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Development concepts that promise growth in the economy while safeguarding the environment have progressively become significant in the recent past in the global south countries. These concepts are framed and argued to respond to immediate and long-term societal needs. This study looks at these concepts as traveling models that strive to find a state of balance between environment and economic goals. They influence how Kenya's development agenda is set and put into action. I conducted qualitative research with experts and actors from government ministries and agencies and local and international non-government organizations. Primary interviews were conducted in Nairobi and via telephone. I attended some workshops and conferences to get an insight on which actors were more dominant than others and how ideas are framed and sold to other actors. I looked at how actors implement the neoliberal concepts of green development in Kenya. Additionally, I conducted focus group discussions and talked to locals where these ideas are implemented, including parts of Kenya's Narok, Baringo, and Laikipia counties. The locals I spoke to were strictly the ones key informants referred to me. This was important to determine whether what is discussed at the global and national levels is reflected and shared with the locals. More importantly, this aided in finding out which visions are dominant, which ones materialize, which ones do not materialize, and alternative visions. The findings indicate that particular actors play significant roles in ensuring ideas move from the international arena's point of origin and are put into practice through powerful networks. Further, the findings indicate that political interests in Kenya play a significant role in how these ideas are received and put into practice. Some ideas become dominant while others do not, which is highly dependent on which actor has what vision, their networks, and the ability to influence politics. To sum it up, the application of green development ideas is characterized ...

In recent years, African economic policies have increasingly focused on intra-continental, rather than global integration, for instance through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) launched in 2019. These initiatives follow a similar logic as neoliberal global value chain approaches such as those promoted by the World Bank: governments envision integration within the African continent as a driver of industry growth, economic diversification, and global competitiveness. However, the vision of such neoliberal value chain integration and its implementation through top-down regulatory and facilitative policy making has often not resulted in the expected positive outcomes. Therefore, the question remains to what extent and under which conditions the shift of economic networks from a global to a more regional scale can benefit regional development and ultimately local livelihoods. Scholarship on Global Value Chains (GVC) and Global Production Networks (GPN) addresses the 'dark sides' of global integration, tending to exclude peripheral areas, exploit certain actors within value chains, resulting in enclave economies. Moreover, perspectives within this literature criticise an inclusionary bias in research that often focusses on regions and sectors integrated into the global economy, thereby neglecting non-participating actors. Addressing these shortcoming, alternative forms of regional integration are increasingly gaining attention by scholars, which revolve around more localised and bottom up approaches for economic development. Against this backdrop, this dissertation firstly addresses the empirically discernible pitfalls of global integration and secondly expands the conceptual understanding of economic development in rural areas. It does so by extending the conceptualisation of regional value chains (RVC) as local, regional, or domestic economic systems with a more holistic and inclusive localised approach. Combining aspects from GVG/GPN theory, Evolutionary Economic Geography and livelihoods ...

Thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian republics are still often granted the epithet "post-Soviet." While this is technically true, the region has been shaped and diff erentiated not only by seven decades of Soviet rule, but also by a pre-Soviet feudal and colonial history as well as various more recent phenomena and developments. Thus, each social phenomenon observed in Central Asia today has its own unique combination of elements from the past deriving from "layered legacies" – legacies of diff erent phases that reinforce, interact with or contradict each other in complex ways and can have very diff erent consequences in diff erent local contexts. This volume examines some of the region's layered legacies by eclectically zooming in on to-pics, such as urban planning, water management, agricultural production, communal coopera-tion, migration patterns, ethnicity, Islam and gender. The overarching question explored across these diff erent examples pertains to the relative relevance and dynamic interaction of these layers of legacies. Are Soviet structures still relevant today? How much was disrupted by the transformation eff orts in the 1990s and to what degree are the Central Asian republics today aff ected by current global socio-economic and political dynamics? These questions were addressed in two workshops in 2020 and 2021 in Augsburg and Ebers-walde that brought together Central Asia researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds to present and discuss their ongoing research on the region. These two events also served as the fi rst annual meetings of the Central Asian Studies Network in Germany (CASNiG), an open net-work of Central Asia researchers and experts set up to exchange ideas, concepts and fi ndings, and to promote collaboration, mutual support and solidarity. This volume presents selected papers based on contributions from the two workshops, addressing contemporary issues and layered legacies in Central Asia from various angles.

