Alternative Development Paths Research Articles

Factors Influencing the Integration of Alternative Farm Enterprises Into the Agro‐Food System*

Abstract Financial stress and general crisis in European agriculture recently have generated a widespread interest in alternative paths of farm business development and structural adjustment. One of the options suggested by policy makers and adopted by farmers was the development of alternative farm enterprises (AFEs), in which farmers recombine resources on the farm and produce a new mix of products and services in order to supplement their incomes. In the present paper we examine the factors influencing the development of AFEs. According to empirical evidence from Etolia‐Akarnania, a prefecture in western Greece that merits “less favored area” status, AFE adoption is influenced by the amount of family labor, the ratio of hired to family labor, the presence of tobacco as a main enterprise, the proximity of the farm to grade A roads, and the farmers' age. Education, management experience demonstrated by the farm manager, physical size of the farm, enterprise specialization, the use of grants, and farm location are the main factors responsible for the farmers' integration into the agro‐food system.

Specialization Pattern and Multistaged Growth: Korea and Taiwan Compared

The sustained rapid growth of Korea and Taiwan represent two alternative paths of successful development. The difference between these two paths is reflected in industrial concentration, macroeconomic management, and export mix. During the 1997 crisis, Korea absorbed severe shocks and then scored a quick recovery, while Taiwan proceeded at a more or less constant pace. Taiwan has followed a “usual progression” experienced by Netherlands or Switzerland before; Korea has struck out on a different path, under a more active government policy. Before the current, ongoing reform, the development policy of Korea dates back to President Park, and fits his style of personal management over the economy. It has its own rationale, but also entails greater financial risks. The different roles played by the small and medium enterprises in the two economies provide food for thought in development economics.

Integrating climate change and sustainable development

The links between climate issues and sustainable development are manifold. Given these interconnections, the lack of close integration of the sustainable development and climate change literatures is puzzling; part of the reason for this lack of connectivity may be the very different research and policy traditions out of which each field developed. This paper argues that integrating climate change and sustainable development approaches, concepts and methods may have some important benefits. To demonstrate this point, we briefly discuss recent developments in both the climate change and sustainable development fields and then turn to the question of how to integrate them. The analysis suggests several conclusions of possible relevance to climate change and sustainable development research, including the need for an approach to scenario analysis that integrates across all aspects of climate change and sustainable development research, and the critical importance of alternative development paths and the assumptions about the reference case or baseline that underlie any analysis.

Global long-term greenhouse gas mitigation emission scenarios based on AIM

In order to respond to climate change, it is essential to describe possible future greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trajectories in both nonintervention and intervention terms. This paper analyzes long-term GHG mitigation emission scenarios according to alternative development paths in the world and major regions, based on the nonintervention emission scenarios quantified by the Asian-Pacific Integrated Model (AIM). AIM is revised and applied to the quantification of narrative storylines for scenarios of socioeconomic development, and GHG emissions from energy use, land-use change, and industrial production processes are simulated. A wide range of mitigation policies are adopted in this simulation as responses to the climate change. Several target stabilized levels—650, 550 and 450ppmv—are analyzed. The results show that to achieve stabilization at a different GHG concentration level, a policy package is essential to reach the target concentration level, rather than a single policy. Energy efficiency improvement will be a key contributor to the reduction of GHG emissions as a result of the policy package. The mitigation cost could be at a medium level, without a large loss of economic growth. The developing world could significantly reduce GHG emissions compared with nonmitigation scenarios with sufficient knowledge transfer from developed countries.

