Climate discourses as barriers to rights-based adaptive social protection: How historical politics shape Ethiopia’s climate-smart safety net

A rights-based approach to ‘adaptive social protection’ holds promise as a policy measure to address structural dimensions of vulnerability to climate change such as inequality and marginalisation, yet it has been failing to gain traction against production and growth-oriented interventions. Through the lens of Ethiopia’s flagship Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), we trace the role of climate discourses in impeding progress towards socially transformative outcomes, despite the importance of social protection for building resilience. We argue that intertwining narratives of moral leadership and green growth associated with Ethiopia’s national climate strategy shape how the PSNP is rendered ‘climate-smart’. These narratives, however, are embedded within politics that have historically underpinned the country’s drive for modernisation and growth-oriented policies, particularly in dealing with food insecurity. Like pre-existing narratives on development and the environment, they rationalise the presence of a strong central State and its control over natural resources and rural livelihoods. The PSNP is thus conditioned to favour technocratic, productivist approaches to adapting to climate change that may help reproduce, rather than challenge the entrenched politics at the root of vulnerability. Ultimately, this case study demonstrates how climate discourses risk diluting core rights-based dimensions of social protection, contradicting efforts to address the structural dimensions of vulnerability to climate change.     

Institutional change in social-ecological systems: The evolution of grassland management in Inner Mongolia

Communities living in the grasslands of present day Inner Mongolia have experienced dramatic social, economic and ecological changes over the past millennium. More recently, these grasslands have undergone widespread degradation, raising concern for securing local herders' livelihoods. To understand these changes in ecological and welfare outcomes over long time scales, we define five broad periods of relative institutional stability over the past millennium, characterize social-ecological system during each period, and then assess major changes between these periods. Looking at changes in institutional contexts helps explain some of our outcomes of interest. We find that while much attention has been given to the change in grassland lease structures in China, the role of market integration and buffers against historically natural constraints on livestock production (e.g., protection from the winter months) have decoupled formerly tight local social-ecological links. This decoupling, along with weak land tenure security due to a complex and volatile policy landscape, suppresses local incentives for grassland conservation.     

Ethnic coexistence in a pluralistic campus environment

In Malaysia, ethnic segregation seems to have grown more and more pronounced at all levels of education, which may have in the main contributed to increasing occupational segregation by ethnicity when the graduates left to join the job market. Such trends may be disturbing given the effort the country has put in to promote interethnic understanding and reduce interethnic economic disparity since 1970. By critically investigating the dynamics of ethnic coexistence in the microcosm of the university campus environment, this paper provides statistical evidence to show how far the country has progressed in terms of ethnic relations since the watershed events of May 13, 1969; to what extent Malaysian multiethnic society is different now compared to the unmistakable racial “corporateness” and interethnic “separateness” that Furnivall observed in his classic study of 1948; and in what ways ethnic relations have been reshaped by three decades of affirmative action policies and the form of ethnic democracy adapted for this unique society.

黄河三角洲*暴雨雷达回波特征及临近预报

本文利用1994－1998年东营站713数字化雷达回波资料结合高空、地面形势，对发生在黄河三角洲地区的33个暴雨日41个暴雨中尺度雷达回波系统特征及形成过程进行了总结，提出了暴雨临近预报的着眼点。在1999年的预报服务中，取得了良好的经济效益和社会效益。     

Local collective action: Adaptation to coastal erosion in the Monkey River Village,Belize

Successful adaptation to environmental change and variability is closely connected with social groups’ ability to act collectively, but many social-ecological challenges exceed local adaptive capacity which necessitate assistance from governmental institutions. Few studies have investigated how local collective action can be used to enrol external support for adaptation. This paper reduces this research gap by analysing a locally driven adaptation process in response to coastal erosion in Monkey River Village, Belize. Drawing on literature on adaptation and political ecology, we examine the different strategies the local residents have used over time to influence government authorities to support them in curbing the coastal erosion. Our findings show that the local mobilisation generated government support for a temporary sea defence and that collective strategies emerge as a response to threats to a place specific way of life. Our case illustrates that it was essential that the villagers could ally with journalists, researchers and local NGOs to make their claims for protection heard by the government. The paper contributes to adaptation research by arguing that local collective action, seen as contestation over rights to protection from environmental change, can be a means for places and communities not prioritised by formal policies to enrol external support for adaptation. Our study supports and adds to the perspective that attention to formal arrangements such as adaptation policy alone has limited explanatory power to understand collective responses to change.     

