scholarly journals Energy and Food Demands, Drivers of Land Grab; A Case of Rufiji River Basin In Tanzania

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Godfrey Eliseus Massay
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Rufiji River

Land grabs has been a tendy phenomena in the last decade across the grobe with Africa and Asia being the hard hit regions.  There has been many drivers that fueled land grabs including the crisses in the food, fuel and finance sector. Attempts has been made by scholars, activists and international communities to define what consitute “land grab” in the contenporay period. Informed by the framework definition of land grabs provided by International Land Coalition’s Tirana Declaration of 2012, this paper uses two cases of foreign land-based agricutural investments to prove the existence of land grabs in Tanzania. Broadly, the two cases are evidence of the global energy and food crises shaping the national and local politics of land governance. These national and local politics are manifested into land grabs dispossesing communities of their land. The paper urgues that there is direct link between the global and the national politics of land grabs. If further shows the role played and approaches used by social movements to resist land grabs.  

scholarly journals Vielfalt and diversité: how local actors in France and Germany evaluate immigration and socio-cultural heterogeneity

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Schiller ◽  
Christine Lang ◽  
Karen Schönwälder ◽  
Michalis Moutselos
Keyword(s):  
Local Politics ◽  
Original Data ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Cultural Heterogeneity ◽  
Societal Actors ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Urban Level ◽  
And Migration

AbstractIn both Germany and France, perceptions of immigration, diversity and their societal consequences have undergone important transformations in the past two decades. However, existing research has only partially captured such processes. The “grand narratives” of national approaches, while still influential, no longer explain contemporary realities. Further, analyses of national politics and discourses may not sufficiently reflect the realities across localities and society more broadly. While emerging in different national contexts, little is known about how diversity is actually perceived by political stakeholders at the urban level. Given the key role of immigration and diversity in current conflicts over Europe’s future, it is imperative to assess present-day conceptualisations of migration-related diversity among important societal actors.This article investigates perceptions and evaluations of socio-cultural heterogeneity by important societal actors in large cities. We contribute to existing literature by capturing an unusually broad set of actors from state and civil society. We also present data drawn from an unusually large number of cities. How influential is the perception of current society as heterogeneous, and what forms of heterogeneity are salient? And is socio-cultural and migration-related heterogeneity evaluated as threatening or rather as beneficial? Based on an original data set, this study explores the shared and contested ideas, the cognitive roadmaps of state and non-state actors involved in local politics.We argue that, in both German and French cities, socio-cultural heterogeneity is nowadays widely recognized as marking cities and often positively connoted. At the same time, perceptions of the main features of diversity and of the benefits and challenges attached to it vary. We find commonalities between French and German local actors, but also clear differences. In concluding, we suggest how and why national contexts importantly shape evaluations of diversity.

The Study of American Local Governance: A Need for More and Better ‘Backyard‘ Scholarship

1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-14
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Oakerson
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
National Politics ◽  
State And Local

Occasional references to the old radical teaching that “all politics is local” notwithstanding, American political scientists have by and large treated the study of local politics as a subject of much lesser importance than national politics. The standard introductory course in “American democracy” has a national focus—often it is exclusively national. Briefly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the study of “urban politics” occupied a more prominent place in the discipline, but interest has waned. The priority concern in both teaching and research continues to be American national government and politics.This narrow focus leads to a distorted and truncated view of American democracy. Despite increased nationalization, state and local government has been and remains a basic element in the practice of American politics. The productivity and creativity of democracy in America are outcomes, not simply of a national political process, but of a complex system of governance in which local collective action provides much of the energy and initiative for addressing public problems. A vast amount of political activity in the United States is channeled through state and local institutions, where much of the work of public problem solving is done.

The Rise and Fall of the French Agences de l’Eau: From German-Type Subsidiarität to State Control

2018 ◽  
Vol 04 (03) ◽  
pp. 1850013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard O. Barraqué ◽  
Patrick Laigneau ◽  
Rosa Maria Formiga-Johnsson
Keyword(s):  
River Basin ◽  
River Basin Management ◽  
State Control ◽  
Integrated Water Management ◽  
Water Users ◽  
Basin Scale ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Administrative Elites

The Agences de l’eau (Water Agencies) are well known abroad as the French attempt to develop integrated water management at river basin scale through the implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). Yet, after 30 years of existence, environmental economists became aware that they were not implementing the PPP, and therefore were not aiming at reducing pollution through economic efficiency. Behind the purported success story, which still attracts visitors from abroad, a crisis has been recently growing. Initially based on the model of the German (rather than Dutch) waterboards, the French system always remained fragile and quasi-unconstitutional. It failed to choose between two legal, economic and institutional conceptions of river basin management. These principles differ on the definition of the PPP, and on the role of levies paid by water users. After presenting these two contrasting visions, the paper revisits the history of the French Agences, to show that, unwilling to modify the Constitution to make room for specific institutions to manage common pool resources, Parliament and administrative elites brought the system to levels of complexity and incoherence which might doom the experiment.

scholarly journals Facing Scarcity in a Land Grab Context in Cameroon

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 153-171
Author(s):  
Hugues Morell Meliki
Keyword(s):  
Rural Area ◽  
Management Strategy ◽  
Living Arrangement ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
Critical Exploration ◽  
Land Grabs

This paper undertakes a critical exploration of the mechanisms via which communities cope with scarcity resulting from land grabs. It explores two ranges of practices – residential multilocality and sorcery – through the lens of resilience. Residential multilocality appears as a novel living arrangement dealing with resource scarcity, while sorcery is used as a tool for bolstering a policy of resource regeneration. Thus, instead of rushing to nearby cities as a response to scarcity, the communities observed reinstate two silenced dynamics. Firstly, they underscore the rise of inter, and intra-rural mobility entrenched in the paradigm of residential multilocality. The paradigm embodies a scarcity management strategy in the sense that the abundance of vital resources in one rural area attracts villagers from other communities struggling with scarcity. Secondly, sorcery is used as a strategy to command eco-friendly behavior of villagers in order to successfully achieve a resource regeneration policy.

Religious Pilgrimages in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan E. Campo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Sacred Place

Pilgrimage, as a type of religious journey, involves embodied movement across geographic, social, political, cultural, and often religious boundaries to a sacred place or landscape. It is arguably a universal phenomenon that can engage individual pilgrims or millions, especially with the onset of modernity, which has facilitated travel over distances great and small. As an aspect of religious life in the United States, pilgrimage is often overlooked. Nevertheless, the country’s landscape encompasses numerous sites of sacred significance associated with organized religions, civil religion, and facets of its cultural religion that attract millions of visitors annually. As a dynamic set of phenomena, pilgrimages to such sites are constantly evolving, affected by factors such as religious and social movements, national politics, immigration, and tourism.

Likelihood of landslide occurrences for definition of rainfall thresholds applied to the Quitandinha river basin, Petrópolis, Brazil

Landslides ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Barreto de Mendonça ◽  
Fernanda Cristina Gonçalves Gonzalez ◽  
Glauco Valle da Silva Coelho
Keyword(s):  
River Basin ◽  
Rainfall Thresholds ◽  
Definition Of

scholarly journals THE POLITICS OF REGIONALISM AND FEDERATION IN EAST AFRICA, 1958–1964

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 519-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS VAUGHAN
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Politics ◽  
East African ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractRecent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonization, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here, the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state-making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralization of power and a means of defeating ‘tribalist’ opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics, and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

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