scholarly journals The political economy of landslides and international aid relief: a qualitative investigation in rural Uganda

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 720
Author(s):  
Kelly F Austin ◽  
Maria Theresa Mejia
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Unequal Exchange ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Relief Efforts ◽  
Aid Relief

<p>This is a qualitative study of perspectives from community members on landslides in Bududa, Uganda. Interviews with community members reveal their perceptions of the causes, effects, and aid response to landslides. We employ a 'structural fieldwork' approach to explain community member's thoughts and experiences using critical macro-comparative perspectives relating to political ecology. This research brings attention to how large-scale unequal relationships in trade and international aid increase landslide vulnerability and there are ineffective relief efforts in a particular locale. Linking environmental degradation in Bududa to political, economic, and social factors provides a broader context in which to view risk from landslides in this community, as a critical case in demonstrating how economic globalization benefits some at the expense of others.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Landslides, unequal exchange, disaster, NGOs, political economy<strong></strong></p>

scholarly journals Integrating Pixels, People, and Political Economy to Understand the Role of Armed Conflict and Geopolitics in Driving Deforestation: The Case of Myanmar

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4589
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Woods ◽  
Panshi Wang ◽  
Joseph O. Sexton ◽  
Peter Leimgruber ◽  
Jesse Wong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Integrated Analysis ◽  
Forest Cover Change ◽  
The North ◽  
Deforestation Rates ◽  
Study Sites ◽  
Political Economic

Armed conflict and geopolitics are a driving force of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC), but with considerable variation in deforestation trends between broader and finer scales of analysis. Remotely-sensed annual deforestation rates from 1989 to 2018 are presented at the national and (sub-) regional scales for Kachin State in the north of Myanmar and in Kayin State and Tanintharyi Region in the southeast. We pair our multiscaled remote sensing analysis with our multisited political ecology approach where we conducted field-based interviews in study sites between 2018 and 2020. Our integrated analysis identified three common periods of deforestation spikes at the national and state/region level, but with some notable disparities between regions as well as across and within townships and village tracts. We found the rate and geography of deforestation were most influenced by the territorial jurisdictions of armed authorities, national political economic reforms and timber regulations, and proximity to national borders and their respective geopolitical relations. The absence or presence of ceasefires in the north and southeast did not solely explain deforestation patterns. Rather than consider ceasefire or war as a singular explanatory variable effecting forest cover change, we demonstrate the need to analyze armed conflict as a dynamic multisited and diffuse phenomenon, which is simultaneously integrated into broader political economy and geopolitical forces.

scholarly journals Out of steam: Energy, materiality, and political ecology

2019 ◽  
pp. 030913251988462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Cederlöf
Keyword(s):  
Thermodynamic Properties ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Technical System ◽  
Unequal Exchange ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Economic

Energy is increasingly used as a lens to study wider social processes. For political ecologists, ‘energy’ has usually been seen as a resource or socio-technical system that gives rise to contentious social relations. This article instead thinks of energy as a materiality with thermodynamic properties. At once, energy becomes an analytical concept with physical and political-economic dimensions. Developing this perspective, the article examines the notion of ecologically unequal exchange and unpacks discussions on how energy systems are co-productive of politicised environments. The outcome is an expanded definition of political ecology set out in relation to three modes of social power.

scholarly journals Jakarta’s great land transformation: Hybrid neoliberalisation and informality

Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 627-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suryono Herlambang ◽  
Helga Leitner ◽  
Liong Ju Tjung ◽  
Eric Sheppard ◽  
Dimitar Anguelov
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Central City ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Shopping Centre ◽  
Private Sector Development ◽  
Political Economic

We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.

Social inequality in the evolution of human societies

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Georgi Derluguian
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Tangible Assets ◽  
Transition To Agriculture ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
High Level ◽  
Political Economic

The author develops ideas about the origin of social inequality during the evolution of human societies and reflects on the possibilities of its overcoming. What makes human beings different from other primates is a high level of egalitarianism and altruism, which contributed to more successful adaptability of human collectives at early stages of the development of society. The transition to agriculture, coupled with substantially increasing population density, was marked by the emergence and institutionalisation of social inequality based on the inequality of tangible assets and symbolic wealth. Then, new institutions of warfare came into existence, and they were aimed at conquering and enslaving the neighbours engaged in productive labour. While exercising control over nature, people also established and strengthened their power over other people. Chiefdom as a new type of polity came into being. Elementary forms of power (political, economic and ideological) served as a basis for the formation of early states. The societies in those states were characterised by social inequality and cruelties, including slavery, mass violence and numerous victims. Nowadays, the old elementary forms of power that are inherent in personalistic chiefdom are still functioning along with modern institutions of public and private bureaucracy. This constitutes the key contradiction of our time, which is the juxtaposition of individual despotic power and public infrastructural one. However, society is evolving towards an ever more efficient combination of social initiatives with the sustainability and viability of large-scale organisations.

