Maine Sea Grant Annual Report 2003

This annual report summarizes the accomplishments and activities of the Maine Sea Grant Program from October 1, 2002 to September 30, 2003. We have organized the report by program areas: management, research, extension/education, and communications. The projects and activities in the extension section are grouped according to the three theme areas (ecosystem health, aquaculture, and fisheries) listed in our strategic plan for 2001-2005, Marine Science for Maine People

Maine Sea Grant Annual Report 2002

This annual report summarizes the accomplishments and activities of the Maine Sea Grant Program from October 1, 2001 to September 30, 2002. We have organized the report by program areas: management, research, extension/education, and communications. The projects and activities in the Marine Extension Team: Connecting to Coastal Residents section are grouped according to the three theme areas (ecosystem health, aquaculture, and fisheries) listed in our strategic plan for 2001-2005, Marine Science for Maine People

Stewarding Biodiversity and Food Security in The Coral Triangle: Achievements, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

The management team of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)- supported Coral Triangle Support Partnership (CTSP) commissioned this report to take a qualitative look at the achievements, challenges, and lessons learned from investment in CTSP. CTSP is part of a broader USAID investment supporting the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security (CTI-CFF), a six-nation effort to sustain vital marine and coastal resources in the Coral Triangle located in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific

Maine Sea Grant Annual Report 2007

Over this past year, Maine Sea Grant has worked to improve its connections within the university community through collaborative projects with the Climate Change Institute, the School of Marine Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Center for Tourism Research and Outreach (CENTRO). These collaborations have involved joint funding proposals for new programs, presentations, and workshops, and Sea Grant financial investments in research activities in these units

Citizen participation in managing water: Do Conversatorios generate collective action?

A central challenge for effective watershed management is improving the welfare of residents who live in upper catchments while providing adequate environmental goods and services to people and areas downstream. A CPWF project, Sustaining Collective Action Linking Economic and Ecological Scales in Upper Watersheds (SCALES), addressed this challenge in three sites.1 This document is an evaluation of a project activity that intended to enhance collective action in one site: the Coello watershed of Colombia. Collective action can influence how people use and manage natural resources. It is a process by which voluntary institutions (e.g., rules and regulations) are created and maintained, often with the aim of improving human and environmental welfare and, especially for water resources, it typically involves a broad range of stakeholders who control, use and benefit from water. Examples of stakeholders include government, private businesses, landowners, farmers, and city dwellers. The SCALES project researched and fostered collective action. The Conversatorio of Acción Ciudadana (CAC) served as the collective action mechanism to promote civil society participation in public policy decisions. Supported by the Colombian constitution, the legal power of CACs enable communities to discuss policies and reach agreements with government authorities. People in the Coello watershed confront water problems that affect their livelihoods. Contamination and deforestation are two major causes of water resource degradation, in terms of both water quality and flow regulation. Specifically, fertilizer contamination of water supplies and sedimentation of waterways negatively affect downstream communities. The watershed also faces competition for water supplies. Water is extracted from natural waterways for both rural irrigation and urban household consumption. A CAC is more than a large meeting to talk and make decisions. The CAC is a four-phase process that enhances the effectiveness of local participation: (1) awareness-raising, (2) capacity-building and preparation (3) CAC implementation, and (4) review and planning. The CAC mechanism has brought together diverse actors and fostered collective action across spatial and social scales. Many types of actors have participated, including local NGOs, upstream and downstream community representatives, politically important actors (at municipal, provincial and national levels) and scientific experts in research and development (R&D). The objective of this review is to evaluate the impact of the CAC process. Evaluation methods included analysis of SCALES project reports and documentation on impact pathways, interviews and social networks. The intended project outcomes, as identified by the project implementers themselves, served as the starting point for the analysis. These expectations were contrasted with identifiable project outcomes. A social network analysis reviewed contextual conditions, mechanisms of intervention, and processes that led to the project outcomes. The evaluation also analyzed interviews with project participants. Some interviews employed techniques of video data collection, where project participants 2011.04.22.CPWF WP-IAS-08.draftv3 CPWF Working Paper - Impact Assessment Series No. 06 vii interviewed key actors regarding their perceptions and opinions of project outcomes and likely impacts. Results of the project evaluation reveal that the CAC process effectively fosters collective action in watersheds communities. Capacity-building activities of the project contributed to communities participating in meetings with multiple organizations and making collective decisions. In addition, dialogue and networking activities increased organizational and political support for communities and local NGOs. This is an example of higher-level organizations (i.e., subnational, national and international) working with lower-level organizations and communities; in other words, cross-scale collaboration. Key outputs of the CAC process included 27 agreements with government authorities with financial commitments of over US$2 million. These agreements included projects for conservation, resource management, agricultural production systems and potable water systems. The project produced four outcomes: 1. Increased awareness of water issues amongst people in the watershed. Distinct problems and experiences from the upper, middle and lower areas of the watershed were shared. Better understanding of others’ perspectives provided incentives for communities to jointly resolve problems and establish agreements. 2. Strengthened links amongst community and environmental organizations. The CAC provided a forum for community-based organizations (CBOs) and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) to communicate and build support for their agendas with both communities and government agencies. Such interactions enabled organizations to establish partnerships and obtain additional public-sector funds. 3. Enhanced local capacities and relationships with authorities. New knowledge helped clarify citizen rights, along with roles and responsibilities of organizations. The CAC generated dialogue and, in turn, commitments of government organizations to work on issues raised by communities. 4. New priorities and commitments for environmentfriendly land uses. The agenda of the CBOs, NGOs and public-sector agencies broadened beyond water to include land uses such as agriculture, power generation and forests. Specific development and conservation practices included organic farming, waste management, forest management and reforestation. Evaluation results show that the CAC process has the potential to become an international public good/method that can (a) facilitate community access to knowledge, technology and skills, and (b) enable them to participate in decision-making processes in managing water and other natural resources. Given the relatively short time frame between project and evaluation, impacts cannot be realistically assessed. Social change processes and associated impact require years to evolve and grow. Nevertheless, the project activities and outputs have laid important groundwork for longer-term economic, social and environmental impacts. Although the CAC process benefits from the support of Colombian constitution, similar effective collective action projects could be achieved in other locations despite not receiving such support. Civic organizations (CBOs or NGOs) can influence government decisions. As lobbying pressures and accountability for actions increase, government agencies themselves will have greater incentive to perform. The CAC process connects the people with authorities, thereby improving decisions and actions

