Suchergebnisse

Der europäische Erweiterungsprozesses wirft die Frage auf, woran eine potentielle Zugehörigkeit zu Europa festgemacht werden kann. Vor dem Hintergrund kulturell-religiöser Debatten, in denen zunehmend "der" Islam als Gegensatz zu Europa gezeichnet wird, und der Tatsache, dass im Fall einer Südosterweiterung der EU mit Bosnien-Herzegowina ein Staat mit muslimischer Mehrheitsbevölkerung aufgenommen würde, steht die "Europatauglichkeit" dieser Region zur Diskussion.Der Autor untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen "Europäisierung und Islam" anhand religiös-politischer Netzwerke und Identitätsdiskurse bosnischer Muslime. In besonderer Weise werden antimuslimische Diskurse Südosteuropas mit in die Analyse einbezogen, innerhalb derer die europäische Zugehörigkeit bosnischer Muslime entschieden zurückgewiesen wird.

The purpose of this book is to summarize new insights on the structure and function of mountain ecosystems and to present evidence and perspectives on the impact of climate change on biodiversity. This volume describes overall features of high-mountain ecosystems in Japan, which are characterized by clear seasonality and snow-thawing dynamics. Individual chapters cover a variety of unique topics, namely, vegetation dynamics along elevations, the physiological function of alpine plants, the structure of flowering phenology, plant-pollinator interactions, the geographical pattern of coniferous forests, terrestrial-aquatic linkage in carbon dynamics, and the community structure of bacteria in mountain lake systems. High-mountain ecosystems are characterized by unique flora and fauna, including many endemic and rare species. On the other hand, the systems are extremely vulnerable to environmental change. The biodiversity is maintained by the existence of spatiotemporally heterogeneous habitats along environmental gradients, such as elevation and snowmelt time. Understanding the structure and function of mountain ecosystems is crucial for the conservation of mountain biodiversity and the prediction of the climate change impacts. The diverse studies and integrated synthesis presented in this book provide readers with a holistic view of mountain ecosystems. It is a recommended read for anyone interested in mountain ecosystems and alpine plants, including undergraduate and graduate students studying ecology, field workers involved in conservational activity in mountains, policymakers planning ecosystem management of protected areas, and researchers of general ecology. In particular, this book will be of interest to ecologists of countries who are not familiar with Japanese mountain ecosystems, which are characterized by humid summers, cold winters, and the snowiest climate in the world

This article examines transnational family development by drawing on the findings of longitudinal research on bi-national marriages between Japanese women and Pakistani men. This type of marriage increased in Japan during the 1990s after a surge in male labor migrants from Pakistan. Very little attention has been given to bi-national relationships between women of the global North and men from the global South. This article explores the ways in which gender, nationality, and other factors intersect in the creation of transnational families. More specifically, it focuses on transnationally split family dynamics in which Japanese wives relocate to Pakistan with their children while their Pakistani husbands remain in Japan to work. These transnational strategies bring the families various opportunities in terms of economic advancement, children's education, and the provision of care for the elderly. However, they also encounter various challenges as their life-courses unfold. Thus, this article highlights both the possibilities and limitations of these transnational families and shows how these Japanese women contest and negotiate their roles and positions within transnational households. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

Der europäische Erweiterungsprozesses wirft die Frage auf, woran eine potentielle Zugehörigkeit zu Europa festgemacht werden kann. Vor dem Hintergrund kulturell-religiöser Debatten, in denen zunehmend "der" Islam als Gegensatz zu Europa gezeichnet wird, und der Tatsache, dass im Fall einer Südosterweiterung der EU mit Bosnien-Herzegowina ein Staat mit muslimischer Mehrheitsbevölkerung aufgenommen würde, steht die "Europatauglichkeit" dieser Region zur Diskussion.Der Autor untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen "Europäisierung und Islam" anhand religiös-politischer Netzwerke und Identitätsdiskurse bosnischer Muslime. In besonderer Weise werden antimuslimische Diskurse Südosteuropas mit in die Analyse einbezogen, innerhalb derer die europäische Zugehörigkeit bosnischer Muslime entschieden zurückgewiesen wird

Capacity building of local governments can strengthen a country because enhancing the abilities of individuals and institutions helps achieve the nation's development goals. As it is one of the development strategies in Zambia, the country has undertaken countless capacity building programs through the cooperation with international and donor organizations. Yet, the effectiveness of the programs is uncertain. This thesis, therefore, examines the impact of capacity building to the planning officers in Zambia. First, surveys were conducted to analyze the officials' incentives to attend training and acquire planning-related skills in a range of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analyses. Then, a GIS training was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively to assess how much they improved their skills through the project. Finally, by comparing the relationship between the individual incentives and training results of the officials, this thesis demonstrates that personal incentives can play a key role in capacity building.

Many Japanese local governments introduced New Public Management (NPM) in the mid/late nineties. Most of them introduced performance measurement, programme evaluation, customer satisfaction surveys, outsourcing and/or contracting out to the private sector, revision of public service delivery, PFI, and PPP (Kudo, 2003). Local public services have been mostly outsourced to private and social sectors.After a decade of these experiences, some municipalities have started to distance themselves from the NPM-driven managerial style. After monitoring and evaluating their performance and considering customer satisfaction, some decided not to renew contracts to their private partners, to bring the service back to public administration, or to introduce new forms of collaboration between public and private sectors, mainly based on proposals from the private sector.The author has been taking part in a research group, which previously surveyed the financial situation of Japanese local governments and their managerial choices (Kudo, 2010) and recently conducted an extensive survey among municipalities to see if they were either in favour of NPM oriented managerial styles or if they were introducing New Public Governance (NPG) oriented (Osborne, 2006; Bovaird, 2007) approaches. Some ways to understand this shift are: 1) putting more importance on citizen participation than cost cutting; 2) preference of PPP to simple outsourcing; and 3) consideration of political accountability (Bakvis and Jarvis, 2012) in administrative implementations. The questioners turn to mayors and financial directors to understand the political as well as economic influences on these choices.The results of the survey and some interviews conducted with mayors and public servants show that some municipalities have shifted from NPM-driven management to public service delivery based on NPG (Pestoff, 2011), although they are rarely aware of the theoretical transition. The examples are small in number, and do not necessary confirm the theoretical framework of public service delivery under NPG (Hartley, 2005), since the reasons of these shifts vary among municipalities.The experiences of Japanese local government would make an interesting lesson for many countries with late introduction of NPM. Japanese NPM demonstrates several characteristics: 1) its NPM has been introduced with some elements of public governance without being recognised; 2) very strong and still dominant attention on NPM; and 3) less attention on NPG, since NPM results in self-reform and learning process of public servants, especially at the local level (Kudo, 2010). The paper analyses the results of the survey in relation to the Japanese literatures on public governance.