‘Selling Our Own Skin:’ Social dispossession through microcredit in rural Bangladesh

In this paper, I articulate a notion of ‘social dispossession,’ an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women’s social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities.     

How effective is inclusive innovation without participation?

The last few years have seen an upsurge in the field of innovation studies especially ‘inclusive innovation’, aiming not only at economic but social development. In developing countries, like India, inclusive innovation must incorporate governance and for governance to be inclusive, it should encompass participation by all, especially the marginalized, to make public policies efficacious and deliverable. I argue that any model of inclusive innovation needs to take cognizance of participation by all stakeholders. The objective of innovation must be to enable and empower people at the periphery through awareness, accessibility and democratic deliberations rather than solely aiming at economic outcomes. There is a need to debate on the ‘inclusiveness’ of innovation and make it more participative. Such an endeavour may help promote United Nation’s sustainable development goals by making governance participatory and expediting the process of social justice.     

Family ties,preconceived images and trust: How local community defines market collaboration in the Dutch fish chain

Vertical chain collaboration is a strategy for customers’ value creation. However, Dutch fishermen are hardly participating in integrated value chains. While supply chain literature describes factors that contribute to successful chain partnerships, scarce research has been done on the dynamics of the sociocultural context for chain collaboration.In 10 semi-structured interviews, representatives of supply chain parties were asked for their perceptions on chain collaboration, trust, and the role of the local community. The interviews were directed at obtaining so-called ‘tacit’ knowledge, the non-spoken codified truths of social networks. Without generalizing, this research provides benchmarks to monitor how the different domains, laid out in this study, impact chain collaboration: community values, network participation and company competences. An overview is given of socio-economic factors blocking and enhancing chain collaboration at company and community level. Factors such as the strong bonding of family with business in tightly knit networks, a high level of social control, entrepreneurial autonomy, and loyalty as community norm hamper collaboration within the supply chain.Respondents’ discourse demonstrates that cultural codes and identity form the very core of the entrepreneur, driving rather than ‘embedding’ economic behavior. Kinship, religion and peer pressure determine ‘windows on the world’ when engaging in chain collaboration. Consequently, any analysis of economics that does not integrate sociological and psychological methodology is flawed from the outset.     

Dams and population displacement on China’s Upper Mekong River: Implications for social capital and social–ecological resilience

China is home to nearly half of the world’s 50,000 large dams, which provide irrigation, flood protection, and hydroelectricity. Most of these projects involve substantial population displacement, which can disrupt social capital, the webs of interdependence and support that community members maintain with one another through relationships of trust and reciprocity. We use new empirical evidence to examine the association between dam-induced displacement and social capital in China and interpret our findings in the context of social–ecological resilience theory. Our focus is on agricultural households on the Upper Mekong River, where four large hydropower dams have been constructed over the past twenty years.Our broad finding is that resettlement is associated with diminished social capital, as measured by two key indicators: inter-household exchange of financial resources, and inter-household exchange of agricultural labor. These effects differ across the four dam sites in the study based on local economic conditions and changes in resettlement policy. We find that population resettlement is associated with markedly lower levels of agricultural labor exchange. In an economically under-developed setting, this reduces the depth and breadth of social support that agricultural households rely on to produce crops for subsistence and income. This in turn diminishes social–ecological resilience because social capital is a key factor that helps agricultural or resource-dependent communities manage risk and adapt to changes and stressors.We consider the policy implications of our findings in the context of scientific and industry efforts to minimize social harm, promote economic vitality, and improve the sustainability of hydropower as a form of renewable energy.     

Multi-causal pathways of public opposition to dam projects in Asia: A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)

Scholars overwhelmingly adopt the case study method when analyzing causal conditions inducing anti-dam-protests. We have carried out the first medium-N-study on this topic analyzing public opposition to 12 dam projects in Asia. For this purpose, we employ a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) which is based on a thorough review of scholarly writings and press reports on the dam projects at question as well as an online survey and semi-structured interviews. We identify two causal recipes sufficient for the emergence of significant anti-dam-protests. First, lacking social safeguards in combination with the presence of political opportunity structures and higher levels of development are sufficient for significant anti-dam-protests to emerge. Second, lacking social safeguards in combination with rampant corruption and environmental risk induce these protests. Current scholarly literature particuarly emphasizes political opportunity structures and development as causal conditions inducing significant protests. Our findings build on this literature to highlight the importance of project-specific conditions.     

Catching sea cucumber fever in coastal communities: Conceptualizing the impacts of shocks versus trends on social-ecological systems

