Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation

This article argues that, although anti-colonial delegations to the 1945 San Francisco Conference did not succeed in bringing all colonial territories under the umbrella of international trusteeship, the threat of expanding international oversight shaped the relationship between colonial governments and international organisations in powerful ways. By focusing on how the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories evolved as a de factosupervisory system for dependent territories, this article considers the ways that representatives at the United Nations defined dependency and self-government and explores the crusade that colonial governments led to justify imperialism in the post-war world. Through a consideration of the diplomatic actions of France, Great Britain and Belgium, this article explores the ways that colonial empires jointly mobilised to defend colonialism at the level of the United Nations. In the face of evolving supervisory mechanisms at the United Nations, the French, British and Belgian delegations joined forces in an attempt to expose some of the inherent contradictions in UN policy towards dependent populations, and to make the case that subject populations living in independent territories often endured worse conditions than those living in formal overseas empires

Contribution of agronomy to land management issues - A Comparison of five interdisciplinary PhD theses

An introductory literature review highlights the growing attention within the processes taking place at farming region and landscape scale beside the classical spatial scales at cultivated/experimental plot level. This recent evolution in agronomy finds its origin in newly emerging land management issues. Meanwhile, geography and other disciplines are stressing the need for a greater integration of multifunctional agricultural activities into the decision-making processes at the various levels of land management, such as provinces, municipalities or watersheds. This requires also that studies on farmland management include explicitly the different environmental and social contexts influencing farming activities. In this paper we aim to analyse how recent agronomic oriented research are facing and supporting various land management issues. We have compared five interdisciplinary PhD theses examining their definitions and methods of analysis for: the farming system, the local land management issues at stake, the spatial scale selected for the study, the stakeholders' involvement and the interaction with other disciplines. Common issues which emerged from this comparison are delivery of agro-environmental services, sustainable land management and landscape conservation. Multiple spatial levels were considered, which included at least one administrative unit of policy decision/implementation. Consequently, the explicit (re)definition of some agronomic concepts and methods was needed. Regarding the interdisciplinary framework, the theses have stressed the interactions among agronomy, geography and ecology. All theses aimed at delivering tools for decision-making support, mainly in the form of cartography. Nevertheless the participation of local stakeholders was generally included as a final step; herewith the settings of stakeholders' involvement were various. In conclusion, we discuss how the produced knowledge has enhanced the land management issues in local planning tools. On these bases, we stress finally the issues at stake to strengthen the roles and contributions of agronomic oriented education and research to agricultural land management and development. (Résumé d'auteur

Les conflits d'usage des espaces périurbains et le contentieux administratif. Le cas de la région Ile-de-France..

L’article porte sur une analyse des conflits d’usages d’espace, traduits par les requêtes devant la justice administrative française de 1981 à 2005. Le terrain d’étude est le périurbain francilien, territoire qui connaît une forte urbanisation et où la diversité des modes d’occupation du sol nécessite une meilleure compréhension de la dynamique spatiale et temporelle de la conflictualité. L’étude empirique montre une corrélation entre l’augmentation des conflits d’usage en Île-de-France et la dynamique de périurbanisation. Elle met en évidence un couplage entre certains types de conflits et certaines caractéristiques du territoire : les problèmes d’urbanisme font souvent l’objet conflictuel dominant dans les communes plutôt aisées, tandis que l’opposition aux infrastructures publiques se situe fréquemment dans les communes à forte urbanisation. Les nuisances des installations classées sont souvent localisées dans des communes plutôt peu aisées.The article provides an analysis of land-use conflicts extract from the rulings of French Administrative Courts from 1981 to 2005. It focuses on Paris’s suburb, where the urbanisation process and the diversity of land-use require a deeper comprehension of the problem. Our results show that the land-use conflict’s evolution is correlated with the urbanisation process. They also detect a coupling phenomenon between conflict’s type and territory’s parameters : urbanism disputes often arise in wealthy municipalities, whereas oppositions to public infrastructure have particularly risen in strongly urbanising towns. Classified industrial facility’s nuisances have been found in unfortunate municipalities.Île-de-France; contentieux; périurbanisation; conflit d’usage; Paris region; periurbanisation; land-use conflict; litigation;

Diaspora, Développement et Citoyenneté: Les Migrants Originaires du Bassin du Fleuve Sénégal

The author analyses the contribution of the diaspora on the development of their locality

Emplois et territoires : l'hypercentralité fonctionnelle de Paris, un atout pour l'Île-de-France ?

Et si l'atout de Paris dans la compétition entre métropoles globales était la concentration spatiale en son cœur de fonctions économiques stratégiques ? Constatant l'hypercentralité fonctionnelle de la métropole parisienne, Lise Bourdeau-Lepage et Élisabeth Tovar s'interrogent sur les effets sociaux et économiques de la politique de localisation des emplois

Experiences from a winter school on landscape agronomy: Stakes, difficulties, perspectives

International audienceIn the latest fifteen years, agronomic research has shown a growing interest for studies which link farm or field scale to landscape scale. Thus, agronomy is called to renew its research questions and methodologies, and as well its educational programmes. In this context, some French and Italian researchers interested in these topics, coming from different scientific fields but sharing interests on landscape scale issues in research and higher education, decided to join their efforts around a common one-week educational programme on Landscape Agronomy for undergraduate and PhD students. Their aim has been to develop a new form of knowledge transfer and application on Landscape Agronomy approaches to students of SSSA-Pisa (IT) and of the PhD School of ABIES-AgroParisTech-Paris (FR). The educational programme consisted of three phases : 1) some theoretical contributions supported by presentations on : issues regarding agriculture and farming practices at landscape level, main approaches on environmental functions of agriculture, changes in farmers practices driven by environmental questions,spatial organization of agricultural activities, role of farming in ecological dynamics, identification of complementarities among agro-environmental functions, environmental impacts of cropping systems,biodiversity influence on agro-ecosystem functions and vice-versa ; 2) two case-studies: a macro level one(at landscape scale) to analyse the role of agriculture on landscape dynamics, and a micro level one (at farm scale) to analyse farming practices and their environmental impacts ; 3) a final evaluation of the educational programme based on : contents of oral presentations on fieldwork results, global evaluation of the educational programme contents by all the participants, each individual ex-post analysis of fieldwork results. The evaluation of the students and teachers underlines benefits, requests and perspectives for education in landscape agronomy. Furthermore, this experience stimulated a collective conceptual and methodological debate that confirmed the necessity to favour and organise experience exchanges on researching and learning in landscape agronomy