To overcome economic injustices and spatial disparities inherited from the apartheid era, the Namibian government pursues regional development in the Zambezi region. Two popular policies are applied that build on the commodification of nature via wildlife tourism: growth corridor policy is envisioned to enable the coupling into global production networks (GPN) via increased connectivity and targeted investments into tourism. Similarly, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) schemes are designed to attract foreign investments in the safari and hunting tourism sector to benefit rural communities. Despite the hopes that are set on international tourism, GPN theory indicates three threats connected with global market integration: first, emerging social inequalities and disarticulations in the host region, second, the appropriation of value by central nodes of the GPN and therefore limited value capture at the production stage and third, the alteration of human-environment relations at the production stage. Notwithstanding this, a conceptualisation of nature's integration into GPNs is still pending. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to scrutinise the commodification of nature through wildlife tourism and growth corridor policy effect on regional development. To this end, value capture among the actors and localities of the tourism GPN was examined, the role of infrastructure for nature-based GPNs assessed and the mechanisms that lead to the integration of nature into GPNs revealed. A single case study approach was applied that comprehensively studied the effects of tourism development policies connected with the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC) in the Zambezi region. A mixed-methods approach combined qualitative interviews, archival research and the review of existing scholarly and grey literature with a business survey, a traffic census and the analysis of quantitative data, inter alia a household survey. Findings reveal that infrastructure development and the expansion of nature conservation territories led to increased value creation from tourism in the region, but traffic census data indicates that extra-regional actors are able to capitalise on these opportunities. Nevertheless, conservancies as local institutions are able to capture roughly 20 % of the value, while tourism accrues to only 5.5 % of the income of rural households. Lastly, the institutional configuration on the local and national scale is crucial for determining how wildlife is economically utilised and who benefits from it. These findings highlight the role of local institutional actors in value capture, confirm the necessity to study the territoriality of GPNs and the role of infrastructure therein and call for a closer look at social-ecological relations at the production stage, since they are decisive for regional development.

Abstract The promises of crowdsourcing volunteered geographic information (VGI) for providing timely information about crises were recognized at least a decade ago. While cartographers and developers hone the accuracy of maps and data, social scientists critique these technologies through various theoretical lenses: in terms of knowledge politics of digital humanitarianism; as tools of neoliberal governance; and as examples of datification supporting automated or remote government. Amidst all these claims, it is time to return to the maps themselves, as empirical examples, considering the information they actually provide. This paper examines crowdsourced and collaborative maps from late 2013 following Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan in the Philippines. Various humanitarian, mapping, and media organizations produced maps in response to the typhoon. Close qualitative analysis of map content queries what these maps reveal about the disaster and whether the maps really produce the information that proponents claim. Analysis of data curated in each map reveals that much of the situational information being mapped is already available elsewhere and that few new ground truths have emerged through these projects. By demonstrating the limitations of the information mediated in these maps, the findings have practical and policy implications for disaster practitioners and digital volunteers intending to help disaster response.

This thesis explores different life situations of elderly people in rural Tanzania. It carves out how the process of ageing impacts these elderlies' lives, highlights the heterogeneity within Africa's older populations and thereby calibrates the "dominant narrative of Africa's older people as homogeneously disadvantaged" (Aboderin 2017: 644). In order to do so, this thesis highlights the disparities in capacity and privilege that exist within this population by taking a relational perspective: it views the elderlies' lives with regard to their life-courses, in relation to inter-generational aspects as well as in interconnections with social markers, particularly class and gender. In rural Tanzania, many family structures change due to the out-migration of younger generations to urban centres. Thus, the elderlies "lives and well-being are fundamentally impacted by the emigration of their children" (King et al. 2017: 185). Applying a mobility perspective, this thesis is concerned with translocal (im)mobilities of elderlies' families, especially with how care work and support are arranged within those translocal networks. The thesis further pays attention to the mobility of the ageing people and their bodies – to how ageing of the bodies impacts the elderlies' interaction and movements through the environment and how this coins the elderlies' everyday lives. Not only in political terms, the elderly in Sub-Saharan Africa seem to be a marginalised group, but also in science, many scholars speak of a lack of research in this field (Maharaj 2013; Hoffman & Pype 2016; Cohen & Menken 2006). This thesis contributes to this research gap by presenting qualitative insights into some elderlies' perceptions and experiences of ageing. Importantly, the starting point of this thesis is not the interest in the elderlies' old age security alone but overcomes this vulnerability-oriented perspective on their lives: it highlights what actually matters to the elderlies – not only for their livelihood security but for their individual wellbeing.

