Resettlement as climate change adaptation: what can be learned from state-led relocation in rural Africa and Asia?

There is growing interest in helping people in developing countries cope with climate change by reframing population relocation as an adaptation strategy. However, there is also ongoing uncertainly surrounding what the advantages and disadvantages of resettling poor and vulnerable communities might be. This article helps address this knowledge gap by considering what might be learned from recent and ongoing state-led relocation programmes in rural Africa and Asia. It draws on a review of planned displacement and resettlement in eight countries, and six months’ experience researching a relocation programme in central Mozambique, to make three arguments: first, there is need to uncover long-standing governmental perceptions of rural populations and the ways in which these affect state-led responses to climate shocks and stresses; second, it is necessary to develop more sophisticated understanding of human choice, volition and self-determination during resettlement as adaptation; and third, greater attention should be paid to how development narratives are generated, transmitted and internalised during climate-induced relocations. Taking into account socioeconomic, political and historical realities in these ways will help to avoid situations in which present-day interventions to assist populations experiencing or threatened by climate displacement simply repeat or reinforce past injustices

Resilience as transformative capacity: exploring the quadripartite cycle of structuration in a Mozambican resettlement programme

The concept of resilience has emerged out of a complex literature that has sought to make sense of an increasingly interconnected world that appears ever more beset by crises. Resilience’s appeal is reflected by the burgeoning mass of literature that has appeared on the subject in the past five years. However, there is ongoing debate surrounding its usage, with some commentators claiming that the term is inherently too conservative a one to be usefully applied to situations of vulnerability in which more radical social change is required. This article extends existing efforts to formulate more transformative notions of resilience by reframing it as a double-edged outcome of the pre-reflective and critical ways in which actors draw upon their internal structures following the occurrence of a negative event, thus reproducing or changing the external structural context that gave rise to the event in the first place. By employing a structuration-inspired analysis to the study of small-scale farmer responses to a flood-induced resettlement programme in central Mozambique, the article presents a systematic approach to the examination of resilience in light of this reframing. The case study findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the facilitative, as well as constraining, nature of structures if vulnerable populations are to be assisted in their efforts to exert transformative capacity over the wider conditions that give rise to their difficulties

This doorknob is on the ceiling

This Doorknob is on the Ceiling is a thesis exhibition of sculptural works that explore the fusion of various domestic, industrial and commonplace objects. Some are new, but most of them are used and outdated. I explore and take advantage of the baggage that comes along with them, their history, their functions and what they suggest. My intention with these items is to both exploit and subvert the contextual boundaries which define them. I manipulate these objects in opposition to the way they are normally presented, encountered and understood, while leaving them recognizable. I am interested in obstructing function and creating unexpected associations between ordinary things. These works investigate dynamic spatial arrangements and codependent evocative relationships between objects that typically need human interaction to become activated or purposeful. I force them to depend on one another for physical support by intersecting and embedding them, creating animated arrangements motivated by indiscernible forces and circumstances

Characterization of alloimmune responses and the generation of transplantation tolerance in thymectomized, thymus-implanted xenopus

