Transforming concepts of ageing: three case studies from anthropology

Humanitarian crises caused by political events and environmental catastrophes forcibly displaced 82.4 million people around the world at the end of 2020. Many conflicts continue for several years, reconstruction can take a long time, and people may anyway be unwilling to return to hazardous environments. Displaced people may remain in their new locations for months or even years, not days or weeks. In response, economic development interventions for displaced populations have become more popular. This includes interventions that invest in the economic development of the host community, and so provide opportunities for those living in nearby camps. Economic development interventions provide a livelihood for displaced people and so reduce reliance on their external support, build or utilise their skills, and so reduce the chances of a culture of dependency and preserve the dignity of the displaced population. Investments in the host population can provide economic opportunities for displaced people and reduce the resentment which may arise if local people see substantial relief aid going into the camp and they get nothing. This brief summarises findings from a systematic review of economic development interventions in humanitarian settings.

Humanitarian crises affect communities and people across the world, causing high levels of mortality and malnutrition, leading to the spread of diseases epidemics and health emergencies, and arresting economic growth. Several causes may trigger a humanitarian crisis: political events, such as armed conflicts, coups, and ethnic and religious persecution, and environmental catastrophes, such as floods, earthquakes and typhoons. This review looks at economic development interventions, such as livelihoods programmes, market support programmes, and local area development projects. Economic development interventions support economic development in the area in which humanitarian emergencies occur. It focuses on interventions and programmes that aim to bridge the transition from emergency response to the development of local economic systems post-conflict and post-disaster in low- and middle-income countries.

PurposeStates and development bodies are increasingly stimulating social enterprise activity in communities as an empowering social and economic development intervention. This type of development initiative is often facilitated by actors who are external to communities, and the role of community members is not clear. This paper aims to explore whether facilitated social enterprise benefits or disempowers communities.Design/methodology/approachThe focus is a case study of a project based in Scotland designed to stimulate the creation of social enterprises involved in community growing. The case study approach involved a mix of methods, including formal (semi-structured) interviews, participant observation and analysis of documentary evidence. Analysis of findings was undertaken using Muñoz and Steinerowski’s (2012) theory of social entrepreneurial behaviour.FindingsFindings suggest that social enterprise that originates outside communities and is facilitated by external actors is potentially disempowering, particularly when social enterprise development does not necessarily align with community needs. The paper reiterates findings in previous studies that certain roles in facilitated social enterprise require to be community-led. Projects that do attempt to facilitate social enterprise would benefit from community participation at the project planning stage.Originality/valueIf facilitated social enterprise is increasingly promoted as an empowering development intervention, this paper provides insight about how facilitated social enterprise occurs in practice and gives preliminary information about possible barriers to empowerment using this approach to development.

Economic development interventions often do not account for the social, cultural, and political differences among populations being served. Factors that make economic development projects successful in Native American communities are not well known or adequately studied. Drawing on a capital asset framework and the governance hypothesis advanced by Cornell and Kalt, the authors analyze how six Pacific Northwest tribes applied Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative funds to diverse projects, which strategies were successful, and why. The data presented show that culturally congruent, community-based projects that meet multiple tribal goals are particularly successful. The authors discuss the necessity of investing in tribal cultural, institutional, and social capital, the value of efficient tribal bureaucracy that maximizes the benefits of sovereignty, the particular importance of building outside entities' understanding of tribal legal and cultural differences, and how the initiative interfaced with existing tribal structures. They offer lessons learned for tribal economic and community development.

Donors increasingly expect international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) to prove that the organizations' economic development interventions alleviate poverty. Currently, many INGOs search for new methods to meet this demand by focusing on the expectations of donors rather than those of beneficiaries. We analyze the benefit of qualitative, context‐specific methods and ask the question: What can an economic development intervention contribute to poverty alleviation from the perspective of the beneficiaries? In our case study, a negative economic valuation was not automatically a reason to evaluate the economic intervention as a failure. Assessment thus cannot be reduced to economic impacts. Also, qualitative approaches can add beneficiary‐oriented data in a context in which accountability mainly focuses on donors. This beneficiary orientation likely leads to better accountability negotiations with donors. Three hypotheses introduce these results.

