Closing the Gender Gap in African Agriculture in the Face of Climate Change

Gender is not about ‘women and girls’ but about roles, responsibilities, access and control over resources and relations between men and women, boys and girls which are socially ascribed. Women’s meaningful participation in decision-making requires going beyond the presence of more women in institutions and processes. Comprehensive gender analyses at national and local levels are necessary to identify the challenges and opportunities for developing gender-responsive agricultural policies. A Gender Action Plan (GAP) for agriculture with a well-structured and robust M&E system is essential. Strengthening Gender Management Systems in the agriculture sector with regular gender audits can promote greater equity between women and men

Design Exchanges in Mid-Twentieth Century Buenos Aires: The Programme Parque Almirante Brown and its Process of Creative Appropriation

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article offers a critical analysis of planning and housing design in mid-twentieth century Buenos Aires, Argentina, within the wider global context of modern design and architecture. In particular, the article focuses on an urban development programme, Parque Almirante Brown (PAB), and on its design plans for slums, shantytowns and social housing. The PAB creatively intertwined elements from different design and planning traditions, including urban design approaches fostered by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). This article argues that the way in which the PAB incorporated these approaches implies the selection of concepts that responded to the government’s political agenda. In other words, it was only through their intersection with local political anxieties that international ideas were included in the actual design of the programme. Specifically, with regard to informal settlements, the PAB followed modern architectural practices based on slum clearance. Simultaneously, it filtered out those ideas which celebrated the vernacular, registered positive aspects in slum life, or granted agency to grassroots groups. Thus, despite contemporaneous discussions which engaged with bottom-up participation, such as those of Team 10, the PAB ultimately proposed the eradication of the shantytowns and the forced displacement of their inhabitants

George F. Kennan’s strategy of Containment: an assessment of Kennan’s coherence and consistency

This thesis examines George F. Kennan’s coherence and consistency when he formulated the strategy of containment. Kennan’s work went through different stages which depended on the political context it was set in as circumstances evolved and the position he held. The aim is not to criticise Kennan but understand whether he remained consistent and coherent and why changes occurred. When Kennan sent the Long Telegram and delivered lectures at the National War College, the strategy had not been structured. In 1946 and early 1947, containment was not a strategy, it was still an idea. The Long Telegram provided him with the opportunity to move to the National War College to develop and structure a strategy. The invitation in 1947 to enter the official bureaucracy as the Director of the Policy Planning Staff did not demand that Kennan create a strategy but he was able to use it as an opportunity to build the strategy he had been advocating which was to contain Soviet expansion through the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe, Germany and Japan. Kennan remained consistent with his recommendations for a political-economic containment, specifically avoiding any military intervention. Kennan became trapped by the X article, as it distorted his views, making it appear that he was contradicting his original approach to containment. Kennan attempted to fight back against the misunderstanding of this article by focusing on political-economic policies, but it became clear that he was losing his influence and struggling to implement a coherent strategy. The extension of the containment strategy beyond strategic areas, the rejection of Program A, along with the continued division of Europe and the more militarized tone of the containment strategy stopped Kennan from implementing a coherent containment strategy. By 1953, Kennan and his containment strategy had been defeated

Risk prioritisation of stormwater pollutant sources

This paper describes the development of a pollutant risk prioritisation methodology for the comparative assessment of stormwater pollutants discharged from differing land use types and activities. Guidelines are presented which evaluate available data with respect to ‘likelihood of occurrence’ and ‘severity of impact’. The use of the developed approach is demonstrated through its application to total suspended solids, biochemical oxygen demand, lead and cadmium. The proposed benchmarking scheme represents a transparent and auditable mechanism to support the synthesis of data from a variety of sources and is sufficiently flexible to incorporate the use of chemical, physical and/or ecological data sets. Practitioners involved in developing and implementing pollutant mitigation programmes are assisted in two key ways. Firstly through enabling the risks to receiving waters from diffuse pollution on a source-by-source and/or pollutant-by-pollutant basis at a catchment scale to be comparatively assessed and prioritised. Secondly, the methodology informs the selection of appropriate diffuse pollution control strategies