This article explores the shift in Cuba's state visions of nature and develop ment, which occurred in the wake of the deep crisis unfolding after the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc, on which Cuba heavily depended. This vital threat to the country's socialist system necessitated far-reaching economic and social policy adjustments, resulting in painful consequences for its citizens. The measures taken in the so-called Special Period demanded a new development vision for their legitimation. The Castro government developed a reformed socialist development model, shifting away from the ideal of Soviet model catch-up modernisation and its instrumental view on nature, towards the paradigm of sustainable development. Based on the analysis of 55 speeches made by Fidel Castro between 1959 and 1996, this radical change in views on nature and development is analysed. This paradigm shift served several political purposes and helped the Cuban leadership navigate through the crisis of the 1990s.

In the European Union, soil erosion is identified as one of the main environmental threats, addressed with a variety of rules and regulations for soil and water conservation. The by far most often officially used tool to determine soil erosion is the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and its regional adaptions. The aim of this study is to use three different regional USLE-based approaches in three different test catchments in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria to determine differences in model results and compare these with the revised USLE-base European soil erosion map. The different regional model adaptations and implementation techniques result in substantial differences in test catchment specific mean erosion (up to 75% difference). Much more pronounced differences were modelled for individual fields. The comparison of the region-specific USLE approaches with the revised USLE-base European erosion map underlines the problems and limitations of harmonization procedures. The EU map limits the range of modelled erosion and overall shows a substantially lower mean erosion compared to all region-specific approaches. In general, the results indicate that even if many EU countries use USLE technology as basis for soil conservation planning, a truly consistent method does not exist, and more efforts are needed to homogenize the different methods without losing the USLE-specific knowledge developed in the different regions over the last decades.

Im Schnittfeld von Raum, Gesellschaft und Umwelt zeichnet sich die Humangeographie durch eine besondere Vielfalt theoretischer, konzeptioneller und methodischer Zugänge aus und unterliegt angesichts sozial-ökologischer Dynamiken und neuer Problemfelder steter Veränderung und Erweiterung. Der vorliegende Band der Reihe Geographica Augustana dokumentiert die facettenreiche Breite aktueller Arbeiten am Lehrstuhl für Humangeographie der Universität Augsburg, die etablierte Schwerpunkte mit neuen Impulsen vereint. Somit kann dieser Band auch als eine Art Positionsbestimmung im Prozess des Wandels einer sowohl personell als auch inhaltlich veränderten Augsburger Humangeographie verstanden werden. Der Band umfasst Beiträge zur Angewandten Wirtschaftsgeographie, zur Geographie Erneuerbarer Energien, zu Stadtforschung, Religionsgeographie, Politischer Ökologie sowie zur Entwicklungs- und Transformationsforschung. In regionaler Hinsicht reichen die Studien vom lokalen Raum Augsburgs und der Region Schwaben bis nach Kirgistan, Äthiopien und Kuba oder verfolgen Kontinente übergreifende Perspektiven. INHALT: Stephan Bosch: Neue Energieressourcen als Ausgangspunkte ländlicher und urbaner Transformationsprozesse - Diana Tatu: Kontinentale Energiesysteme – Ökologische und sozioökonomische Implikationen eines panamerikanischen Energienetzwerkes - Karin Thieme, Serge Leopold Middendorf: Das Augsburger Schwabencenter. Urbanes Reallabor für einen Lebensraum im Wandel - Thomas David: Kontextabhängiges Konsumverhalten und dessen Konsequenzen für Einzelhandelsstandorte am Beispiel Augsburgs - Markus Hilpert: Place Branding von Wallfahrtsorten Markenbildung: Volksfrömmigkeit als postsäkulares Image? - Johannes Mahne-Bieder: Säkularisierung, Individualisierung und religiöse Praxis Einflüsse auf das religiöse Verhalten in (post-)modernen Gesellschaften - Serge Leopold Middendorf: Autarkie als (Selbst-)Reflexion. Plädoyer für neue philosophische Perspektiven in der Humangeographie - Sebastian Purwins: Der Globale Süden und die ...