Motivated by recent reductions in United States Emergency Management funding and increasingly-severe weather shocks, I call attention to the role of Economic Development in supporting the United States National Preparedness Goal. I discuss current Economic Development practitioner disaster response fieldwork and interventions, as well as related academic research, in the context of FEMA’s Core Capabilities to make the case that Economic Development professionals are key stakeholders in the field of Emergency Management. I conclude by making the case that Economic Development Practitioners are vital members of the Emergency Management community and provide recommendations for their integration into planning and funding decision-making processes.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a rigorous and positivist science of subjectivity. It was set up to deal with specific problems in other scientific disciplines. The discovery of paradoxes in mathematics had put in question the ultimate rationality of mathematics and of the mathematized empirical sciences. Husserl's phenomenology worked to trace mathematics and logic back to their fundamental units and operations and to exhibit the mental acts in which they are constituted. Subsequently he judged that every scientific discipline was in need of a phenomenological investigation of the subjective acts in which the distinctive objects studied by that discipline are constituted, given to intuition and their meanings ascribed.Empirical and ideal objects—the essences with which objects are identified and classified—are given in intuition; intuition constitutes them as objects. Intuition occurs in acts in the first-person singular—“I see.” These acts can be brought to light by a specific kind of reflection, also an act in the first-person singular. The successive intuitive and meaning-ascribing acts, and the second-order intuition that is reflection, retain and anticipate one another, forming a distinctive and individual stream of consciousness that is the first-person singular. The science of subjectivity is based on the reality of the first-person singular.By midcentury developments in other sciences led to discrediting the phenomenological conception of subjectivity. Structural linguistics had exhibited system in the phonetics and syntaxes of languages and demonstrated that languages change in systematic ways. The meanings of words and expressions form within language and are determined by the existing vocabulary, grammar, and paradigms of a language; they are not the products of individual subjective acts.Anthropology discarded, as post-Enlightenment Western, the concept of individual subjectivity as an abiding identity and source productive of meanings, judgments, decisions, and initiatives.1 It is cultural symbols that, Clifford Geertz affirms, first articulate, generate, and regenerate thought. To think is to identify things and relate them with words and other cultural symbols. Symbols are external to the thinker; they are words and also images, markings, gestures, rituals, graven idols, water holes, and tools.2 Their meanings are in their uses, and the ways they are used are accessible to observation without divining the minds of the users. “The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but,” Geertz affirms, “they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation … as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands.”3 Thus anthropology can dispense with the dubious methods to access other minds and become a natural science like any other.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss set out to show the underlying structures, not explicitly conscious, in kinship systems, myths, garb and adornment, and cuisine. He set out to show that fundamental generative structures are universal across cultures.Emotions surge focused by words and symbols. Indignation, a feeling of injustice, of frustration of our expectations and plans, envy, jealousy, triumph—words and cultural symbols, not produced by the individual mind, make them possible. “Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man,” Geertz declares.5For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. The meanings of speech acts produced by individuals are determined from the specific tongue, milieu, profession, and social and practical situation in which they are uttered and from the distribution, condensations, and displacements of signifiers in the unconscious. Perceived things and events are not only identified with language; the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of a specific language determine what we perceive and how. Action is ordered by the material imperatives of things and the cues, watchwords, and orders of social institutions.For postmodernism, Ellen Fox Keller explains, “subjects are … constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or ‘performativity’ than as their source…. Selves are multiple and fractured rather than unitary, mobile rather than stable, porous rather than enclosed, externally constituted rather than internal or ‘inner’ natural essences.”6 The agency in me that says “I” is not a substantive identity; it is intermittent, fragmented, transitory.Art is now no longer seen as a discontinuous succession of individual creations; its themes and styles are engendered by the history of art. Postmodern theorists have abandoned the notion of creative force in the depth of the individual, indeed the notion of creativity: A society produces innumerable materials, mediums, forms, colors, meanings; artists select and combine from this existing fund. Their productions are constituted as art by being accepted into the history of art by the institutions and commerce of the art world.The postmodern philosophy of mind is seen to be realized in the practice and usage of electronic media. Media broadcasts diffuse representations of events and products; information about everything is instantly available on the Internet. Knowledge is stored as neutral units of information, detached, as in Wikipedia, from the experience and perspective of a thinker. Cyberspace engineers and theorists see themselves producing a global brain in which potentially all things and events are represented, all data stored in memory, and linked in all possible ways, connected, combined, synthesized. Individuals connected on the Internet constitute the noosphere, the collective consciousness that emerges from all the users of the Internet and that is greater than any one of them and greater than all of them. It would be analogous to the hive mind of ant, termite, or bee colonies studied by biologists. Its axioms, paradigms, technologies of image and message production, and distribution technologies are studied by cyberspace theorists and culture studies.Surveying the field of scientific research today, I will here turn attention to three sectors of research that break with the postmodern conception of subjectivity.Classical ethnographers observed the habitats, implements, economic activity, institutions, and beliefs of a community in view of producing an account of a particular “culture,” conceived as a functionally