Long-Term GHG Emission Scenarios for Asia-Pacific and the World

Because the Asia-Pacific region has half of the world population and is experiencing very rapid economic growth, it is becoming more important in the global response to the climate change issue. However, the best way to respond to the issue depends largely on the development patterns of this region, and this region has a wide range of development path options. This article analyzes long-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenarios depending on alternative development paths in the developing countries of this region (referred to hereafter as “the Developing Asia-Pacific”), as well as in the world. The Asian-Pacific Integrated Model, or AIM, is revised and applied to the quantification of narrative storylines into scenarios of socioeconomic development, and GHG emissions from energy use, land use change, and industrial production processes are simulated. The results show that GHG emissions from both the Developing Asia-Pacific and the world as a whole would rapidly increase in the first half of the next century, while the emission scenarios would diverge significantly in the latter half. The range of the Developing Asia-Pacific scenarios are wider than those of other regions, and include the possibilities of both keeping emissions low with high economic growth and also causing a rapid increase of emissions with low economic growth. The Developing Asia-Pacific, as well as the rest of the world, have to consider more sophisticated policies to reduce GHGs in the first half of next century, and also must consider a number of robust policies to prepare for the wide range of future development paths.

Sektorale Sozialdialoge - Zur empirischen Analyse einer vernachlässigten Ebene der Integration

Zusammenfassung Im Gegensatz zur vorhandenen Literatur über Probleme und Ergebnisse von Sozialdialogen auf der Makroebene ist die sektorale Variante trotz ihrer potentiellen Bedeutung bisher weitgehend vernachlässigt worden. Nach einigen Bemerkungen zu Interpretationen der Verfahrensregulierungen, welche die Kommission in mehreren Mitteilungen vorgenommen hat, geben wir zunächst eine Übersicht über die bisherigen Ergebnisse, wobei wir explizit zwischen offiziellen Einschätzungen und Ergebnissen empirischer Untersuchungen unterscheiden. Anschließend analysieren wir in empirischer Sicht die spezifischen aktuellen Schwierigkeiten, wobei wir zwischen den Problemen der privaten korporativen Akteure sowie der Implementation von Regulierungsvorhaben differenzieren. Anmerkungen zur Zukunft der Europäisierung sowie zu alternativen Entwicklungspfaden auf sektoraler Ebene sowie ein kurzer Ausblick beschließen den Beitrag.

Towards a Meta‐Framework of Endogenous Development: Repertoires, Paths, Democracy and Rights

Although interest in endogenous (integrated, participative, bottom‐up) rural development by policy makers, practitioners and academics continues to grow, the term suffers from an incomplete conceptualization. This prescriptive essay proposes a meta‐framework in which to conceptualize the nature of endogenous development in the contemporary, contexts of globalization and Europeanization. The framework is built around three main components. Territorial repertoires and development paths encapsulate the nature of ownership and choice in the exploitation of resources. This derives from a more sophisticated understanding of territorial agency. A repertoire functions dynamically as a mediator between the local territory and the extralocal level and so the component rights focuses attention onto this flexible interface, through the support potentially available from extralocal regulation and through a raising of consciousness within the local territory. Rights, by energizing a cultural and political dynamic, allow for a discourse on alternative paths of development to be pursued, which is itself operationalized through any or all of the three modes of democracy.

Natural capital and quality of life: a model for evaluating the sustainability of alternative regional development paths

Natural capital contributes to the quality of life of a region in two complementary ways: first, by directly providing environmental services that cannot be imported, and second, by supplying the natural resources that, through a human controlled production process, become valuable to humans. The evolution of the combination of these two components of the quality of life determines the path of development a region takes. Environmental services also determine the ability of natural capital to regenerate itself. Ecosystems and other components of the regional natural capital produce environmental services that provide life-support functions necessary for natural capital reproduction. The destruction of this critical natural capital impairs the internal sources of improvement of the quality of life of a region, leading to a non-sustainable path of development. This article describes a model of the relationship between natural capital and quality of life that provides a stricter definition of sustainable development through explicit characterization and classification of natural capital according to its ability to produce life-supporting environmental services, by its substitutability, and by its possible reconstruction. Application of this model then shows that there are 51 possible regional development paths, only 32 of which are sustainable and only 14 of which are sustainable while also providing improvements in quality of life. Only six of these 14 sustainable development paths are attained with economic growth, however, while the other eight paths increase quality of life by increasing the production of environmental services. The model could help in the development of institutional interventions that would promote regional development paths that are sustainable.