渭河流域3 100年前资源退化与人地关系演变

渭河流域全新世古土壤S     

New friends in new places: Network formation during the migration process among Poles in the UK

This paper contributes to on-going work that seeks to understand the dynamic nature of immigrant social network formation. We explore three propositions, derived from the literature, that might be expected to characterise the ways in which migrant associational ties evolve during and immediately after arrival in their destination country. Evidence is drawn from 42 interviews conducted between January and December 2008 with predominantly Polish migrants to the UK (28) as well as domestic service providers (14). In agreement with the existing literature on immigrant social network formation we find that weak associational ties between migrants are locally dense and rapidly formed. More surprisingly, we also find that the Poles in our sample from lower socio-economic groups tended to rely heavily upon weak associational ties while higher socio-economic group Poles tended to rely on associations made through their employing institutions. This illustrates the importance of socio-economic status in framing co-ethnic migrant network formation. This is significant because we also find that weak associational ties are not unambiguously beneficial to lower socio-economic group migrants who tend to (have to be) more compromising about, and therefore more compromised by, the social ‘friendships’ that result.     

基于SNA的新型集中社区公共空间网络结构优化

公共空间并非“存在即合理”。公共空间网络结构效率折射出社会网络的重构能力、社会资本的建构强度、社会秩序的重塑能力。新型集中社区作为近年大量涌现的新型居住形态,正面临社会关系重构的巨大压力。本文运用社会学的网络分析法研究公共空间网络,并对苏州新型集中社区D的公共空间网络结构进行实证分析,其结论为：公共空间网络的关联度为0.216、中心势0.358、小世界值1.978,表明空间网络整体关联度不足,呈现出破碎化的特征;商业空间整合效应的发挥受到业态配置的影响;居民社会属性对空间网络结构特征造成一定影响。最后,基于“社会—空间”互动逻辑,以社会网络重构为导向,从集中安置模式、公共空间网络优化2个层面,提出新型集中社区有待进一步研究的方向,以期为当前及未来的集中社区规划建设和公共空间整体优化提供科学合理的依据。     

Social justice in coastal erosion management: The temporal and spatial dimensions

Coastal erosion management is primarily based on economic considerations (cost-benefit analysis). From the perspective of social justice (as a particular expression of the wider concept of human rights), however, several arguments can be advanced regarding public intervention in coastal defence management when private property is threatened by coastal erosion. In this paper we examine these arguments at both the short-term local scale and the long-term large spatial scale and consider the merits of inclusion of a social justice dimension in coastal erosion management. The coast provides a range of resources that benefit society as a whole. Coastal residents and property owners face a direct financial loss from coastal erosion but the general public also stands to incur losses other than purely financial if it there is public intervention for the benefit of these property owners. The arguments for public intervention are strongest at the local and short-term scales but they weaken (and even reverse) at geographically larger and longer time scales. At larger scales, the costs to society increase as intergenerational equity, non-coastal residents, climate and sea level change, and the environment are considered. Because of the intensity of interest involved at the local level, we argue that the necessary hard decisions must be made nationally if a sustainable policy is to be adopted. Social justice considerations provide a potential improvement on the traditional economic cost/benefit-based decision-making process of coastal erosion management but they only contribute to sustainability if viewed at the national level.     

Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critical realism, post-structuralism and participatory development. Together, these works demonstrated an important engagement with the politics of how environmental explanations are made, and the mutual dependency of social values and environmental knowledge. Yet, today, the lessons of Blaikie’s work are often missed by analysts who ask what is essentially political or ecological about political ecology, or by those who argue that a critical approach to environmental knowledge should mean deconstruction alone. This paper reviews Blaikie’s work since the 1980s and focuses especially on the meaning of ‘politics’ within his approach to political ecology. The paper argues that Blaikie’s key contribution is not just in linking environmental knowledge and politics, but also in showing ways that environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of socially vulnerable people. This pragmatic co-production of environmental knowledge and social values offers a more constructive means of building socially just environmental policy than insisting politics or ecology exist independently of each other, or believing environmental interventions are futile in a post-Latourian world.