Local Development Agents Research Articles

Розробка і впровадження нових організаційних структур в публічному секторі

Розробка і впровадження нових організаційних структур в публічному секторі

Analisis Pemanfaatan Wakaf Hidroponik sebagai Solusi Pembiayaan Pendidikan di Tapos Depok,

This study aims to Analysis of the Utilization of Hydroponic Endowments as a Solution for Education Financing in Tapos Depok. This research using interview methods examines the analysis of hydroponic endowments as a funding source for education in Islamic boarding schools (pesantren). The research aims to explore the benefits and challenges of utilizing hydroponic farming to generate income for educational purposes. Through interviews with key stakeholders, the study reveals the advantages of hydroponic farming, such as efficient and sustainable vegetable production, leading to increased revenue for educational needs. The research also identifies technical and management challenges in hydroponic system operation, as well as marketing and distribution strategies. The findings highlight the educational aspects of hydroponic implementation, providing valuable learning experiences for students in modern agriculture, hydroponic technology, garden management, and entrepreneurial skills. The study underscores the significance of community support and collaboration in expanding market reach and emphasizes the role of Islamic boarding schools as local development agents contributing to economic growth and community welfare. Overall, the research shows that the application of hydroponic endowments as a financing solution has positively impacted the independence, sustainability, and education of Islamic boarding schools.

Place-based sustainability—act or wait-and-see?

There has been a “territorial turn” in exploring sustainable development in the past two decades. Sustainability is increasingly seen as rooted in local resources, relationships, and values. Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are a substantial local resource and participants of local development. One of the most important relationships of CCIs is with local municipalities, which usually have an overview of local resources, and a role of redefining national level policy ideas, including those pertaining to cultural and art activities. The paper examines place-based development in Valmiera County as a case of national cultural policy translation, grounded in interpretations of the availability of local resources for change. The paper argues that the trajectories of local cultural development are indeed strongly related to local development agents' interpretations of available local resources, including active CCIs. In negotiating the preferred development paths, the stakeholders tend to respond to one of two strategies carried out by the local municipality: Act (taking upon themselves the role of a cultural operator) or Wait-and-see (enabling other cultural operators, the private and non-governmental CCI sector). The paper also highlights the role of creative intermediaries in negotiation processes. The Wait-and-see approach is seen as preferable and more sustainable in the long run.

From Peasant to Elite: Reshaping Agriculture in Gansu Province

This article contributes to the growing body of research on the role of the Party-state in shaping an emerging post-peasant modernity in rural China, taking developments in Gansu Province as a case. The article first analyses how a political preference for an agrarian elite has been put into recent policies and translates into rural practices. It argues that the “new-type agricultural management subjects,” (which form the core of this elite, should also be considered as a policy instrument designed to promote structural change in Chinese agriculture. This article proceeds to explore the capacity of the new agrarian elite as local development agents in Gansu Province. It focuses in particular on the legitimation of this instrument and its consequences for the structure of agriculture.

Vulnerability as ethical practice: dismantling affective privilege and resilience to transform development hierarchies

This paper introduces new analytical concepts to reveal overlooked dimensions of power inequalities between elite development agents (EDAs), local development agents and the targets of aid. Affective privilege captures the positioning of EDAs within affective patterning that sustains their dominant position. They enjoy a greater capacity to affect others in ways that reproduce structural power. Affective resilience captures their reduced capacity to be affected in ways that challenge their prior understandings, including understanding of self and their relations with others. Both affective privilege and affective resilience act as barriers to mutual understandings, limit reflexivity and, crucially, sustain hierarchies that are intimately felt by the power-deficient, but that pass unnoticed and therefore unaddressed by EDAs. I propose vulnerability as an ethical practice by the powerful as a means to both be attentive to these hierarchies, and to meaningfully transform relationships in development.

The District Assembly Common Fund and Fiscal Decentralisation: What is the Impact on Local Development in Ghana?