Multi-scale modelling of land use change dynamics in Ecuador

A spatially explicit multi-scale approach to land use change modelling is explained and demonstrated. It is based on the empirical description of the biogeophysical and socio-economic drivers of land use at different aggregation levels, using a system analytical approach for the characterisation of agro-ecosystems. Sub-national changes in land use following changes in the national demand for agricultural commodities are modelled on the basis of complex interactions in time and space and the competition between alternative land uses. In a multi-scale allocation procedure, land use changes are calculated for cells of a geographical grid with a maximum resolution of 5×5 min. The model was applied to Ecuador. Land use change allocation in the model was validated with historical data. A hypothetical future base-line scenario of increasing demands for agricultural commodities was used to demonstrate how dynamics of land use are modelled. The results may be used to detect so-called ‘hot-spots’. These are dynamic areas where impacts of land use change on the natural resource base can be expected. The model offers scope for comparison of different scenarios in which alternative development paths can be defined, for example, with respect to changes in food demands, technology levels, infrastructure, soil suitability or the protection of natural areas.

Conserving global biological diversity by encouraging alternative development paths: can development coexist with diversity?

The conservation of biological diversity concerns the management of the development process, not only at the national but also at the global level. Individual countries have made their development choices independently but relatedly, too often following the precise form of the choices of other countries preceding them in the development process. Development via imitation is pursuing the form, rather than the substance of a successful development strategy. Countries should instead be developing upon a base of assets that provides them with a relatively unique set of goods and services to place upon global markets. When the first countries developed, this criterion indicated that they should convert their countries to new forms of production; when the last countries are developing, relatively unique goods and services flow from their lands as they stand. What is required is the development of global institutions that encourage countries to see that their best development opportunities lie down these alternative development pathways, based upon their already-existing but relatively unique national assets.

Growing pains: a conceptual framework for considering integrated assessments

Policy concerns related to the environment have grown in the past decadesfrom relatively local and well-defined problems to increasingly complex andglobal issues. With this has grown the need to develop the capacity tointegrate, reconcile, organize, and communicate knowledge across scientificdisciplines, as well as to make this knowledge available and useful for policy-makers. One response to this has been the growing field ofIntegrated Assessment (IA). Our goal in this paper is to reflect on the purpose and valueof IA in principle. We propose a conceptual framework within whichindividual IA studies, and the practice of IA as a whole, can be placed andevaluated. The framework addresses both the integrative nature of IAs andtheir policy usefulness, including a self-awareness of their role and capabilities. We illustrate several stages in the evolution of integrated assessments: fromlinear to more complex chains of analysis, from non-adaptive to perfectly-adaptive to realistically-adaptive agents, from simplistic to sophisticated to pluralistic consideration of alternative underlying development paths, from strictly quantitative to quantitative and qualitative analyses, from science-driven to policy-driven, and from analyses that dictate to users to those that involvethose users in the actual assessment process. By so doing, we argue for botha richer form and process of IA. Ultimately, we feel that it may also benecessary to reconsider the framing of the questions that IAs have been askedto address, perhaps leading to the consideration of the use of other forms of mandated science.

Mitigating factors: Assessing the costs of reducing GHG emissions

The debate over the costs of GHG emission reduction has become more complex recently as disagreements over the existence of economic and environmental double dividends have been added to discussions over the existence of a negative cost potential. We argue that basic assumptions about economic efficiency, the (sub-)optimality of the baseline and the rate of technical change are more important than model structure, and we underline the importance of the timing of decisions for determining the costs. Moreover the use of a single baseline ‘no policy’ scenario and several policy intervention scenarios may be fundamentally misleading in the longer term simply because the very idea of a business as usual scenario is deeply problematic. Ultimately the debate turns on political judgments about the desirability of alternative development paths.

