Suchergebnisse

This article considers how Russian local civic organizations work and adapt to societal changes. We studied thirteen small NGOs in a region (oblast) of central Russia. These NGOs work with social issues, often connected to poverty and social marginalization. The NGOs are both formal and informal organiza-tions, such as charity funds, registered associations, informal clubs, and local groups for mutual help and support. The NGOs have varying relations to the wider public, as well as to Russian authorities. Examining the local level means here urban or rural settlements and small towns. Social issues were a subject of concern for numerous local organizations. Their success in this activity was connected to trust in them among citizens. The overall picture is that a lot depended on the reputation of a leading person at the NGO. There were not many signs of internal democracy or collective decision-making in these NGOs, strategic decisions were mostly taken by the leader. The Russian State has launched a contradictory policy on NGOs including legislation on 'foreign agents,' which means that NGOs are living in a 'dual reality': locally acting non-governmental and/or non-commercial organizations are both welcomed to contribute to solving social problems and increasingly controlled. This has caused problems for many NGOs which have, however, proved flexibility to survive. Quite a few reorganized their activities, some started deeper collabora-tion with other NGOs, the local administration or the church. The study gives more evidence of charity as the main method of helping people rather than activating them. ; Peer reviewed

Academics from the Global Development Institute are helping to convene a number of panels at the annual Development Studies Association conference taking place on 28–30 June 2023. The theme of the conference is Crisis in the Anthropocene: Rethinking connection and agency for development. The annual conference will be hybrid (in-person and online combined) to ensure […]
The post DSA Call for papers: Development Studies Association conference 28–30 June 2023 appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Academics from the Global Development Institute are helping to convene a number of panels at the annual Development Studies Association conference taking place on 28–30 June 2023. The theme of the conference is Crisis in the Anthropocene: Rethinking connection and agency for development. The annual conference will be hybrid (in-person and online combined) to ensure […]
The post DSA Call for papers: Development Studies Association conference 28–30 June 2023 appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Academics from the Global Development Institute are helping to convene a number of panels at the annual Development Studies Association conference taking place 6-8 July 2022. This year’s conference adopts justice and equity as central normative lenses to explore just futures in an urbanising and mobile world, facing a climate and ecological crisis in a […]
The post DSA Call for papers: Development Studies Association conference 6-8 July 2022 appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Academics from the Global Development Institute are helping to convene a number of panels at the annual Development Studies Association conference taking place 6-8 July 2022. This year’s conference adopts justice and equity as central normative lenses to explore just futures in an urbanising and mobile world, facing a climate and ecological crisis in a […]
The post DSA Call for papers: Development Studies Association conference 6-8 July 2022 appeared first on Global Development Institute Blog.

Motivation The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for transformative development rooted in international norms, such as human rights, rule of law and gender equality. Often, however, nation-states do not implement these norms to the extent to which they are envisaged. Against this backdrop, regions have the potential to fill this implementation vacuum. Purpose Without a normative dimension, transformative development risks reproducing traditional economic development. In this special issue we focus on norm implementation in different world regions through the lens of normative coherence for development. Methods and approach The articles in this special issue all use qualitative methods, such as text analysis and in-depth interviews. Given the different regional contexts, each article has its own approach to normative coherence for development depending on the regional normative framework. Findings This special issue indicates that regions are an important interlocutor between the global, national, and sub-national level and, as such, are crucial for implementing the sustainable development agenda. The articles show, however, that to date normative coherence for development has not been achieved due to overriding priorities and technical approaches to policy coherence for development. Policy implications With this special issue we aim to draw more attention to the topic of normative coherence for development and show that policies need to be adjusted in order to reflect the normative dimension of sustainable development. ; Peer reviewed

How are development policies, prepared by donors, translated into practice in different social settings? Many modalities are used, but we consider bilateral projects to be a conduit for value change and sustainable development. Our case concerns two bilateral projects with Nepali and international technical advisors. The article discusses the complex scenario that technical advisors must navigate to broker policy ideals into practice. They must respect the intentions and regulatory and normative frameworks of the donor and recipient governments, and the local cultures and realities of the local governments and villagers with whom they work. At the same time, they promote value change in support of gender equality and human rights. This also raises the question of whose values count—those of the donor, Nepalese Government, local participants or the advisors? We argue that technical assistance has an indispensable role in facilitating sustainable, equitable and inclusive rural development outcomes in socio-culturally difficult operational environments. ; Peer reviewed