Local governments have been created as agents of local development in which the people in the local areas are given greater opportunities to influence policies and programs that directly affect their well-being and thereby reducing their poverty levels. But the implementation of the policies and programmes is bedeviled with many problems. Key among them is the issue of financing the local development projects in order to reduce rural poverty. The government of Ghana attempted to reduce this problem when it introduced a development fund in1994 known as the – District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) to encourage local governance and deepen Government’s commitment to decentralization in general and fiscal devolution in particular. The study therefore, seeks to assess the impact of District Assembly Common Fund on Local Government Development in the Adaklu District Assembly in the Volta Region of Ghana. The study mainly adopted qualitative methods of research to obtain information on the experiences of the poor people in the Adaklu communities selected as study areas. Interview guides were used to obtain information from the people in the communities, staff of the Assembly and some heads of the decentralized departments. A major finding of the study is that the assembly did not involve the rural people in the poverty reduction programmes in the district.

Kearifan Lokal Masyarakat Pesisir dalam Memahami Teknologi Hasil Perikanan

<em>Characteristics of people in coastal area are taught and open mind like sea which is analog to open access and high risk. They inherit knowledge from their ancestors who refered to stars constelation as guide, besides other traditional technologies. There are four research questions: (1) How are technologies inherited to young generations? (2) Are the developing fish technologies accepted? (3) What are governments’, scholars’, and NGO’s roles? and (4) How is people’s responds towards modern technologies? Meanwhile, this research wants: (1) To know inheritance technologies, (2) To understand acceptability level, (3) To explore the roles’ of governments, NGOs, and scholars, and (4) To recognize people’s respond toward technologies. Fisheries commodities have comparative advance, although they are perishable food that need quick, accurate, and right treatment. The research was conducted in Larantuka Sub-district of East Flores. Observation and interview were data collection methods applied in this research. Data were analysed using SWOT analysis. It is concluded that traditional technologies are useful to preserve local culture and wisdom. The role of government through local development agents, NGOs, and scholars via trainning has not applicable yet for the community in the wide area and has limitations of man power.</em>

Qualità e processi partecipativi. Lo strumento dell'autovalutazione: un percorso sperimentale per i GAL toscan

This paper aims to describe the experience carried out in the Rural Development Programme (RDP) of Tuscany Region for the period 2007-2013 in the assessment of the activities implemented by the Local Action Groups (LAG) using a participatory approach. This assessment method has been adopted to stimulate awareness of the LAGs as local development agents and enhancer of the Social Capital of the territories in which they operated. Through an evaluation process well-structured step by step, the self-assessment tried to maximize the acquisition of information from the individual LAG for the RDP evaluation at regional level and to strengthen their empowerment and reliability as agents of rural and local development.

English

Is there any commitment made to reduce poverty? This is evident because 1.) The concept of poverty is vague, 2.) the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mostly stop at the national level and not sub national level where there are needs. Less attention is devoted to local institutions and traditional authorities, which are the real agents of local development. In African development, less attention is devoted to grassroots’ perspective and political leadership; traditional authorities who hold spiritual power to influence local community and transfer culture are neglected. Their potential to take collective action is disregarded, partly because of their ignorance and development paradigm, which is seen as “modernisation and scientific”. To increase the effectiveness of local government is through democratic decentralization, which involves transfer of power and resources. Many developing countries use it to improve the quality of service delivery and strengthen sustainable local development. Decentralization is a vehicle for achieving MDGs because it operates at local and community level; and planning is crucial to ensure participation in governance and local development. Increasingly participatory governance is emerging as a key focal area, both in its own right, and as a means of securing MDGs, especially poverty reduction. Decentralization and participatory processes are complex and take years to implement; but they play critical role in achieving MDGs. Sustainable development cannot be realized without robust strong institutions and active citizenry engaged in key decision-making. Political leaders should promote good governance, by strengthening institutions and public participation to address national and local development agenda. Furthermore, functional local structures and ancestral systems are important for a strong service delivery, a prerequisite for any vibrant, democratic, and decentralized governance. The new development paradigm involves political commitment. To address local development, authority and resources have to be transferred, and it is crucial to promote citizen´s engagement at all levels. The paradigm should consider: a) strengthening of Local governments, b) building capacity of Civil society, including communities and traditional authorities, and c) Promotion of emerging Private sectors by local economic development interventions that generate employment and income for the poor; local institutions should address local structures and systems to promote local development. Key words: Governance, local development, millennium development goals, poverty, Africa, communities.

