

Sea-level rise due to climate change will have significant effects on coastal areas and populations. Adaptation policies recommend the managed realignment of the most vulnerable assets and activities. Despite their medium- and long-term benefits, these policies face significant friction due to social acceptability in the communities where they are implemented.

This article investigates the hypothesis that respecting principles of justice in the implementation of managed realignment should increase its acceptability. We compare preferences of those people who are exposed to the risk of climate-change-induced flooding and those who are not, as regards funding managed retreat policies and defining compensation criteria for assets at risk. The main theories of social justice provide the four principles included in the analysis: efficiency, need, responsibility and priority assigned to property rights.

A choice experiment survey was conducted with 258 residents of coastal and hinterland communities in the south of France. Four attributes were selected to define the managed realignment policy: the dialogue arrangements, the implementation period, the policy implementation schedule and the cost. The results show support for a relatively fast launch of these policies (within 15 years) but in stages and through a process of dialogue with the population. People's perceptions of the funding criteria reveal a preference for national solidarity. Finally, national funding of managed retreat policies and compensation criteria based on market prices have a significant positive influence on the acceptability of managed realignment policies, whereas introducing responsibility-based compensation criteria tends to favour the status quo over the adaptation policy.

Policy relevance

Prioritization of the funding criteria reveals the preference for national solidarity. Preferences for the justice criteria underpinning compensation reveal a great diversity of values. Besides implantation modalities, preferences for managed realignment policies depend on which level they are implemented at, on the expropriation criteria (the emphasis given to property rights, i.e. market price), on the attachment (people perceived as worst off, i.e. the property is their main residence rather than a second home or they have lower levels of income) and on the degree of responsibility (related to the date of purchase, i.e. on the information given at the time on the risk).