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The integration of development and climate objectives is increasingly recognized as significant in research and policy making. In practice, some development aims, such as poverty alleviation, enhancing energy security and access or improving health, also have potential climate benefits. The challenge is to find a broadly applicable range of effective policies and actions that realize development objectives and at the same time result in real climate benefits.

This article investigates developments in and antecedents of socially mixed marriage in the rural Dutch province of Zeeland during the long nineteenth century, taking individual and family histories, community contexts, and temporal influences into account. A government report of the 1850s said of Zeeland that farmers and workers lived "in indifference together". However, our analysis of about 163,000 marriage certificates reveals that 30 to 40 per cent of these rural inhabitants continued to marry outside their original social class. Multivariate logistic regressions show that heterogamous marriages can be explained first and foremost by the life-course experiences of grooms and brides prior to marriage. Previous transitions in their occupational careers (especially to non-rural occupations for grooms, and to service for brides), in their migration trajectories (particularly moves to urban areas), and changes in the sphere of personal relationships (entering widowhood, ageing) are crucial in understanding marriage mobility. © 2005 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis.

In many Western countries, including the Netherlands, couples marrying in the interwar period experienced unprecedentedly high levels of childlessness. Only recently do we witness a return to these levels, as part and parcel of the so-called second demographic transition. Looking back on the interwar period, many scholars have attributed the decline of fertility and the increase of childlessness to rampant economic and political instability. However, contemporary social scientists ascribed the phenomenon to individualization, secularization, and the priority newlywed couples gave to a career and a luxurious lifestyle. From this perspective, childless couples in the interwar period could be seen as "pioneers" of the second demographic transition. To disentangle "traditional" and "modern" backgrounds of childlessness, we have studied the fertility histories of nearly 3,000 Dutch couples married between 1919 and 1938. Our results, in particular the strong association of childlessness with religiously mixed marriage, confirm that an important part of childlessness in the interwar period can be associated with a modern, individualized lifestyle.

"How has 'agency' - or the ability to define and act upon one's goals - contributed to global long-term economic development during the last 150 years? This book asserts that autonomous decision making, and female agency in particular, increases the potential of a society to generate economic growth and improve its institutions. Inspired by Amartya Sen's capabilities approach and looking at this in comparison to contemporary economic theory, the collection of chapters tackles the issue of agency from the micro level of household and family formation and asks how this applies to gender at regional and state level. It brings to the fore new empirical data from across the globe to test the links between family systems, female agency, human capital formation, political institutions and economic development and puts these into broader historical context. It will appeal to scholars researching social policy, gender studies, economic history, development studies and philosophy, as well anyone with interests in the long-term societal development of the world economy and issues of global inequality."--Provided by publisher.

The aquaculture industry in Norway currently represents 60% (US$ 5.4 billion) of Norwegian seafood exports. Of these, farmed Atlantic Salmon ( Salmo sala r) represents over 80% (850,000 tons). These production levels are driven by a strong and growing demand for farmed fish, and has a stated political goal of increased growth by a factor of 5 by 2050 in Norway alone. However, growth is potentially more challenging without the public support and trust in the governance regime that regulates the industry. The theoretical framework of this paper rests on accountability theory, whereby the research team highlighted and tested the paradox between the ideal and the actual practices on a group of stakeholders representing the aquaculture industry and municipal, regional, and sector management in northern Norway relative to their interactions and need thereof—vs. the expectations of the public. The findings of a workshop were used to develop a conceptual model and test our theory on stakeholder driven future scenarios using a combination of systems thinking and fuzzy cognitive mapping. We found that stakeholders and management alike in a workshop setting valued flexibility of legislation and expert opinions highly, whereby regulatory standardization is not prioritized—in line with soft accountability. The industry acknowledged, though, that the public perception and negative media attention of the industry, in turn depended on hard accountability.

Climate change affects the marine environment at all levels of governance. At a global level, researchers expect the projected increase in sea surface temperature to facilitate large changes in the marine food web, which in turn will affect both global fisheries and aquaculture. At the local level, government and stakeholders want to know whether and how this affects their local communities and their adaptive capacity in light of this. Research suggests that risk communication of the effects of changes in the marine food web suffers from stakeholders' short-term mentality and narrow boundaries. This in turn can lead to an underestimation of the potential risks associated with climate change. We explore this theory by mapping the perceptions of marine stakeholders in the region of Troms, Norway. We first developed cognitive maps in a workshop setting, and then used system conceptualization to analyze the feedback mechanisms of the system qualitatively using fuzzy cognitive mapping. We examined the outcomes and compared them for different scenarios using a simple MatLab script. Results demonstrated that stakeholders did not underestimate their risks to climate change. They were aware of environmental changes, and they perceived that a changing climate was the cause of this change, and that it was indeed affecting their livelihoods-and would continue to do so in the future.