Suchergebnisse

In den vergangenen zwei Jahrhunderten haben mehrere Transformationen zu tiefgreifenden politisch-rechtlichen, ökonomischen und sozialen Umbrüchen der agrarisch geprägten Gesellschaften in Zentralasien geführt.In Kirgisistan spielt in diesem Zusammenhang die Weideproblematik eine herausragende Rolle: als historisch und gegenwärtig bedeutende naturbasierte Ressource behandelt der Band mittels einer politisch-ökologischen Analyse die übergeordnete Frage nach den Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehungen durch eine akteurs- und institutionenfokussierte Betrachtung der Veränderungen der Weidelandverhältnisse. Dabe

Abstract
This paper uses food as a prism to examine society and the impacts of social change at different scales, ranging from the scale of the region, through the scale of the local community, to the scale of the household. It applies an approach that combines materials gained from archival studies, a literature review, and empirical research conducted in the Western Pamirs of Tajikistan to reconstruct socio-historically and spatio-environmentally situated food-related arrangements (foodscapes) in the study region. The main characteristics addressed include rootedness, richness, scarcity, and remoteness. It makes visible both continuities and shifts that have occurred to these arrangements in the course of social transformations. The study joins the canon of ethnographic food studies, and, by presenting a regional focus on the Tajik Pamirs, complements the emerging body of food-related socio-scientific research in and on Central Asia.

The development discourse maintains that community-based approaches are generally equitable, sustainable, and legitimized strategies for the management of natural resources. It remains frequently unnoticed that the policies and legal frameworks designed to regulate such local governance approaches oftentimes are externally initiated and top-down in nature, and frequently not adapted to local demands and capacities. Significant differences between the goals of such interventions and the lived reality and associated unintended effects were often concealed within the debates. A similar indication can be stated for Kyrgyzstan's pasture law, which demands that local communities are fully responsible for the management of pasturelands. The recent innovation in pasture law has not comprehensively resulted in the desired outcomes on the ground. Based upon a comparison of Kyrgyzstan's pasture-related legislation with the impacts of its implementation in the walnut-fruit forest region located in the south-west of the country, this article points out that community-based pasture management in local practice appears to have resulted in hybrid institutional arrangements comprising aspects of the existing formal legislation and local- specific informal regulations. Simultaneously, case-specific circumstances, particularly the constellation of uneven power holders and interest-driven players and their interactions, as well as the respective socio-economic conditions, highly influence the resource management performances on the ground. The actual outcomes do not necessarily correspond to the requirements of the formal legislation. They can even contradict the requirements of the formal legislation and generate subsequent problems. At a first glance, due to the assumed high participation of the immediate users and the belief in their supposedly intrinsic interest in eco-friendly resource use, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) approaches seem to have a great potential for creating economic, social, and ...

In den vergangenen zwei Jahrhunderten haben mehrere Transformationen zu tiefgreifenden politisch-rechtlichen, ökonomischen und sozialen Umbrüchen der agrarisch geprägten Gesellschaften in Zentralasien geführt. In Kirgisistan spielt in diesem Zusammenhang die Weideproblematik eine herausragende Rolle: als historisch und gegenwärtig bedeutende naturbasierte Ressource behandelt der Band mittels einer politisch-ökologischen Analyse die übergeordnete Frage nach den Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehungen durch eine akteurs- und institutionenfokussierte Betrachtung der Veränderungen der Weidelandverhältnisse. Dabei zeigt sich im Untersuchungsgebiet der Walnuss-Wildobst-Wälder wie historische Vorbedingungen, aktuelle Prozesse verschiedener Maßstabsebenen und externe Interventionen für lokale Verhältnisse wirksam sind.

Mobile Viehwirtschaft ist unter den in weiten Teilen Zentralasiens bestehenden natürlichen Bedingungen eine vorteilhafte und deshalb seit Jahrhunderten verbreitete Wirtschaftsform. In vorkolonialer Zeit wie während der Zarenherrschaft und der Epoche des Sozialismus zogen Menschen ungehindert von Herrschaftsoder Verwaltungsgrenzen mit ihrem Vieh in jahreszeitlichem Rhythmus zu ihren Weideplätzen, auch wenn administrative Maßnahmen oder ideologische Vorgaben sie zu sesshafter, besser zu kontrollierender Wirtschaftsweise anhalten sollten. Erst die neuen, viel hermetischer geschlossenen Grenzen der Nachfolgerepubliken der UdSSR stellen unüberwindbare Hindernisse dar und sind Ursachen für zwischenstaatliche Konflikte, aber auch sozio-ökologische Probleme.

In the Pamirs of Tajikistan, meeting food needs is an ongoing struggle. One of the challenges to local agricultural production is water scarcity. This paper presents a case study of a small-scale, self-organized irrigation governance system in a village in the western Pamirs, applying the concept of "hydrosocial arrangements" to explore its physical and social components and the interactions between them. It concludes that the system has proven sustainable and resilient, largely because of its strong sense of community ownership and its flexibility. Political actors and development practitioners often lack detailed knowledge about such well-functioning local solutions, but external interventions applied without that knowledge risk destroying effective systems that are already in place. It is important to design interventions that are tailored to local needs and based on a comprehensive and well-contextualized understanding of local structures, relations, and values.