The Idea of a Meaningful Synthesis of Marxist and Non-Marxist Systems of Political Economy as a Mirror of Intellectual Turmoil (About V.T. Ryazanov’s Book «Modern Political Economy: Prospects of Neo-Marxist Synthesis»)

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
A.B. Lyubinin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Subjective Assessments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Political Economic

Review of the monograph indicated in the subtitle V.T. Ryazanov. The reviewer is critical of the position of the author of the book, believing that it is possible and even necessary (to increase the effectiveness of General economic theory and bring it closer to practice) substantial (and not just formal-conventional) synthesis of the Marxist system of political economy with its non-Marxist systems. The article emphasizes the difference between the subject and the method of the classical, including Marxist, school of political economy with its characteristic objective perception of the subject from the neoclassical school with its reduction of objective reality to subjective assessments; this excludes their meaningful synthesis as part of a single «modern political economy». V.T. Ryazanov’s interpretation of commodity production in the economic system of «Capital» of K. Marx as a purely mental abstraction, in fact — a fiction, myth is also counter-argued. On the issue of identification of the discipline «national economy», the reviewer, unlike the author of the book, takes the position that it is a concrete economic science that does not have a political economic status.

The possibility of democratic socialism in Habermas

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102098689
Author(s):  
Pedro A. Teixeira
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Economic Regime ◽  
The Ideal

In keeping with the radical openness of his theory of democracy, Habermas avoided pre-determining the ideal mode of economic organization for his favoured model of deliberative democracy. Instead of attempting a full-blown derivation, in this article, I propose adapting the Rawlsian method of comparing different political–economic regimes as candidate applications of his theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. Although both theorists are seen as endorsing liberal democratic world views, from the perspective of political economy, the corollary of their conceptions of democracy would arguably veer elsewhere: in Rawls’s case, into the territory of property-owning democracy or democratic socialism, and in Habermas’s, into any political–economic regime which guarantees the real exercise of full political and discursive liberties against the background of legitimate lawmaking. The ultimate aim of this article is to discuss whether a concrete conception of democratic socialism, if any, is compatible with Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy.

The Role of Politics in the Historical Transport Networks of the Iberian Peninsula and the Pyrenees from Roman Times to the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-260
Author(s):  
Pau de Soto ◽  
Cèsar Carreras
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Transport Network ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Transport Networks ◽  
Political Economic

AbstractTransport routes are basic elements that are inextricably linked to diverse political, economic, and social factors. Transport networks may be the cause or result of complex historical conjunctions that reflect to some extent a structural conception of the political systems that govern each territory. It is for this reason that analyzing the evolution of the transport routes layout in a wide territory allows us to recognize the role of the political organization and its economic influence in territorial design. In this article, the evolution of the transport network in the Iberian Peninsula has been studied in a broad chronological framework to observe how the different political systems of each period understood and modified the transport systems. Subsequently, a second analysis of the evolution of transport networks in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula is included in this article. This more detailed and geographically restricted study allows us to visualize in a different way the evolution and impact of changes in transport networks. This article focuses on the calculation of the connectivity to analyze the intermodal transport systems. The use of network science analyses to study historical roads has resulted in a great tool to visualize and understand the connectivity of the territories of each studied period and compare the evolution, changes, and continuities of the transport network.

Social Status in an Open-Source Community

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (5) ◽  
pp. 823-842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Natural Setting ◽  
Laboratory Setting ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Status Mobility ◽  
The Status

Despite a fair amount of conjecture regarding the circumstances that lead to the generation of status orders, most of the previous literature in this area typically has studied the effects of social cues within a laboratory setting. This article analyzes the evolution of the status hierarchy within a large-scale, natural setting. The results of empirical analyses assessing a large online community of software developers show that in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social references. Ironically, these same social references also work to constrain an actor's status mobility.

Large-Scale Sport Events and Resident Well-Being: Examining PERMA and the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jason Doyle ◽  
Kevin Filo ◽  
Alana Thomson ◽  
Thilo Kunkel
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Host Community ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Sport Events ◽  
Commonwealth Games

Delivering community-based benefits is oftentimes cited to justify the high costs associated with hosting large-scale events. The current research is embedded in positive psychology to examine how an event impacts host community members’ PERMA domains, reflected through positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the authors interviewed 15 host community members before and after a large-scale sport event to determine if and how the event impacted their well-being. The findings uncovered evidence that the event activated positive emotions, relationships, and meaning across both phases, and evidence of accomplishment within the postevent phase. The findings contribute to the knowledge by examining the links between large-scale sport events and well-being throughout the event lifecycle. This research forwards implications for event bidding committees, event organizers, and host community officials to maximize community well-being through hosting large-scale events and to help justify associated expenses from a social–psychological perspective.

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