A comparative study of late-imperial and early-republican private property rights institutions, as measured by their effects on Shanghai's early financial markets

This research presents an analysis of Shanghai's two separate, parallel but simultaneously coexisting institutional environments, one operating under control of the Chinese central government, and the other under an extraterritorial system defined by foreign (mainly British, American, and French) political and legal conceptualisations. This institutionally dichotomic condition characterised Shanghai for over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth to midtwentieth centuries, throughout the course of amid tumultuous political upheaval shaping the domestic political landscape. The nature of these parallel institutional environments in large part reflected the period's political events; the era's political turmoil, via their impact on the nature of institutional protections on private property, contract, and investor rights, concomitantly helped determine Shanghai's economic development, including the development of the city's financial markets. While China's broader domestic institutional framework over this period has received considerable attention in the literature, there exists debate regarding the nature of the strength and efficacy of the domestic institutional environment, particularly in regard to issues pertaining to state capacity and protection of private property rights. This debate is reflective of similar debate within Chinese economic history, one that has portrayed China's late-imperial and republican economic growth as signified mostly by failure, yet with recent revisionist work providing intriguing empirical evidence suggesting considerably stronger economic growth to have occurred throughout the period. In a parallel manifestation, a robust revisionist literature has presented an effective challenge to the standard conventional literature has tended to view the domestic institutional environment over the period as inherently weak and ineffective. In this research project, we utilise Shanghai's unique dualistic institutional setting over this period to help address this debate in the literature. Specifically, we identify how differences between these two institutional frameworks impacted economic actors' behaviour, with a particular emphasis on the revealed preferences displayed by investors acting within Shanghai's early financial markets. To undertake our analysis, we construct an original dataset based on archival records of bond and equity prices that traded on Shanghai's early stock exchanges. The market pricing and trading activity associated with similarly constructed financial instruments, differing primarily in terms of the issuer –whether a domestic or extraterritorial entity– reflect the differing perceptions that contemporaneous investors ascribed to the broader institutional environments. This economic and financial historical research project therefore utilises analysis of contemporaneous investor perceptions to examine not only Shanghai's early financial markets, but also to draw broader conclusions regarding Shanghai's dual institutional environment from a comparative perspective, as well as providing a new viewpoint on a long-standing debate in the literature regarding the efficacy and strength of China's domestic institutional foundations over the late-imperial and early republican time period

