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The aim of introducing agroforestry and community-based forestry is to secure and improve livelihoods, maintain and restore ecosystem services, and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, the adoption and scaling up of these systems among food insecure communities have proved to be difficult. To better understand why, I identified barriers and bridges at different adoption stages and levels of governance. These were analysed using policy narratives and the sustainable livelihood approach in the light of sustainable development, sustainability and resilience of landscapes. The first stage was the negotiation process between the Swedish NGO Vi-Skogen and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) about funding. Three explanatory approaches were used: organizational, power and context. Vi-Skogen and Sida were caught in policy incompatibility dilemmas that slowed down the NGO policy process, and delayed critical changes that could have improved project outcomes. The second was Vi-Skogen's agroforestry project in Tanzania's Mara Region. A random sample of 21 households was drawn from each of 89 project villages. The proportion of households with surviving agroforestry trees varied from 10-90 % among villages. Field training and visits to farmers with good practices were important for households to start planting trees. Local collaboration, perceived ownership of trees and benefits of trees for crop production were additional factors important for households' decision to continue with agroforestry practices. The third was eleven community-based forest producer and user groups (CBFGs) in eastern and southern Africa. Development of many groups had stagnated and few had managed to develop large scale value-added production. I identified eight barriers and four bridges that influenced the scaling up process of agroforestry and community based forestry among food insecure households. All resulted from interactions among social, political, and economic structures and processes at multiple ...

Presents an upcoming research that focuses on building a theory on how states relate to emigrating people, how states are organized outside their territories, and how the emigrating people relate to their country of origin. The project will focus on countries in the Middle East with an emphasis on Turkey, Syria and Algeria. L. Pitkaniemi

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of current research on international democratization. I start by discussing the choice of empirical indicators. Given a set of indicators -- Freedom House & Polity, which stand out as the most useful ones -- I make a graphic representation of democratic tendencies in different regions in the world. In this survey one region, North Africa & the Middle East, comes out as exceptional; here no general improvements have been made since the early 1970s. I then make an account of explanatory conditions which have proved in large-n empirical studies to play a role for democratic progress (such as modernization, access to oil, popular demonstrations & the type of authoritarian regime). I end up in a puzzle, which regards the Muslim countries. We can establish, on the one hand, that these countries clearly under-perform democratically. But on the other hand, comparative research has not managed so far to point out why that is the case. We can see a pattern, but we cannot point out an empirically solid explanatory mechanism. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

From comparative research on the constitutional development in Central & Eastern Europe & also from the long-standing debate on whether parliamentarism or presidentialism best facilitates democracy, it is apparent that there has been & continues to be, a certain degree of confusion concerning the concepts of semi-presidentialism & presidentialism. Different scholars mean different things by the terms & therefore classify countries differently. In this article I argue that the conceptual dichotomy between pro-premiar (premier-presidentialism) & pro-president systems (president-parliamentary systems) provide the best solution to several of the problems related to categorizing constitutional types, most importantly perhaps to the presidential power dilemma. I, furthermore, employ these concepts on the post-communist constitutional systems & try to reveal patterns with regard to presidential power, geographical region & democratzsation. 6 Tables, 3 Figures, 51 References. Adapted from the source document.