interrelated structure of economic, political, and ideological systems. Their work was scientific not only in the rigor of its observations but also in that the representation of a culture is translated into the vocabulary, paradigms, and explanations of scientific economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, biology, and physics.How are these productions of an anthropology that aims to be scientific verified? In most cases, another ethnographer does not go back to that community to verify what the first has written. In most cases the members of that community cannot or do not read the account of them the ethnographer has published. In practice a monograph is accepted by the anthropological community for internal characteristics—the appearance of detailed and exhaustive data and the apparent rigor of the reasoning and conclusions drawn from them.Agricultural practices, housing construction, tools and equipment, economic exchanges, and kinship systems are recorded and translated into the objective terminology of modern sciences. But all these are found to be determined by the natives' understanding of causality and the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. In practice the ethnographer sets out to learn the language, the categories, and the imagery of the users of symbols and in fact learns them by speaking to the natives and being understood by them. The anthropologist conceives the “culture” as an overarching and integrated system of symbols and representations, distinctive to a society, that provides individuals with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves in the world around them and to one another.But field researchers have come to recognize that the ideology or mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. Pieces of the ideology and myth combine but also conflict with the practical knowledge each individual acquires of his or her particular natural environment and workplace. The discourse of the informant is also shaped by the sensibility, energies, and skills of his or her body. Consciousness waxes and wanes as sensory thresholds, states of wakefulness, fatigue, and also instincts, cravings, appetite, agitations, and drives surge and recede. Two women working alongside of one another planting and harvesting crops, the one with superabundant energy, the other with slow metabolism, the one young, the other aged after multiple childbearings, do not experience the same articulation of that field, and though they use the common words to describe it, the words do not have identical force and meaning for each of them. The singularity of a person's body also figures as a force of resistance to the identities attributed to him or her from others and from the ideology. Individuals with somewhat different pieces of ideology and myth and practical knowledge interact and engender changes in practical enterprises and social institutions and also in ideology and myth.The entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. The researcher is not a fly on the wall, unnoticed, going into every room and field. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant, commonly paid by the ethnographer, has a political and psychological relationship with that researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired.There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness. The publication, twenty-five years after his death, of Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries—where he writes often of how he was just sick of all these truculent and fickle savages—has made ethnographers aware that they are not simply recording what an informant says but are in an obscure agon with an individual.Anthropologists write for readers in their own culture, primarily the academic community, but have to first understand and represent the native's point of view, more exactly, represent the individual informant's point of view. This has led to the search in recent decades for new forms of writing.7 There is need for theory to conceptualize the forces that make the discourse of the informant his or her own voice.The mind of the informant is not simply a locus where the ideological system of his culture is inscribed; it is a force of commitment—commitment to some pieces of this system but also to his own work and his maneuvers in the network of his political and psychological relations with others.Anthropologists have come to see that every community has contact with other communities and imports some of the representations of other communities, modified, renamed, reversed and assimilated, some sections badly integrated, coexisting or overlapping with sections of its own representations. In zones where a people has been invaded or conquered by another and have to contrive their lives between different economic and institutional systems with different cultural and mythical systems of interpretation, there arise cargo cult messiahs, Vodou serviteurs, ialorixás, mediums, and curanderos. They deal with individuals in individual predicaments and work with parts of the Christian and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps, to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments.Today anthropological field researchers first and everywhere encounter such encroachment of an alien system of understanding on communities in the entry of modern scientific medicine. With the intense and highly profitable penetration of pharmaceutical marketing across the planet, many people, especially the very poor, are treated by local health workers and by their families with a mix of modern therapeutic methods and pharmaceuticals, traditional healing resources, and religious and ritual practices. Medical anthropologists set out to assess and understand the impact of healers and rituals. They come to recognize something else: individuals are forced to take responsibility for their illness and healing with whatever resources and understanding they can assemble.8 Medical practitioners have come to recognize the difference between a patient assenting to and obeying the doctor, or the faith healer, and a patient taking responsibility for his disease and its cure on the basis of his own daily sufferings, observations, and judgments. Their practice will be different if the doctor has to take account of the patient herself taking responsibility for her disease and its treatment. We need a theoretical understanding of the first-person singular in this force to take responsibility for one's illness.In our Western societies folk medicine and faith healing are vanishing alternatives to scientific medical research, institutions, and practice. Medical science has constructed a highly technical vocabulary and grammar to formulate the results of its laboratory and clinical research into pathologies and their treatments. When a sufferer goes to the doctor, the doctor translates the patient's account of her ailments into this language, and the patient is induced to learn this language to understand her ailments, communicate them, and assent to treatment. Increasingly patients download explanations and treatments from the Internet before and after