Small Words, Weighty Matters: Gossip, Knowledge and Libel in Early Republican China, 1916-1928

In the years following the death of the autocratic ruler Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), the flow of gossip surrounding political leaders in China’s urban spheres revealed an open, disorderly yet robust arena full of competing voices, agendas, and manipulations. My dissertation examines gossip as both a new body of public political knowledge and a means of popular participation in this politically-fragmented and transitional era. On the one hand, this body of political knowledge engaged a wide spectrum of Chinese society engaged with this body of political knowledge, and which fostered an uncontrolled playful citizenship in China’s urban spaces. On the other hand, this new civic participation prompted the fledging Republican state to curb the dissemination of information through censorship, legal avenues and political propaganda. I argue that political gossip played a constructive role in forming a participatory political culture, in developing state mechanisms to discipline popular knowledge, and in transforming shaping legal categories of defamation. Different fromAs opposed to other studies that analyze the formation of Chinese citizenship in the process of nation-building, my project contextualizes the popular political participation in the Republican era within a broader shift in political culture that was increasingly shaped by the entertainment media. Lower- class information traders and a commoner audience dominated in the gossip economy by actively producing and consuming narratives and opinions, without being restricted by state education and elite activism. My research thus offers a brand new bottom-up perspective in the studyies of Republican Chinese political culture. Chapter 1 examines the commercialization of “trivial information” by focusing on the rise of a commercially driven and professionalized group of gossipmongers across varying social-economic strata in the late 1910s and the early 1920s. The expansion of the community affected both the practice and mindset of gossipmongers in the industry. Chapter 2 shows how the entertainment interplayed with political significance in the early Republican gossip publications to involve more commoner readers in both knowledge production and consumption in this gossip economy. This unique mode challenged conventional top-down knowledge transmission and the sense of exclusivity in the field of knowledge production. Chapter 3 illuminates the state’s efforts at developing a new censorship system and tactics of moral persuasion for re-building knowledge and establishing moral authority in the late 1910s. I show that the central government was a functional authority in the cultural realm during the period of chaotic and fragmentation. Chapter 4 turns to the relationship between the mass media and the defamation law. It focuses on a 1919 case in which the Beijing government sued the Republican Daily for insulting the President. Although the state attempted to use the legal instrument to fix a boundary between playful and serious political discussion, the Press’ commercial pursuit and insistence on autonomy gradually transformed this means of taming into a mechanism of publicity. The last chapter analyzes the politics of visibility from the aspect perspective of political leaders who also drew on the discursive power of gossip by examining Jiang Jieshi’s coordinated effort to take control publicity surrounding his romantic life and wedding ceremony in 1927. In this new form of official political communication, a striking tension persisted between the attempts of to use the form and dissemination power of gossip as an effective technique of social influence and the unruly commercial adaptation of media narratives

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Reimagining Urban Place and Governance in Semarang, Indonesia

Purpose: This project analyzes the uses of space and geography up the scales of political organization – from the village to the municipal – attempting to find the intersections where physical space meets governance using Semarang, Indonesia as my strategic case. This research employs a biocultural lens, addressing the existing gaps in literature by advancing a framework to function across disciplines and ultimately reconnecting to its practical application in urban planning and design. Such a framework is important in providing a blueprint for building a coherent and supportive structure on which to assess the human impact of design and contribute new “human-centered” solutions to the discussion of the way we plan, upgrade, and build our cities. Methods examined the formal planning strategies employed by the municipality to mitigate the city’s key shocks and stresses; the informal acts of community mapping and placemaking incited by community stakeholders; and the overlay of these two urbanizing processes; framing the study of the kota (city) and its governance in terms of their interaction in the built environment. Practical Implications: This paper suggests that if participatory, village-oriented strategies were further encouraged and even facilitated by the city – especially in neighborhoods with high environmental risk – corresponding policy efforts and geospatial planning in building urban resilience will prove more effective and efficient. This paper further asserts the function of place and placemaking as a tool for leveraging village voices in urban development