The Vietnamese National REDD + Action Plan (NRAP) seeks to reduce emissions from forest clearing and land use, especially from the main drivers of coffee and rubber commodity expansion. Achieving the NRAP goals, however, means negotiating a complex and fragmented forest policy arena, with conflicting sector goals, disconnects between global and local ambition and action, and imbalanced power dynamics between actors. We map the fragmentation of this policy arena and explore the extent to which the NRAP is able to integrate policy responses to drivers to achieve emissions reductions. We examine what the NRAP sought to integrate, what was not taken into account, what is integrated at which scale, and which actors are part of integration (or not) across the policy process components. We conclude that if policy integration does not affect a ?whole of government? shift in priorities or change in mandate among driver sectors, fragmented policy arenas will persist and forest based climate mitigation objectives will not be achieved. ; Peer reviewed

Water-related disasters have become more unpredictable amidst human-induced climatic and hydroecological changes, with profound effects on people inhabiting fragile river basins. In this article, I analyse drastic waterscape transformations and people's differentiated exposure to water-related vulnerabilities in the Grijalva River lower basin, southeastern Mexico, focusing on how state authority is reinforced through waterscape alterations and how altered waterscapes shape state-making and scalar politics. Examining interlinkages between 1) state-making and governance; 2) resource-making and politics of scale; and 3) hazard-making and the dynamics of socionature, the article contributes to scholarly and development practice discussions on environmental vulnerability. I argue that the goals of consolidating state power and promoting development through massive waterscape changes and resource extractions have provoked hazards that are difficult to control, resulting in differentiated distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Drawing on archival research, documentary analysis, thematic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the study illustrates the overlapping and cumulative effects of state-making, politics of scale, and the dynamics of socionature on socially differentiated vulnerability. Although the forms of governance shift over time, statecraft as a mode of consolidating state authority and controlling lower basin environments and residents persists. The government prevents social mobilisation through political persuasion and pressure, and disciplines residents to adapt to altered waterscapes, while allowing few changes in prevalent power structures. Simultaneously, the study demonstrates that water cannot be controlled by political rules and requisites, while local residents reinterpret dominant ways of governing through claim-making, negotiation, everyday resistance, and situational improvisation, albeit within unequal power relations. The study enhances understanding of water-related vulnerabilities resulting from recurrent, yet temporally remoulded agendas of state-making combined with socially differentiating politics of scaling and the dynamics of socionature, which altogether reformulate human-nonhuman interactions and make local smallholders and pen-urban poor increasingly vulnerable to floods. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ; Peer reviewed

Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses suggest that seismic surveys employed in oil exploration harm marine life; however, their long-term impacts have not been extensively studied. We examine debates between fishers, the oil industry, and governmental authorities over the effects of oil explorations in Tabasco, Mexico. The study employs ideas from historical ontology in tracing the contested production of truth-claims about exploration in the context of scientific uncertainty. It shows how actors, through their different engagements with the sea, and with different degrees of power, frame claims about the relations between exploration and fish. We argue that fishers, through their efforts to "think like fish" produce situated knowledges about the effects of oil exploration. They explain a disappearance of fish by their understanding that seismic surveys disturb fish migration, impair the hearing of fish and cause fish death. Oil company and governmental representatives frame the impacts of oil exploration as insignificant by separating environmental and social dimensions, by isolating individual exploration events, and by arguing that possible effects are transitional. Due to scientific indeterminacy, oil exploration is malleable in the hands of powerful political representations that understate its possible impacts on marine socio-environments. ; Peer reviewed

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same 'thing' when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a 'hydrosocial territory.' We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of 'modern Water'; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an 'indigenous' ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through 'ontological politics', whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations. ; In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same 'thing' when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a 'hydrosocial territory.' We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of 'modern Water'; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an 'indigenous' ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through 'ontological politics', whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations. ; Peer reviewed