Ability Of Community Members Research Articles

Peningkatan Kapasitas Pengelolaan dan Pelaporan Dana Desa

The village fund law has mandated the government to allocate village funds for the welfare of the community in the village. Public understanding of the importance of accountability must be reported to the state is the main focus of this community service activity. This empowerment activity aimed to increase public understanding of the management and reporting funds in the Kebonsari Village, Candi, Sidoarjo Village. The program applied to learn by doing method in the form of practical learning. Activities were carried out in stages, including gathering information, implementing socialization training, mentoring, monitoring the management, and reporting activity funds for the community. The results showed an increase in the understanding and ability of community members in managing and reporting community activity funds in Kebonsari Village with entrepreneurial activities (salted eggs), handicrafts (Sayangan), and animal husbandry (Bebek Village). A total of 17 people out of 21 residents felt the beneficial impact of the activities was shown by the level of community satisfaction. Therefore, this activity should be promoted further with a different focus according to the problems found in the community to maintain and improve accountability culture by upholding the values of integrity and transparency in the management and reports of village funds in the future.

The relevance of institutions and people’s preferences in the PSNP and IN‐SCT programmes in Ethiopia

AbstractThe effective implementation of social protection interventions is key for achieving positive change. The existing literature mainly focuses on issues related to programme design and impact, rather than the factors that influence the emergence, expansion and provision of these programmes. This article builds on the recent literature that indicates that the quality of institutions and people’s preferences play an important role in the implementation of social protection. It does so by using Ethiopia and its Productive Safety Net Programme – one of the largest social protection programmes in sub‐Saharan Africa – as a case study, thereby contributing to debates on how to implement social protection more effectively, particularly in settings of widespread poverty and relatively low levels of institutional capacity. Based on primary qualitative data, the article finds that greater institutional quality at the local level is associated with the more effective provision of social protection. The ability of community members and social protection clients to voice preferences can lead to adaptations in implementation, although the extent to which this occurs is highly gendered.

An Uneven Playing Field: Regulatory Barriers to Communities Making a Living from the Timber from Their Forests–Examples from Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam

Community forestry (CF) is widely viewed as the solution to many of the challenges facing forest management and governance in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it is often felt that CF is not delivering on its potential. This paper focuses on one possible limitation: the role of regulations in curbing communities’ ability to make a living from their timber resources. The work covers Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam, using policy analyses, national level experts’ workshops, and focus group discussions in two CF sites in each country. The results highlight the fact that there are numerous, often prohibitive, regulations in place. One challenge is the regulations’ complexity, often requiring a level of capacity far beyond the ability of community members and local government staff. The paper puts forward various recommendations including simplifying regulations and making them more outcome-based, and facilitating key stakeholders, including government and community based organizations, working together on the design and piloting of forest monitoring based on mutually agreed forest management outcomes. The recommendations reflect the belief that for CF to succeed, communities must be allowed to make a meaningful living from their forests, a result of which would be increased investment in sustainable forest management.

THE TURKISH SEPHARDIM OF SAN ANTONIO MARKET, BARCELONA, 1900–1945

The article offers an historical anthropological study of a little-known, mostly Turkish-Sephardi population that settled in Barcelona at the beginning of the twentieth century, attracted by the commercial dynamism of the area around the San Antonio Market. The complete disappearance of the community in the early 1940s has made it more difficult to reconstruct its history than is the case with some other Jewish communities in Spain. Through oral history testimonies and the location of several dispersed sources, this article provides new ethnographic and historical information that contributes to recovering the memory of this Jewish community. The study is also an attempt to explain the reasons behind the departure of most of the community's members in the early 1940s, after more than 20 years of settlement and integration in the city of Barcelona. It shows how the new conditions introduced by the Francoist authorities had a direct impact on the ability of community members to make a living. The restrictions forced them first to ask for help from the international organizations which were helping European refugees and ultimately to leave the country.

Participatory Conservation in the Condor Bioreserve, Ecuador

The Condor Bioreserve (CBR) project seeks to promote community-based and participatory forms of conservation at four protected areas in Ecuador. This chapter provides a review of the academic and practitioner literature on participatory conservation, and explores the kinds of participation which occur in the CBR. Three assertions are central to the paper. First, the ways communities are represented by project documents and project planners condition the outcomes of participatory projects. Second, the intense focus of participatory approaches on the community level diverts attention from political and economic realities which constrain the ability of community members to actively conserve natural resources. And third, the chronological point at which communities and local people become involved in decision processes affects the kinds of participation in conservation projects; because problem definition is a key moment in which various participants establish basic assumptions about the nature of problems, the exclusion of local communities from the initial phases of program planning conditions the ways in which communities are likely to participate in conservation efforts. The paper addresses these issues by looking at the cases of management planning activities, the water fund (FONAG), extension efforts in the Sinangoé community, and the Local Participation in the Management of Protected Areas (PALOMAP) external review of participation in the CBR initiative.