This Thesis investigates the role of the Xenopus thymus in educating T cells to destroy minor histocompatibility (H) antigen-disparate skin grafts and probes the extent to which allotolerance is established to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigens first encountered at metamorphosis. The work began with intrastrain skin grafting and mixed leucocyte culture (MLC) (Chapter 2) which confirmed that only minor H antigen differences exist between J strain Xenopus laevis individuals, thus making them suitable as an additional animal model to the X.laevis/X.gilli (LG) isogeneic hybrids available. Chapter 3 revealed that rejection of minor H disparate grafts was completely thymus-dependent, while 7-day thymectomy (Tx) severely impaired rejection of MHC disparate grafts. Implantation (at 4-6 weeks of age) of larval or adult thymus from MHC-compatible or MHC-disparate donors restored the ability of Tx Xenopus to reject 3rd-party MHC antigen-disparate grafts, while tolerance to skin of the thymus donor type always ensued. Restoration of minor H graft rejection was impaired when thymus donor and TX host were MHC- or minor H antigen-mismatched. The use of LG hybrids revealed that minor H graft rejection was restored in Tx hosts only by implantation of a fully identical thymus. In Chapter 4, skin graft tolerance to donor MHC antigens was demonstrated following perimetamorphic allografting of skin to control J and LG recipients; the skin graft tolerance induced in certain donor/host combinations was shown to be not entirely specific for minor H antigens. In Chapter 5, in vitro, 1-way MLC reactivity of splenocytes from thymus-implanted Tx animals to thymus donor-type cells was shown to be variable, but occasionally positive; control Xenopus, made allotolerant of skin grafts by prior skin implantation retained a splenic MLC towards skin donor strain splenocytes. In vivo MLR assays in Chapter 6 also detected proliferation towards alloantigens of the skin or thymus donor, but the nature of these alloreactive (T-dependent) cells remains uncertain. Preliminary graft-versus-host experiments indicated that the tolerance induced by allothymus restoration of Tx hosts was more complete than following skin alloimplantation to metamorphosing controls; these studies also suggested that it is the cytotoxic effector component of tolerant animals that is defective

Land uses that require a central business district location

M.S.Malcolm G. Little, Jr

Hyperfine structure in the rotational spectrum of asymmetric-top molecules containing two identical quadrupolar nuclei

Ph.D.J. Q. Williams and T. L. Weatherl

Challenging climate change and migration discourse: different understandings of time-scale and temporality in the Maldives

This article draws on ongoing research in the Maldives to explore differences between elite and non-elite perceptions of climate change and migration. It argues that, in addition to variations in perceptions based on diverse knowledge, priorities and agendas, there exists a more fundamental divergence based upon different understandings of the time-scale of climate change and related ideas of urgency and crisis. Specifically, elites tend to focus on a distant future which is generally abstracted from people’s everyday lived realities, as well as utilise the language of a climate change-induced migration ‘crisis’ in their discussions about impacts in a manner not envisaged by non-elites. The article concludes that, rather than unproblematically mapping global, external facing narratives wholesale onto ordinary people’s lives and experiences, there needs to be more dialogue between elites and non-elites on climate change and migration issues. These perspectives should be integrated more effectively in the development of policy interventions designed to help people adapt to the impacts of global environmental change

Raising awareness of environmental change in the Maldives

Island communities in the Maldives are experiencing environmental change on a daily basis due to coastal erosion, the accumulation of waste at sea and on beaches, and the rapid expansion of the built environment. Researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Reading in the UK, and the Maldivian NGO ENDEVOR, are working with these communities to understand how such changes affect day-to-day life, and to raise awareness of associated issues amongst decision makers in the national capital, Malé. An exhibition of 40 photographs taken by island inhabitants depicting the challenges they face in their daily lives was held at the National Art Gallery in Malé. The exhibition launch, attended by the photographers and policymakers, proved particularly effective in enabling island residents to raise their concerns and put forward their solutions

Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: the management and maintenance of touristic nature

This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of ‘sustainable tourism’ in recent decades. Rather than preventing further destruction of the ‘natural’ world, or fostering the reproduction of ‘natural’ processes, this article argues that the tourist sector actively seeks to alter and manage local environments so as to ensure their continuing attractiveness to the high-paying tourists that seek out idyllic destinations. Additionally, by drawing on an example of tourism development, environmental change and local conflict in the Maldives, it shows how interventions by tourism managers can result in conflict with local people who, possessing different imaginaries, interests and priorities, may have their own, often long-established, uses of the environment undermined in the process. The article concludes that the growing diversity and increasing environmental awareness of tourists is currently producing a range of complexities and ambiguities that preclude any easy and straightforward environmental response by the sector, and ultimately might destabilise the Western-based tourist imaginary itself