The Relationship Between Culture and Development in Fragile Spaces - An Organizational Study

Slums are arguably the most evident and outrageous symptom of a failed social system. And as underdeveloped areas, they are also the most common targets of external programs of development. However, in this work we acknowledge the importance of cultural organizations in the preservation of local culture and as agents of local development. This research aims to analyze the extent to which actions undertaken by cultural organizations existing inside favelas (Brazilian slums) lead to the development of such fragile spaces. The investigation was framed according to the assumptions of the postcolonial studies of management and development (Cooke and Dhar, 2008a). As we claim, this contribution is expected to be constructed by an academic perspective but also enacted with practical relevance. It is based on the fieldwork developed by the authors in a specific favela of Rio de Janeiro (Morro do Cantagalo). Cultural organizations at Cantagalo support the creation and maintenance of a local identity, which protects the local community from the outside distorting influences of the modernization development. However, the effectiveness of their actions is limited by structural contingencies that cannot be overcome with management practices. In order to break that limit, the habitants need to reinforce the existing networks to demand a more substantial investment on local culture, putting the public policy at the service of the process of cultural enrichment (as defended by the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, 1984). Thus, culture should be regarded as a conditional precursor, and not palliative aim.

A community-based participatory study investigating the epidemiology and effects of rabies to livestock owners in rural Ethiopia

A participatory study was carried out in the Oromia region of Ethiopia to ascertain the principal epidemiological features of rabies and its impact on livestock owners. Due to the variation in topography (and therefore livestock and human populations within the study area) villages from both high (>1500m) and lowland areas were included. Local development agents who had no knowledge of the study's purpose recruited a total of one hundred and ninety six participants from eleven lowland and ten highland villages. A facilitator trained in animal health and participatory techniques conducted the interviews with groups of up to eleven participants. Methods used included ranking, scoring, proportion piling, seasonality calendars and open discussions to investigate a set of questions pre determined from a pilot study. The relative importance of rabies to other zoonoses, temporal distributions of the disease, the species affected, current methods of control within affected species and consequences of their loss were all explored. Data was compared between high and lowland areas and previously published studies.The study found that rabies was considered the zoonosis of greatest risk to public health in both areas. It reportedly occurred with higher frequency in highland areas and subsequently affected more livestock in these parts. Two distinct temporal patterns within the areas were described and participants provided reasons of biological plausibility for the occurrence. Livestock were found to contribute as a higher proportion of all species affected than previously shown in published material. This is likely to be due to the low level of reporting of affected animals to the available veterinary services, from where comparative data originated. The death of infected livestock species was found to have numerous social and economic implications and the ramifications of this are made greater by the perception that the highest incidence of clinical disease being in areas of greatest livestock density. The underestimation of the burden of disease by central bodies is likely to influence the economic rationale behind effective rabies control in the future.

Una aproximación a la situación de los Agentes de Desarrollo Local (ADL) en el proceso de creación de nuevos polígonos industriales

Un modelo de desarrollo local como el que tenemos implantado, aparecido a mediados de los años ochenta como respuesta a una situación de grave crisis económica y social, presenta hoy en día grandes carencias de tipo estructural, muchas de las cuales se han ido originando de facto con el transcurso de los años sin que nadie haya recogido el testigo de completar dichos vacíos. En esta nota destacamos una de ellas que consideramos muy visible en la actualidad: ante la floración continua de polígonos industriales –fuente teórica de empleo a nivel local– denotamos como el instrumento básico creado por el modelo de desarrollo local, los Agentes de Empleo y Desarrollo Local –AEDL o simplemente ADL– quedan apartados del proceso de su diseño y concepción, dedicando su labor profesional a tareas complementarias a las anteriores. Sobre la base de un estudio realizado en la comarca valenciana de La Ribera Alta, pretendemos poner de manifiesto esta situación y reflexionar sobre los principales factores que la causan.

