International audience ; Feeding cities is assuming ever more importance on the political agenda. But beyond the required willingness of political actors to develop urban food strategies, initiatives driven by local actors also play a central role in the long-term construction and consolidation of these strategies. Through describing experiences in West Africa and South America, we emphasise that taking into account informal relationships in designing public policies can improve food production and distribution in urban areas.
International audience ; Feeding cities is assuming ever more importance on the political agenda. But beyond the required willingness of political actors to develop urban food strategies, initiatives driven by local actors also play a central role in the long-term construction and consolidation of these strategies. Through describing experiences in West Africa and South America, we emphasise that taking into account informal relationships in designing public policies can improve food production and distribution in urban areas.
Previous studies show that blemished infrastructural development projects dispossessed local population and degraded natural resources to a greater extent in the developing countries. Therefore, this research is aimed at determining how land use decisions affect local habitats and resources. Thus, the data were collected from the recently constructed water reservoir in the southern part of Pakistan, named Chotiari. Our findings show that the project is hampered by the local actors' nonparticipation in decision-making, deceptive information dissemination by the authorities, misuse of funds, power relations, improper rehabilitation plans and unequal access to natural resources. We paid attention to the actors' network, land as well as the property rights violations, which have created the conflicts, where the causes of the conflicts of land use super positioned in the light of international rules and laws have also been explained. Thus, it is recommended that, for natural resource governance and land use conflict management, it is imperative to take all stakeholders on board during feasibility of any infrastructural setting. Furthermore, the awareness campaigns regarding the environmental importance and valuation of natural resources must be on the topmost agenda of the government.
Feeding cities is assuming ever more importance on the political agenda. But beyond the required willingness of political actors to develop urban food strategies, initiatives driven by local actors also play a central role in the long-term construction and consolidation of these strategies. Through describing experiences in West Africa and South America, we emphasise that taking into account informal relationships in designing public policies can improve food production and distribution in urban areas.
There is a dearth of studies exploring the construction of ideas on regionalism outside Europe. This article seeks to make a contribution to close this gap. It examines the construction of ideas on regionalism in Indonesia, the largest member country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Theoretically, the paper draws from Acharya's concept of 'constitutive localization' which it develops further. It offers an alternative explanation to studies which argue that as a result of mimetic behavior, social learning, and cost-benefit calculations, regional organizations across the world become increasingly similar. While this may be the case in terms of rhetoric and organizational structure, it is not necessarily the case at a normative level. The Indonesian case shows that even though foreign policy stakeholders have increasingly championed European ideas of regional integration after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/1998, they have skillfully amalgamated them with older local worldviews through framing, grafting, and pruning. European ideas of regional integration thereby served to modernize and relegitimize a foreign policy agenda which seeks to establish Indonesia as a regional leader with ambitions to play a major role in global politics. Adapted from the source document.
The article examines the potential of the scale approach in the analysis of the former socialist dictatorships in Middle- and Middle-East-Europe based on the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Obviously, the communist claim to power always relied on highly centralised chains of command. Nevertheless, regional state functionaries were occasionally able to realize their specific interests by scalar strategies like forming horizontal alliances or 'jumping' over the official channels through vertical personal networks. Focussing on processes with different patterns of top-down- and bottom-up-interactions, the scale approach reveals the fragile construction of the GDR's 'Democratic Centralism': By taking responsibility for regional or local interests and trying to streamline them with central politics, state functionaries at the same time stabilized and undermined the political system. Despite gaining temporary leeway for acting in their own interests, regional and local authorities remained bound to the directives from the central leadership till the end of the GDR in 1989/90.
Since Ghana's oil discovery in 2007, the question of how the resource will benet aected communities and who holds the responsibly is still a subject of debate. Will the benets be negotiated by local actors or will benets ow automatically from the state and oil companies? Guided by the actor-oriented theoretical foundation, the paper qualitatively examines how dierent actors have emerged in the Western Region of Ghana to negotiate for benets from the oil nd. Two qualitative case studies were conducted on sher folks and youth groups to examine the processes, dynamics and outcomes of their negotiations. The results show that disenfranchised youth and sher folks, who feel dispossessed of their livelihood, have resorted to social mobilisation and contentious political bargaining strategies to negotiate for their benefits and to channel their grievances. Alternative livelihoods, jobs for locals and improvement in social infrastructural development are the primary requests of the local actors. The paper concludes that local actors' interests are varied and negotiations are largely unregulated. Local actors constantly accuse oil companies for not prioritising their needs. State coherent policies and structures to mediate the negotiation processes between local actors, companies and the state are therefore recommended to avoid violent conicts.Keywords: Local Actors, Negotiation, Local Benets, Oil and Gas, Ghana
Enduring colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary politics and policies in Africa. As former and new actors seek to expand economic and political influence in the continent, new forms of domination arise to accommodate neo- and post-colonial agendas. Development, an all-encompassing word that foresees linear pathways towards socially and politically engineered goals, has been used as normative justification for such endeavours (see Escobar, 2011; Ferguson, 1994). The underlying message being that those in the Global South need to modernize and come closer to the development standards of those in the Global North (Alemazung, 2010; Easterly, 2007; Ferguson, 2006; Rist, 2007). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
This book examines the political and institutional processes that have led to the strengthening of the Israeli central bank within the context of the now predominant neoliberal regime.
