Contextual influences on social enterprise management in rural and urban communities

The idea that difference exists between rural and urban enterprise activity is not new, the obvious comparators are measures such as social architecture, resource availability and accessibility. However, when the concept and practice of management in social enterprise is compared in these two contexts then there is opportunity to further our understanding of the contextual challenges encountered by social enterprise. In this paper six cases studies are compared and analysed: three cases are urban social enterprises and three classified as remote rural social enterprises. The urban cases are social enterprises located around Glasgow in the west of Scotland and are compared with three remote rural location studies, one on the Scottish mainland peninsula, the other in northern Scotland and the final case on a Scottish western island. We conclude that the main differences between remote rural and urban management of social enterprise are heavily nuanced by in-migration levels in both rural and urban locations, leadership and community needs and therefore deserving of context relevant policy

Building knowledge for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander remote tourism: lessons from comparable tourism initiatives around the world

This report aims to build knowledge about what issues Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may need to consider in remote tourism by reviewing, compiling and drawing insights from comparable tourism initiatives around the world.The report is based on information from a range of sources that highlight remote tourism issues at many different levels of strategy and development , from the micro level of ensuring engagement with local service providers, to the broad level of collaboration strategies with diverse interest groups. The examples identify a wealth of remote tourism roles available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, demonstrating that remote tourism is complicated and people should examine which roles are appropriate and achievable.The report covers the main remote area landscape settings: remote arid and semi-arid areas (deserts), remote rainforests, remote high altitude mountainous areas, and remote cold and warm water islands. Each section discusses a collection of cases and other tourism initiatives by people s indigenous to the respective remote landscape settings. Many cases illustrate the desires of people around the world to preserve natural and cultural qualities while sharing remote areas through tourism. Summaries from each case identify issues that progressively build further insight into the challenges and strategies people from around the world have applied to remote tourism.A limitation of the report is that the review provides a snapshot of remote tourism activity throughout the world; it has not been able to say which of these activities are sustainable. Nevertheless, this approach uncovers the gravity of challenges faced by Indigenous peoples around the world involved in remote tourism, with the common dependence on external sources particularly noted. While presenting the strategies used in the various international contexts to contend with the challenges, the report suggests that local knowledge and insight cannot be underestimated as a major factor in developing successful Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tourism businesses

Agri-environmental and rural development indicators: a proposal

The present work is a proposal of a set of indicators prepared for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The indicators are to be used in monitoring the implementation of the Ministry's strategy for sustainable use of natural resources. The core of the present work is in setting up an indicator system, which is structured around specific themes. The focus is on the assessment of agricultural and rural development. At the end, an attempt is made to provide a comprehensive picture by considering the mutual inter-linkages between the various indicators

Biodiversity Loss and the Taxonomic Bottleneck: Emerging Biodiversity Science

Human domination of the Earth has resulted in dramatic changes to global and local patterns of biodiversity. Biodiversity is critical to human sustainability because it drives the ecosystem services that provide the core of our life-support system. As we, the human species, are the primary factor leading to the decline in biodiversity, we need detailed information about the biodiversity and species composition of specific locations in order to understand how different species contribute to ecosystem services and how humans can sustainably conserve and manage biodiversity. Taxonomy and ecology, two fundamental sciences that generate the knowledge about biodiversity, are associated with a number of limitations that prevent them from providing the information needed to fully understand the relevance of biodiversity in its entirety for human sustainability: (1) biodiversity conservation strategies that tend to be overly focused on research and policy on a global scale with little impact on local biodiversity; (2) the small knowledge base of extant global biodiversity; (3) a lack of much-needed site-specific data on the species composition of communities in human-dominated landscapes, which hinders ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation; (4) biodiversity studies with a lack of taxonomic precision; (5) a lack of taxonomic expertise and trained taxonomists; (6) a taxonomic bottleneck in biodiversity inventory and assessment; and (7) neglect of taxonomic resources and a lack of taxonomic service infrastructure for biodiversity science. These limitations are directly related to contemporary trends in research, conservation strategies, environmental stewardship, environmental education, sustainable development, and local site-specific conservation. Today’s biological knowledge is built on the known global biodiversity, which represents barely 20% of what is currently extant (commonly accepted estimate of 10 million species) on planet Earth. Much remains unexplored and unknown, particularly in hotspots regions of Africa, South Eastern Asia, and South and Central America, including many developing or underdeveloped countries, where localized biodiversity is scarcely studied or described. ‘‘Backyard biodiversity’’, defined as local biodiversity near human habitation, refers to the natural resources and capital for ecosystem services at the grassroots level, which urgently needs to be explored, documented, and conserved as it is the backbone of sustainable economic development in these countries. Beginning with early identification and documentation of local flora and fauna, taxonomy has documented global biodiversity and natural history based on the collection of ‘‘backyard biodiversity’’ specimens worldwide. However, this branch of science suffered a continuous decline in the latter half of the twentieth century, and has now reached a point of potential demise. At present there are very few professional taxonomists and trained local parataxonomists worldwide, while the need for, and demands on, taxonomic services by conservation and resource management communities are rapidly increasing. Systematic collections, the material basis of biodiversity information, have been neglected and abandoned, particularly at institutions of higher learning. Considering the rapid increase in the human population and urbanization, human sustainability requires new conceptual and practical approaches to refocusing and energizing the study of the biodiversity that is the core of natural resources for sustainable development and biotic capital for sustaining our life-support system. In this paper we aim to document and extrapolate the essence of biodiversity, discuss the state and nature of taxonomic demise, the trends of recent biodiversity studies, and suggest reasonable approaches to a biodiversity science to facilitate the expansion of global biodiversity knowledge and to create useful data on backyard biodiversity worldwide towards human sustainability

Identifying obstacles to the design and implementation of payment schemes for ecosystem services provided through farm trees

An important determinant of ecosystem services provision from European farmland is the amount and spatial arrangement of trees, shrubs, and woodlands that are integrated into the respective land use systems. Farm trees are considered ‘keystone structures’ of agroecosystems because of their disproportionally large ecological value (relative to their low abundance), but are threatened by agricultural intensification, land abandonment, and urbanization. While the preservation of farm trees is a component of several command-and control approaches and while numerous payment schemes for ecosystem services (PES schemes) provided through agricultural practices do in general exist, there are few incentive-based policies that specifically target the conservation of farm trees. This paper uses an institutional economics framework for the analysis of PES schemes that enhance the establishment, protection, and management of farm trees. Using the German state of Saxony as a case, it elaborates on the reasons for the very reluctant participation of farmers in these schemes. The obstacles identified include high production and opportunity costs, contractual uncertainties, and land tenure implications. Further, since scheme adoption has been low compared with the total area covered by the respective farm tree types, the PES schemes alone cannot explain the substantial increase in number and size of some farm-tree types. Options to improve participation comprise regionalised premiums, result-oriented remuneration, and cooperative approaches. The example of PES schemes for farm trees highlights one of the major challenges for the protection and preservation of cultural landscapes: they are man-made and thus need to be preserved, managed, and maintained continuously.Payments for ecosystem services (PES), agroecosystems, trees outside forests, institutional economics, East Germany, Saxony, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,