their consultations with the doctor. The extraordinary advance in pharmacology and hi-tech surgical interventions has made this language the more necessary and the more difficult for the patient to master.Medical practice finds that it must also deal with economic, political, and juridical institutions. The patient must learn and understand the medical discourse and to some measure also the economic, political, and juridical discourses.But the patient has another problem: he has to endure the suffering and to assess its impact on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. For all this, the medical discourse is of no avail. Indeed the real and promised advances of medical biotechnology, organ transplants and prostheses, and life-support systems work to defer death, rendering suffering and death intolerable and unintelligible. The sufferer has to elaborate a narrative of her aspirations and her fate, her destiny, her lifetime. The patient's own narrative of that alien event in her life that is her illness will determine what treatments she will accept and may even have an effect on the efficacy of those treatments. This narrative is composed not out of concepts but out of bewilderment, anxieties, fears, attachments, dereliction, and pain. The sufferer gets sight of the indifference of the material world, the impenetrability of brute reality, gets sight of the aleatory, improbable reality of his or her existence. Suffering and anxiety are not simply cultural artifacts; they are not made possible by the words of a culture but seek words for a private language, the narrative the sufferer composes by and for himself or herself.Anthropologists who have studied mentally disturbed very poor people in Java, Brazil, and India find that the family of the psychotic may accept whatever therapy and psychopharmaceuticals are available while also invoking images and conceptions and rituals from the prevailing religion.9 The images and conceptions from the prevailing religion function to fix, to bind, the rampant strangeness of the sufferer's experience and behavior for them. Medical anthropologists have investigated these phenomena in view of explaining the social and cultural context in which modern psychiatric practice in these places must be pursued.The psychotic himself may identify himself and his states with concepts and images from the prevailing religion. However, the psychotic works an individual transformation of them, giving them new and distinctive structures and force, often viewed as heterodox and fanatical by the family and by religious leaders. They may often be mixed with practices of black magic and sorcery. Anthropological researchers have come to recognize positive and productive forces in these heterodox beliefs and practices: they function to isolate the sufferer from her family and the community, in a protective withdrawal that enables the psychotic to recognize the distinctiveness of her sufferings and anxieties, establish some kind of distance from them, and produce images and discourse of strong coherence and emotional intensity.In 1922 Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill—in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 from the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from asylums in Heidelberg and farther afield, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatrist John M. MacGregor observed that “these ‘things’ are the product of an obsessional involvement with images in the service of extremely unusual preoccupations and ideas.” They are cosmological diagrams, maps of planets or worlds, depictions of visions and visitations of the dead, icons of private religions, influencing machines or magical weapons, medical illustrations, excitants for an explosive sexuality: “Commonly, there is no desire to share these things with anyone, and the images are kept secret, or are hidden.”10 They express a drive to create a metaphysical habitat for oneself alone.Prinzhorn found that he could not diagnose the psychiatric traumas and conditions of the patients from the images they made. Although they had no art education, these individuals had through long and obsessive application come upon techniques and styles that gave their works intense coherence, economy, and extraordinary expressiveness. Prinzhorn had obtained a degree in art history before training as a doctor and psychiatrist. He argued that the works of asylum image-makers issue from the same basic drives—an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols—that are at work in professional artists. Prinzhorn identified ten masters of the asylum, whose works exhibit exceptional skill, power, and eloquence.Professional artists such as expressionists Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin and surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst looked upon the works reproduced in Prinzhorn's book with awe and admiration; Paul Éluard called it “the most beautiful book of images there is.”11 Jean Dubuffet collected thousands of works of the insane, prisoners, and also spiritualists, mediums, and children, people ignorant of the canons and taste of the art world, calling them art brut, and eventually housed them in a building in Lausanne, Switzerland, set up as an antimuseum. English writers now call them the works of “outsider artists.”For postmodern aesthetics and culture studies the materials and styles of the artist are culturally produced, and an image or audio composition is constituted as art by the judgment of the art world, recognized because it makes a significant statement at a specific time in the evolution of art history. These works were made by individuals untrained in art and ignorant of the art world. Yet these works that issue out of their exaltations and terrors and made as metaphysical habitats for them were recognized to have in addition extraordinary aesthetic quality—and just because they were isolated from, free from the constraints of, the canons, tradition, taste, and trafficking of the art world. “Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,” Dubuffet observed:12 “Insanity is the who Paul Éluard that the to be realized that to understand the of art a new conception of the first-person singular is He the as in constituted by what is from and by consciousness a of creative energies, and not as but as individual. The attention to the art of was motivated and the that the fundamental identified by Prinzhorn were of “The artist is not a kind of every is a kind of We need theory to understand how the basic drives that produce are in and set the first-person book The I argued that and the the but also the of things we and the other are not simply and social they are as real as we are and order order our and our We need a theory that this reality and this ordering In The I a force in the first-person the force of to one's a force, and a force a narrative of one's own I have attention to zones in the field of research where the methods of and cultural research up the first-person singular and the specific forces of the first-person singular. to these zones will to a more and more concept of the first-person singular.

