Girls’ and women’s education within Unesco and the World Bank, 1945–2000

By 2000, girls’ and women’s education was a priority for international development organisations. While studies have examined the impact of recent campaigns and programmes, there has been less exploration of ideas about girls’ and women’s education within development thought in the immediate post?colonial period, and the political mechanisms through which this came to be a global concern. Through a study of policy documents, this paper investigates how the education of girls and women came to be prioritised within the two principle UN agencies involved with education since 1945, the World Bank and Unesco. A shift in priorities is evident, from ensuring formal rights and improving the status of women, to expanding the productive capacities of women, fertility control and poverty reduction. While the ascendance of human capital theory provided a space for a new perception of the role of women’s education in development, in other policy arenas women’s education was central to exploring more substantive, rights?based notions of gender equality. Ultimately, the goal of improving girls’ and women’s education fitted into diverse development agendas, paving the way for it to become a global development priority

Malthusian assumptions, Boserupian response in models of the transitions to agriculture

In the many transitions from foraging to agropastoralism it is debated whether the primary drivers are innovations in technology or increases of population. The driver discussion traditionally separates Malthusian (technology driven) from Boserupian (population driven) theories. I present a numerical model of the transitions to agriculture and discuss this model in the light of the population versus technology debate and in Boserup's analytical framework in development theory. Although my model is based on ecological -Neomalthusian- principles, the coevolutionary positive feedback relationship between technology and population results in a seemingly Boserupian response: innovation is greatest when population pressure is highest. This outcome is not only visible in the theory-driven reduced model, but is also present in a corresponding "real world" simulator which was tested against archaeological data, demonstrating the relevance and validity of the coevolutionary model. The lesson to be learned is that not all that acts Boserupian needs Boserup at its core.Comment: Chapter in: "Society, Nature and History: The Legacy of Ester Boserup", Springer, Vienna (in press

Changing women's roles, changing environmental knowledges: evidence from Upper Egypt

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which changing gender roles in a Bedouin community in Upper Egypt, brought about by settlement over the last 20 years on the shores of Lake Nasser, have impacted on the accumulation and development of indigenous environmental knowledges by Bedouin women. The research was carried out among four groups of Ababda Bedouin in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and involved in-depth monthly conversations carried out over a period of 12 months. The main conclusions of the study are that the women of the study area have had to develop new knowledges which, in some cases, are now different from those held by men because of the different economic circumstances in which many find themselves; that these knowledges are fluid, dynamic and ever-changing with their own internal dynamism; and that socially constructed notions of gender are vital in the development process, notions that are sensitive to both men's and women's interests and their interrelationships

Restoration, Transformation and Adaptation: Authoritarianism after 2011 in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran

Following the push for reform during the popular uprising in 2011, authoritarianism is once again dominating domestic politics and power relations in the MENA region. Drawing on data collected during field trips to Cairo, Tehran, Beirut and Kuwait city, the authors of this MENARA report analyse three distinct ways in which political leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran have stood their grounds since 2011 by. The report shows that the region’s autocratic leaders have adopted highly distinct strategies to cope with the challenges they have been confronted with internally – including strategies of “restoration”, of “transformation” and of “adaptation”. The report ends by suggesting that European leaders, in spite of their limited leverage and resources, have a longterm strategic interest in fostering alternative forms of political regimes in the MENA region

A Land System representation for global assessments and land-use modeling

Current global scale land-change models used for integrated assessments and climate modeling are based on classifications of land cover. However, land-use management intensity and livestock keeping are also important aspects of land use, and are an integrated part of land systems. This article aims to classify, map, and to characterize Land Systems (LS) at a global scale and analyze the spatial determinants of these systems. Besides proposing such a classification, the article tests if global assessments can be based on globally uniform allocation rules. Land cover, livestock, and agricultural intensity data are used to map LS using a hierarchical classification method. Logistic regressions are used to analyze variation in spatial determinants of LS. The analysis of the spatial determinants of LS indicates strong associations between LS and a range of socioeconomic and biophysical indicators of human-environment interactions. The set of identified spatial determinants of a LS differs among regions and scales, especially for (mosaic) cropland systems, grassland systems with livestock, and settlements. (Semi-)Natural LS have more similar spatial determinants across regions and scales. Using LS in global models is expected to result in a more accurate representation of land use capturing important aspects of land systems and land architecture: the variation in land cover and the link between land-use intensity and landscape composition. Because the set of most important spatial determinants of LS varies among regions and scales, land-change models that include the human drivers of land change are best parameterized at sub-global level, where similar biophysical, socioeconomic and cultural conditions prevail in the specific regions. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Pathways for scale and discipline reconciliation: current socio-ecological modelling methodologies to explore and reconstitute human prehistoric dynamics

International audienceThis communication elaborates a plea for the necessity of a specific modelling methodology which does not sacrifice two modelling principles: explanation Micro and correlation Macro. Three goals are assigned to modelling strategies: describe, understand and predict. One tendency in historical and spatial modelling is to develop models at a micro level in order to describe and by that way, understand the connection between local ecological contexts, acquired through local ecological data, and local social practices, acquired through archaeology. However, such a method faces difficulties for expanding its validity: It is validated by its adequacy with local data, but the prediction step is unreachable and quite nothing can be said for places out where. On the other hand, building models at a far larger scale, for instance at the continent and even the world level, enhances the connection between ecology and its temporal variability. Such connections are based on well-founded theories but lower the " small causes, big effects " emergence corresponding to agent-based approaches and the related inherent variability of socio-ecological dynamics that one can notice at a lower scale. We then propose a plea for combining both elements for building large-scale modelling tools, which aims are to describe and provide predictions on long-term past evolutions, that include the test of explaining socio-anthropological hypotheses, i.e. the emergence and the spread of local social innovations

Women Under Kuomintang R ule Variations on the Feminine Mystique

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68360/2/10.1177_009770047500100101.pd

Income Convergence and Regional Growth in India: Before and After the Economic Liberalization

In this article I study regional growth and sub-national income convergence in India in the context of economic reforms that have been undertaken since 1991. I also examine convergence in development inputs such as population growth, literacy and investment at the sub-national level. My results show that there is a strong evidence of divergence in per capita income of the 15 states studied in the sample. The standard deviation of net state domestic product has increased over time indicating no evidence of convergence in the pre- or post-reform period. Population, state capital expenditure and commercial bank credit have also diverged over time across these 15 Indian states. However, literacy shows evidence of convergence across states.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Evaluating the effectiveness of agricultural adaptation to climate change in preindustrial society

The effectiveness of agricultural adaptation determines the vulnerability of this sector to climate change, particularly during the preindustrial era. However, this effectiveness has rarely been quantitatively evaluated, specifically at a large spatial and long-term scale. The present study covers this case of preindustrial society in AD 1500–1800. Given the absence of technological innovations in this time frame, agricultural production was chiefly augmented by cultivating more land (land input) and increasing labor input per land unit (labor input). Accordingly, these two methods are quantitatively examined. Statistical results show that within the study scale, land input is a more effective approach of mitigating climatic impact than labor input. Nonetheless, these observations collectively improve Boserup's theory from the perspective of a large spatial and long-term scale.postprin