A Science Policy to Cope with the Inevitable?

Planning to cope with the Indian population dynamics is the central issue of the remarkable book edited by V. Gowariker, The Inevitable Billion Plus. The paper discusses the feasibility of Gowariker's proposals by examining first the science and technology policy experiences of the so-called developed countries, and then the lessons that can be drawn for a developing country such as India. With the end of the Cold War, the grounds for the support of basic science are everywhere reconsidered. This may be an opportunity for India, doomed to remain a 'mixed economy' whatever the fate of the liberal reforms, to design an alternative path of development aimed at reconciling the economic and strategic imperative of innovation with the nonetheless pressing imperative of social improvement. Such a policy is not so much to train Western-style researches as to increase and spread basic technical skills in line with local needs.

Occurrence of an alternative pathway in the larval development of the crab Chasmagnathus granulata Dana, 1851 under laboratory conditions

Larvae of the crab Chasmagnathus granulata were collected in a salt marsh located in the Lagoa dos Patos, Brazil and reared from eclosion to metamorphosis under different dietary regimes. Larvae reared individually in beakers of 40 ml and fed Tetraselmis chuii (zoea III and zoea IV), showed a supplementary stage, here designated as zoea V, with morphological characteristics intermediary between zoea IV and megalopa. No zoeae V molted to megalopa stage. To confirm the occurrence of the supplementary stage, mass cultures of larvae of C. granulata were fed Artemia sp. at high densities, we again detected the fifth zoeal instar. However, when zoeae V were individually placed in beakers and fed Artemia nauplii, they succeeded in molting into megalopae. We observed the occurrence of two types of zoeae IV — a smaller type (from which originated the zoeae V) and a larger type (which directly developed into megalopae). We conclude that stressful nutritional/environmental conditions were responsible for the occurrence of this alternative path of development.

Development patterns under population pressure: Agricultural development and the cassava-livestock interaction in smallholder farming systems in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper identifies the pathways along which smallholder farming systems evolve in a context of population pressure in the cassava producing zones of Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis indicates the existence of the cassava-livestock interaction. Particularly the use of cassava roots by pigs is important. Generally, two alternative development paths can be observed. Land scarcity induced by population growth is the driving force behind them. For countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana, intensification of arable crop production including cassava is prevalent while in the East African countries, mixed crop (cassava)-livestock systems are emerging. The case of Nigeria is peculiar as farming systems evolve along both pathways. In the absence of population pressure and land scarcity extensive crop production systems evolve, as in Zaire. It is concluded that emphasis should be placed on institutional support and research that will encourage the productivity and sustainability of either systems. In Nigeria both policy strategies may have to be adopted.

Experimental control of neoplastic progression in cell populations: Foulds' rules revisited.

Foulds introduced six rules of tumor progression based on his observations of spontaneous mammary cancer in mice and generalized them to all forms of neoplasia [Foulds, L. (1954) Cancer Res. 14, 327-339 and Foulds, L. (1969) Neoplastic Development (Academic, New York), Vol. 1, preface and pp. 72-74.] Rules III, IV, and V are considered controversial, and research in animals seems inadequate to resolve the controversies. A subline of NIH 3T3 cells undergoes progressive transformation to produce foci of increasing population density when repeatedly constrained by sequential rounds of growth to and maintenance at confluence. Analysis of the results provides a cellular basis for rules III, IV, and V. Rule III states that progression is independent of the growth of the tumor and occurs in tumors that are arrested. Cell culture shows that progression is actually favored by constraint of growth, a result inconsistent with a major role for point mutations in progression. Indeed, there is a suggestion that the transformation may arise from chromatin changes preceding apoptosis. Rule IV states that progression can be gradual or abrupt but the latter conclusion has been frequently criticized. Cell culture exhibits both forms of progression but, in particular, eliminates the doubt about the abrupt form. Rule V, which is in a sense an extension of rule IV, states that progression follows one of alternative paths of development. The results in culture indicate that every independent transforming event gives rise to foci of unique morphology. Thus, even for the single characteristic of transformed focus morphology, many alternative paths to neoplasia are available to cells. In addition to clarifying the rules of progression, a method is described for pinpointing the time of the occurrence of events that are only expressed as dense foci after a variable lag time. The results in culture reinforce Foulds' conclusion that neoplastic development is primarily an epigenetically driven process and identify some of the cellular interactions that underlie that process.