The structural floor design for new medical facilities is often selected early in the design phase and in renovation projects, the floor structure already exists. Because the floor structure can often have an influence on the location of vibration sensitive medical equipment and facilities, it is becoming necessary to identify the best locations for equipment and facilities early in the design process. Even though specific criteria for vibration-sensitive uses and equipment may not always be available early in the design phase, it should be possible to determine compatible floor structures for planned vibration-sensitive uses by comparing conceptual layouts with generic floor vibration criteria. Relatively simple evaluations of planned uses and generic criteria, combined with on-site vibration and noise measurements early in design phase, can significantly reduce future design problems and expense. Concepts of evaluation procedures and analyses will be presented in this paper. Generic floor vibration criteria and appropriate parameters to control resonant floor vibration and noise will be discussed for typical medical facilities and medical research facilities. Physical, economic, and logistical limitations that affect implementation will be discussed through case studies.

Introduction to Special issue

This chapter explores financial management issues surrounding economic development. The intent is to construct a comprehensive overview of how community values impact financial management choices, which in turn shape a region’s economic development efforts. Attention is focused on how communities select and apply financial instruments in various situations. The chapter is organized into seven sections and each section approaches the financial management of economic development from a different perspective. Readers will develop an understanding of diverse economic development finance issues and demands placed on management structures and functions. This first section focuses on key definitions and the difficulty of delineating between economic development finance and other areas of public and private finance. It includes a discussion of the relationships between public finance, economic development, community development, planning, strategic planning, and government intervention. The second section employs a historical perspective to demonstrate how economicdevelopment policy and related financial instruments evolved. Section three looks at the ‘‘localness’’ of economic development, using a geographic perspective to review diversity of local financial management tools. Institutional perspectives of public sector, private sector, and not for profit sector roles are the focus of Section four. Section five focuses on federalism and how the availability and appropriateness of financial tools is impacted by the U.S. federal system. The sixth section uses an instrumental perspective to review financial instruments employed by economic developers. While not exhaustive, numerous financial tools and organizing principles are discussed. Finally, Section seven gives an overview of future opportunities and pitfalls that impact the financial management of economic development.Economic development has been variously defined. Practitioners and scholars have produced nearly countless case studies and meta-studies of the role of economic development in a community and recipes for success. One issue is clear from this plethora of study; there is no single, widely accepted definition. Definitions tend to fall into two categories, narrow and broad. The narrow definition focuses exclusively on economic impacts, most commonly job generation. The broad definition shares focus between purely economic measures and social measures such as community ambiance and quality of life. Unfortunately, the term economic development is used to convey both narrow and broad concepts. However, the broader concept is more accurately referred to as community development. It is not uncommon for two highly knowledgeable professionals, either academics or practitioners, to suffer confusion regarding definition.

