Suchergebnisse

Neoliberal approaches to urban restructuring may favor the wealthier and more powerful, but neoliberalism alone cannot account for the varied outcomes found among poor urban residents. Using field studies and documentary research on five cities in French-speaking West Africa and India, this study looks comparatively at how different groups use multiple forms of power to pursue individual and collective benefits. Dominant structures produced contradictory discourses that created spaces that served as terrains of struggle between the more and less powerful. Rich and poor created cross-class alliances that sometimes brought incremental benefits to the poor; the poor also used their agency to pursue individual advancement and collective resistance. These efforts have not changed the basic structures, but they have improved urban living conditions.

In Mali, the middle-class diet has changed over time as a result first of colonization & then of globalization. While the middle-class Malians have kept a culturally defined food system, they have adopted many new imported foods. However, in an international discourse that focuses on Mali's poverty, the cuisine of the middle class has been ignored. This chapter looks at changes in Mali's domestic political economy that have facilitated a growing middle class; conducts a subsector analysis to outline the structure of the food system -- from producers to consumers; & analyzes the invisibility of this system & how this influences our understanding of food globalization & development planning. It is concluded that a lack of data on the urban middle-class diet has skewed analyses of food groups, thereby distorting the targeting of foreign aid toward development of export crops, mainly cotton, to the neglect of food crops. References. J. Stanton

This article broadens analytic perspectives on the effects of government interventionsby looking at the interaction of two distinct but simultaneous policy initiatives: involuntary resettlement and structural adjustment. Case study data from the Bafing valley in Mali show that simultaneous implementation of these two initiatives reinforced the economic growth of the zone but increased negative environmental effects.Key Words: Mali, resettlement, structural adjustment, sahel, environmental degradation, economic development, river basin development, privatization, liberalization.

The right to compensation and rehabilitation for those displaced by projects is a generally recognised principle of multilateral development institutions and, increasingly, of national governments. There is no such consensus of the concept of benefit-sharing—neither its definition nor realisation. This paper advances this discussion: reviewing past performance of benefit-sharing and anticipating its future rationale, timing and delivery. Drawing upon country laws and project reviews for hydropower, it also briefly examines prospects for another revenue generating sector: mining and non-revenue generating urban projects. It addresses the question: should benefit-sharing be limited to monetary benefits derived only from projects generating revenue during the project operations phase or should a broader concept of benefit-sharing prevail? The authors compare both financial and resettlement logics of each form. In anticipating an uncertain future, they conclude that centralising partnerships and negotiated consent with the resource losers can lead to workable, durable, ethical and effective benefit-sharing.

Some ten million people worldwide are displaced or resettled every year, due to development projects, such as the construction of dams, irrigation schemes, urban development, transport, conservation or mining projects. The results have usually been very negative for most of those people who have to move, as well as for other people in the area, such as host populations. People are often left socially and institutionally disrupted and economically worse-off, with the environment also suffering as a result of the introduction of infrastructure and increased crowding in the areas to which people had to move. The contributors to this volume argue that there is a complexity, and a tension, inherent in trying to reconcile enforced displacement of people with the subsequent creation of a socio-economically viable and sustainable environment. Only when these are squarely confronted, will it be possible to adequately deal with the problems and to improve resettlement policies