Research on vulnerability and adaptation in social-ecological systems (SES) has largely centered on climate change and associated biophysical stressors. Key implications of this are twofold. First, there has been limited engagement with the impacts of social drivers of change on communities and linked SES. Second, the focus on climate effects often assumes slower drivers of change and fails to differentiate the implications of change occurring at different timescales. This has resulted in a body of SES scholarship that is under-theorized in terms of how communities experience and respond to fast versus slow change. Yet, social and economic processes at global scales increasingly emerge as ‘shocks’ for local systems, driving rapid and often surprising forms of change distinct from and yet interacting with the impacts of slow, ongoing ‘trends’. This research seeks to understand the nature and impacts of social shocks as opposed to or in concert with trends through the lens of a qualitative case study of a coastal community in Mexico, where demand from international seafood markets has spurred rapid development of a sea cucumber fishery. Specifically, we examined what different social-ecological changes are being experienced by the community, how the impacts of the sea cucumber fishery are distinct from and interacting with slower ongoing trends and how these processes are affecting system vulnerability, adaptations and adaptive capacity. We begin by proposing a novel framework for conceptualizing impacts on social systems, as comprised of structures, functions, and feedbacks. Our results illustrate how the rapid-onset of this fishery has driven dramatic changes in the community. New challenges such as the ‘gold-rush-style’ arrival of new actors, money, and livelihoods, the rapid over-exploitation of fish stocks, and increases in poaching and armed violence have emerged, exacerbating pressures from ongoing trends in immigration, overfishing and tourism development. We argue that there is a need to better understand and differentiate the social and ecological implications of shocks, which present novel challenges for the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of communities and the sustainability of marine ecosystems.     

Assessing the social context of wildfire-affected areas. The case of mainland Portugal

Wildfires cause different impacts, depending on the conditions and resilience level of the exposed communities. Wildfire occurrence in mainland Portugal was assessed with regard to socioeconomic and demographic parameters, to identify the most distinctive conditions of fire-affected areas, without implying the existence of causal relationships. The latest population and agriculture census data were used to retrieve conditions at the civil parish level, regarding demographic patterns, social and labor conditions, physical structures and agricultural activities. To identify differences between parishes, two groups were created with the communities that showed the highest and lowest 20% of wildfire incidence between 2007 and 2014, separately for density of fire events and for burned area. A stepwise approach based on classification trees and random Forest methods was applied to identify the best discriminant variables between the groups. First, irrelevant variables were removed by an interactive process based on misclassification rates. The second step used random Forest analysis to the remaining variables to evaluate their importance in distinguishing the groups. In the final step, cluster analysis was applied to test the correspondence between the clusters created with the selected variables and the initial groups. Results showed that parishes with higher fire density have higher population density, higher proportion of young and educated people, larger families and more overcrowded buildings. On the contrary, parishes with larger burned area are less populated, less attractive to foreigners, have a higher proportion of elderly people, more degraded housing conditions and agricultural activities, visible in the density of sheep and goat and pastures, are still relevant. The cluster analysis demonstrated a better performance of the model for wildfire density, revealing a strong association with socioeconomic dynamics with an agreement above 0.85, much higher than for burned areas which is 0.29. Overall, the spatial distribution of wildfire impacts is framed by societal settings and particular conditions must be further understood to improve the coping capacity of affected communities.     

Beyond fisheries management: The Phronetic dimension

This paper has two main sources of inspiration. Firstly, building on Flyvbjerg's “Making Social Science Matter”[Flyvbjerg B. Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2003], I argue that the contribution of the social sciences to fisheries resource management must essentially be “phronetic” (after Aristotle's phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom), in contrast to the “scientific” (Aristotle: episteme) contribution of the natural sciences. Secondly, inspired by the recent publication “Fish for Life: Interactive Governance for Fisheries” [Kooiman J, Jentoft S, Pullin R, Bavinck M, editors. Fish for life: interactive governance for fisheries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; 2005], I hold that phronesis is basically what the notion of governance adds to management. Governance is the broader concept, inviting a more reflexive, deliberative and value-rational methodology than the instrumental, means-end oriented management concept. I claim that for interdisciplinarity to work in fisheries it is essential to recognize the fundamental methodological differences that exist between the social and natural sciences.     

Ethnic diversity,scarcity and drinking water: a provocation to rethink provisioning metropolitan mains water

Urban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To extend debates about the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the processes by which Burmese refugees and migrants who lived with water scarcity pre-migration make water potable post-migration to Australia. With a focus on mapping the material, discursive, spatial and emotional relations that enable the provisioning of potable water, the paper brings into conversation Elizabeth Shove's social practice theory with Elspeth Probyn's emplaced formulation of subjectivity. The adaptive provisioning capacities of people whose lives are immersed in cultures of water scarcity point towards a politics and relational ethics of care underpinned by provisioning and first-person contact. To conclude, these grounded Burmese examples provide an opportunity to employ scenario thinking to imagine alternative drinking water futures for south-east Australian cities.     

Social influence approaches to encourage resource conservation: A meta-analysis

Would somebody be more willing to start recycling if they knew that their friends were all recycling? Social influence refers to the ways in which our behaviour is affected by what other people do, or by what other people think. Various insights from theories of social influence have been applied as part of interventions to encourage resource conservation, such as the use of social norms, social learning, and social comparison processes. The question arises: Is social influence as effective as is sometimes assumed? This review compares the effectiveness of different social influence approaches to encourage resource conservation via a meta-analysis and outlines what remains to be learned about the mechanisms linking social influence to behaviour change. A random-effects meta-analysis with a sample of 29 studies revealed that social influence approaches were effective when compared to a control group. They were also more effective when compared to another intervention, although in this case the effect size was small. The effectiveness was different for different social influence approaches and for different target groups. These findings raise a number of important questions, which form the basis of a research agenda for better understanding the processes through which social influence approaches encourage resource conservation.