Sub-Saharan Africa countries face the challenge of reducing rural poverty and reversing the declining trends of agricultural productivity and the high levels of soil nutrient depletion. Despite of numerous efforts and investments, high levels of poverty and resource degradation persist in African agriculture. The Millennium Development Goals Report (MDGR) states that the majority of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 a day belong to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia. About two thirds of the global rural population lives in mixed crop-livestock systems (CLS), typical of SSA, where interactions between crops and livestock activities are important for the subsistence of smallholders. CLS are characterized by high degree of biophysical and economic heterogeneity, complex and diversified production system that frequently involves a combination of several subsistence and cash crops and livestock. Increasing crop productivity is clearly a key element to improve living standards and to take these people out of poverty. However, agricultural productivity in most of SSA has been stagnant or increased slowly. In addition, the likely negative impacts of climate change on agriculture have accentuated the vulnerability of smallholders. The international research community has once more the eyes on SSA with the recently proposed post-2015 MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals that emphasize the need to achieve sustainable development globally by 2030 by promoting economic development, environmental sustainability, good governance and social inclusion. Governments and scientists are making considerable efforts to develop strategies that include structural transformations of the different sectors of the economy in search of the recipe to achieve the SDGs. Most of these strategies are based on policy and technology interventions that seek to achieve the “win-win” outcomes and move from the usual “tradeoffs” between poverty-productivity-sustainability to synergies. A key message of this thesis is that achieving the goal of sustainable development in semi-subsistence African agriculture will require better understanding of the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle: why high poverty and resource degradation levels persist in African agriculture. I hypothesize that the answer to this puzzle lies, at least in part, in understanding and appropriately analyzing key features of semi-subsistence crop-livestock systems (CLS) typical of Sub-Saharan Africa. The complexity and diversity of CLS often constrain the ability of policy or technology interventions to achieve a “win-win” outcome of simultaneously reducing poverty while increasing productivity sustainably (i.e., avoiding soil nutrient losses). This thesis focuses on the Machakos Region in Kenya. Machakos has been the center of many studies looking at soil fertility issues and its implications for poverty and food security, including the well-known study by Tiffen et al. (1994). Recently, the Government of Kenya developed the Kenya Vision 2030, a long-term development strategy designed to guide the country to meet the 2015 MDGs and beyond. The agricultural sector is recognized as one of the economic actors that can lead to reduce poverty if appropriate policies are in place. For the Vision 2030, the key is to improve smallholder productivity and promote non-farm opportunities. The Vision 2030 was used to assess if the implementation of some of the proposed plans and policies can lead to a sustainable agriculture for smallholders in the Machakos region. This thesis describes and uses the Tradeoff Analysis Model (TOA), an integrated modeling approach designed to deal with the complexities associated to production systems such as the CLS and at the same time, quantify economic and sustainability indicators for policy tradeoff analysis (e.g., poverty indexes and measures of sustainability). The TOA was linked to Representative Agricultural Pathways and Scenarios to represent different future socio-economic scenarios (based on the Vision 2030) to assess the impacts of policy interventions aimed to move agricultural systems towards meeting sustainable development goals. One important finding is that the complex behavior of CLS has important implications for the effectiveness of policy interventions. The Machakos analysis provides important findings regarding the implementation and effectiveness of policy interventions addressing poverty and sustainability in Africa and other parts of the developing world. The analysis shows that policy interventions tend to result in much larger benefits for better-endowed farms, implying that farm heterogeneity results in differential policy impacts and that resilience of agricultural systems is likely to be highly variable and strongly associated with heterogeneity in bio-physical and economic conditions. The results shows that a combination of these interventions and strategies, based on the GoK Vision 2030 and the Machakos County plans, could solve the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle in this region. The pathway from tradeoffs to synergies (win-win) seems to be feasible if these interventions and strategies are well implemented, however the analysis also shows that some villages may respond better to these strategies than others. The analysis suggests that these interventions may actually benefit most the areas with better initial endowments of soils and climate. The analysis also suggested that prices (e.g., maize price) play a key role in the assessment of policy interventions. There is an increasing recognition that analysis of economic and environmental outcomes of agricultural production systems requires a bottom-up linkage from the farm to market, as well as top-down linkage from market to farm. Hence, a two-way linkage between the TOA model and a partial equilibrium market model (ME) was developed. The TOA model links site-specific bio-physical process models and economic decision models, and aggregate economic and environmental outcomes to a regional scale, but treats prices as exogenous. The resulting TOA-ME allows the effects of site-specific interactions at the farm scale to be aggregated and used to determine market equilibrium. This in turn, can be linked back to the underlying spatial distribution of economic and environmental outcomes at market equilibrium quantities and prices. The results suggest that market equilibrium is likely to be important in the analysis of agricultural systems in developing countries where product and input markets are not well integrated, and therefore, local supply determines local prices (e.g., high transport costs may cause farm-gate prices be set locally) or where market supply schedules are driven not only by prices but also by changes in farm characteristics in response to policy changes, environmental conditions or socio-economic conditions. The results suggest that the market equilibrium price associated to a policy intervention could be substantially different than the prices observed without the market equilibrium analysis, and consequently could play an important role in evaluating the impacts of policy or technology interventions. As mentioned above, climate change poses a long-term threat for rural households in vulnerable regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. Policy and technology interventions can have different impacts under climate change conditions. In