Rural Movements in Europe: Scandinavia and the Accession States

This paper explores the national rural/village movements now established in some 16 European countries, with special focus on those in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The aim of the paper is to raise awareness by providing information on the significance of rural social movements, rather than to attempt a detailed analysis. Starting in the 1970s in some Scandinavian and Western European countries, as a local community response to rural decline, the village movements have built into major national forces, and have recently expanded into the EU accession states in Central and Eastern Europe. They were established to address issues of rural decline, agricultural change, migration, centralization and EU accession. They are now also organizing themselves at EU level, to provide a voice for rural communities in Europe. This is a notable example of a structured approach to mobilizing rural communities to become stronger agents of local development and to participate in rural policy-making at local, regional, national and EU levels. The paper draws on information gained in a recently completed initial investigation of the national village movements in Estonia, Finland, Slovakia and Denmark, together with information from Sweden. The information is based on that gathered from a wide range of interviews and the minimal documentation available from the movements themselves. The experiences of the movements in enabling local structural development, capacity-building, empowerment and action are documented, as is their work to develop strategic planning and advocacy. The paper identifies the motivating forces, structural and process models, activities and outcomes of the different movements. It takes account of the effects of differing national contexts, and identifies some key elements of experience and learning.

Traditional leadership factor in modern local government system in Ghana: policy Implementation, role conflict and marginalization

The search for appropriate institutional framework for local governance and development has been a difficult task in Africa. Although Traditional Authorities are authentic and time-tested institutions of governance, their role has been politically, administratively, and financially marginalized since the introduction of modern local government system. The focus of this paper is the discussion on the various local government structures, policies and their marginalization strategies. The discussions include indirect rule, establishment of town councils, introduction of public treasuries, the first and second republican local government models and the decentralized system of government with creation of District Assemblies. Some of the strengths and weaknesses of the systems were discussed. The issue of local taxation and the bias of the revenue distribution formula against Traditional Councils are also discussed. The Stool Land Revenue (SLR) shared among Traditional Authorities (TAs) is only 7 per cent of the District Assemblies Common Fund (Grants). The District Assemblies receive 55 per cent of the SLR plus DACF. The political structures, taxation authority, distribution of SLR, and Grants are used as tools to marginalize the traditional authorities. While the performance of some modern local government institutions, as agents of local development, is poor the development efforts of some Traditional Authorities at promoting education, health and environmental management, are highly commendable in Ghana. This indicates that Traditional Councils have potentials that are not fully harnessed due to marginalization. Modern local government stands to gain if Traditional Authorities become active partners and their potentials harnessed for development. Keywords: traditional leadership, agglomeration, devolution, marginalization Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 26(1) 2006: 76-88

Local development agents' training for sustainable and endogenous development: A participatory development project among mayan communities

This paper focuses on the capacity building of ‘local partnership’ members or leaders as development agents in their Mayan communities. It relates to an education/training process started in 1995 in four different regions of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, which was carried out by Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) and academic institutions. It refers to the topics, methods and techniques used in eight training workshops involving local groups' leaders from fifteen Mayan communities. The paper points out the capacities acquired by the local Mayan leaders and the impact on their own lives, and their current work with groups and communities. It is based on participant observation in workshops and communities and on interviews with trained agents. It was found that the major impact of the entire process relates to the agents' personal development. The pedagogic relation employed to encourage local and ethnic identities, traditional knowledge and self-confidence was of great importance in this process as well.