Explaining Transitions from Neopatrimonial Dictatorships

number of possible political trajectories for neopatrimonial regimes.2 A military coup, a nonrevolutionary transition to civilian rule, and ongoing stability are also possibilities. In this article I analyze the nonrevolutionary cases of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Franqois Papa Doc Duvalier and Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, alongside the revolutionary cases of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua, Mohammad Reza Shah in Iran, and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, in order to sharpen our understanding of the conditions that influence transitions from neopatrimonialism. My purpose is to examine the variables which adcount for transition to military dictatorship, transition to civilian rule, stability, and revolution as alternative paths of political development for neopatrimonial regimes. Neopatrimonial regimes are characterized by the chief executive's maintenance of state authority through an extensive network of personal patronage, rather than through ideology or impersonal law.3 The degree to which the patronage network radiating from the ruler penetrates state institutions, especially the military, tends to be uneven and to fluctuate over time. There is often an ongoing struggle between the dictator, who seeks to wrest autonomy from state institutions, and the incumbents of these institutions, who seek to retain autonomy. In neopatrimonial regimes the degree to which the patronage network penetrates civil society also varies. Hence the position of societal elites and their followers can range from thorough cooptation by patronage resources to denial of such resources altogether. The variables I propose as explanations for the alternative paths of transitions from neopatrimonialism capture changes in the relationship of the dictator's patronage network to state institutions and to societal elites.

Response to Sklar

Near the end of his important and challenging essay, Martin J. Sklar briefly considers an alternative path of development to the corporate-liberal reorganization that he identifies with the era between the 1890s and 1916. “A statist resolution might have taken hold,” Sklar writes,had the American capitalist class, or its corporate sector, been less developed in its market powers and proficiencies and hence more dependent on the state for its wealth and power; had the liberal republican tradition of the supremacy of society over the state (the sovereignty of the people) been weaker; had the working class been less imbued with that republican ideology, less developed, and hence more inclined to statist rather than associative-constitutional ideas and principles; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with a statist-oriented sector of the working class or a statist-oriented petty bourgeoisie, especially in the farm and rural population; had the corporate sector of the capitalist class sought and found alliance with civilian or military professionals, technicians, administrators, and managers—or a “managerial class”—looking to the state as a base of power. (p. 210)

On Variability and Alternative Paths of Socioeconomic Development

For many decades, the direct or indirect rejection of objective variability and alternative paths of socioeconomic development in general and of socialism in particular has been by no means the last feature of our prevailing ideology. As an expression of extreme ideological intolerance, it has been one of the causes of alienation, confrontation, and outright hostility among even essentially close social currents, to say nothing of theories of social development that had different social foundations and of their practical implementation.

Arable farming and sustainability in the sandveld of Botswana – a case study of government planning strategies in Boteti Subdistrict

This article examines how certain measures in arable farming development programmes are suited to objectives of sustainability as presented in national plans. Both the Land Boards' land allocation and the implementation of measures in ALDEP, ARAP and Drought Relief seem to give negative ecological impact. Thus, only to a limited degree will the measures solve the problems farmers arc facing in the sandveld. Alternative development paths are presented, including both the development of ecologically sound farming practices and planning, which take into account environmental variations at different geographical levels.