this thesis the likely economic and environmental impacts of climate change and adaptations on the agricultural production systems of Machakos are analyzed. Climate change impact assessment studies have moved towards the use of more integrated approaches and the use of scenarios to deal with the uncertainty of future condition. However, several studies fall short of adequately incorporating adaptation in the analysis, they also fall short of adequately assessing distributional economic and environmental impacts. Similarly, climate change is likely to change patterns of supply and demand of commodities with a consequent change in prices that could play an important role in designing policies at regional, national and international levels. Therefore, a market equilibrium model should also be incorporated in the analysis to assess how markets react to changing prices due to shifts in supply and demand of commodities. The TOA-ME was used to incorporate the elements mentioned above to assess the impacts of climate change. Using data from 5 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) with three emission scenarios (SRES, 2000) to estimate the climate change projections, these projections were used to perturb weather data used by a crop simulation model to estimate the productivity effects of climate change. Land use change and impacts on poverty and nutrient depletion at the market equilibrium were then assessed using the TOA-ME model. The simulation was carried out for three scenarios, which are a combination of socio-economic and climate change scenarios: a baseline scenario that represents current socio-economic conditions and climate conditions, a climate change and current socio-economic scenarios (i.e., future climate change with no policy or technology intervention), and a climate change and future socio economic conditions which are a consequence of rural development policies. Our findings show that in this particular case, the changes on precipitation, temperature and solar radiation do not show a significant difference among the selected emission scenarios. However, the variability is significant across GCMs. The effects of climate change on crop productivity are negative on average. These results show that policy and technology interventions are needed to reduce this region’s vulnerability. Furthermore, the socio-economic scenarios based on policy and technology interventions presented in the case study would be effective to offset the negative effect of climate change on the sustainability (economical and environmental) of the system across a range of possible climate outcomes represented by different GCMs. Finally, the results show that ignoring market equilibrium analysis can lead to biased results and incorrect information for policy making, in particular for the scenario based on policy and technology interventions. One of the major conclusions of the thesis are that policy interventions aimed to deal with poverty and sustainability can have unintended consequences if they are not accompanied by a set of policy strategies and investments. For example, increasing the maize price can result in substitution from subsistence crops to maize, without much increase in nutrient inputs, thus increasing soil nutrient losses. The analysis shows that improving soil nutrient balances by increasing fertilizer and manure use is critically important, but is not enough to move the system to a sustainable path. There is no one factor that can reverse the negative nutrient balances and move the system towards sustainability. Rather, a broad-based strategy is required that stimulates rural development, increases farm size to a sustainable level, and also reduces distortions and inefficiencies in input and output markets that tend to discourage the use of sustainable practices. The Machakos case shows that a combination of these interventions and strategies, based on the GoK Vision 2030 and the Machakos County plans, could solve the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle in this region.

From a hilltop overlooking the community of Puerto Penasco, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari decreed a million-hectare biosphere reserve for the upper Gulf of California and the delta of the Colorado River. Assembled with him on the podium in June of 1993 were the governors of Sonora, Baja California, and Arizona, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Luis Donaldo Colosio, then head of the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL), and Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, an aide to President Salinas at the time and now his successor. Salinas set the parameters for the reserve's management plan. Resource exploitation was to be prohibited within a nuclear zone at the mouth of the Colorado River, and offshore shrimp trawling was to be outlawed in a larger buffer zone, north of a line traversing the upper Gulf from Puerto Penasco to San Felipe on the coast of Baja California. Within this buffer zone, too, inshore fishermen would be restricted to the use of gillnets with a mesh size of four inches or less. Salinas also called for the active pursuit of economic alternatives for the region, specifically the further development of tourism, sport fishing, and aquaculture. Such pursuits were to be underwritten by a billion dollars in regional assistance from the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), run by the Sonoran native and heir-apparent to Salinas, Luis Donaldo Colosio. In its conception, then, the biosphere reserve was an amalgam of resource management notions. It called for a strictly protected nuclear zone—although none of its architects specifically addressed the nascent literature on "harvest refugia" as a fisheries enhancement tool (cf. Dugan and Davis 1991a, 1991b; Carr and Reed 1991; Tegner 1991; Roberts and Polunin 1993). It presumed the need for an "integrated conservation and development program" (ICDP) to relieve pressure on endangered species and a fragile environment (cf. Brandon and Wells 1992; Chou et al. 1991; Stycos and Duarte 1995; White 1988). And, at least in the buffer zone, the plan suggested that a "sustainable" fishery could be fostered—primarily through severe restrictions on gear. The Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve thus began as a concerted effort to arrest the deterioration of an ecosystem and to protect several endangered marine species. It is a symbol, too, of Mexico's willingness to respond to international calls for environmental consciousness. Simultaneously, though, Mexico was responding to another international agenda. The neoliberalism of the North urged—indeed, required—Mexico to undertake a multifaceted program of structural adjustment, including, in the case at hand, the privatization of the region's fisheries. The Gulf of California, thus, serves as a crucible for these two agendas, and we here take a midcourse glance at how these agendas are sorting themselves out. We examine the political environment in which the biosphere reserve was conceived and, consequently, the environmental politics accompanying the implementation process. And we assess, again in a preliminary way, since there is no closure to the process, how one small community in the upper gulf is structurally adjusting to the new economic order. These two seemingly disparate agendas are, in El Golfo de Santa Clara at the mouth of the Colorado River, very much intertwined.

Disentangling the relationship between economic development and environmental protection has attracted much attention from public administration scholars. While traditionally scholars approach the relationship from either a substitutive or a complementary perspective, we offer a nuanced perspective by examining how the target‐setting on economic growth shapes environmental performance. This article proposes an explanation for the impacts of gross domestic product growth targets on environmental performance based on a yardstick competition model, where the upper‐level governments use relative performance to create competition among lower‐level governments. We argue that a trade‐off exists between economic development and environmental performance; however, the substitutive relationship tends to transit to a complementary relationship when environmental performance is incorporated into the cadre evaluation system. Analyzing a panel dataset of economic targets and PM2.5 air pollution across Chinese cities from 2001 to 2010, we confirm the relationship between economic targets and environmental performance by highlighting local leaders' political incentives.

The African continent has experienced sustained growth since 2000, which has led to the "emergence of Africa". However, the continent also ranked second in the world in terms of income inequality, after Latin America. This has raised concerns about the inclusiveness of African growth. The inclusiveness of growth is receiving increased attention in both academic and decision-making circles, with several definitions and means of measurement being proposed, which will tend to reveal a lack of unanimity. This work is made up of two parts. The first assesses the measurement of inclusive growth and the second assesses the relationship and the role of trade in promoting inclusive growth.
 For this paper, the degree of inclusiveness of African growth was calculated using the unified method of measuring inclusive growth based on 33 African countries over a period of 2000-2018. The findings show a slightly inclusive growth as a result of a rise in economic growth and a slight fall in inequality. The inquiry concerning the function of trade as one of the fundamental supporters of growth presents two ways that commercial exchange can impact inclusive development. 1) An indirect but significant route through GDP. 2) The direct benefits of trade on every social class, without the intervention of GDP growth. The linear regression reports non-significant results, indicating the indirect relationship between GDP growth and inclusive growth. The results imply that in addition to trade, as an important contributor to inclusive growth, there are other parameters like economic policies and development interventions.

One of the efforts to develop an inclusive economy in the poorest province in Indonesia, Papua, is through fiscal policy. This research has two main objectives, namely: (i) assessing the Inclusive Economic Development in Papua; and, (ii) analyzing the relationship between fiscal policy in realizing Papua Inclusive Economic. Papua Province has the lowest Inclusive Economic Development Index (IEDI) ranking in Indonesia. This low level of caused 26.8 percent of the poor population in Papua Province. Economic development interventions through fiscal policy need to be carried out. Analysis of regional fiscal policy factors that are significant to the IEDI of each city/district can pay attention to policy directions from the past that need to be prioritized so that policy strategies can be developed. Novelty: This research is the first to observe Papua's IEDI through government expenditure factors. This research is the first that show how statistically to modelling IEDI. The fiscal policy is observed through the budgeting of the General Allocation Fund (GAF), Physical Special Allocation Fund (PSAF), Non-Physical Special Allocation Fund (NPSAF), and Village Fund (VilF). Data is observed in 2019 to 2021. Panel data regression model is used to analysis the effect of expenditure. The REM model obtained gives an R-sq of 41.9% with high IEDI prediction accuracy. This study found that PSAF and NPSAF were the source of the increase in IEDI. These findings indicate that the PSAF and NPSAF (physical and non-physical) is more efficient than the GAF and VilF on inclusive economic development in Papua.