Civil society in the history of ideas: the French tradition

"This paper argues that there existed a specifically French tradition of conceptualizing civil society, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which differed in important respects from the Anglo-American emphasis on the market sphere. It shows that this tradition, which had its roots in Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, and was exemplified most famously in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, argued for the existence of a third, intermediary sphere between the government and the people as indispensable for the preservation of political liberty. At the same time, this paper shows how the French thinkers here discussed feared that the preservation of this intermediate sphere of civil society was threatened by the rise of modern, individualistic society. French defenders of civil society were therefore highly critical of modernity - a critical attitude which seems to have been inherited by some of their contemporary descendants, such as Robert Putnam." (author's abstract)"In diesem Papier wird die These vertreten, dass sich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert eine besondere französische Tradition der Begriffsbildung von 'Zivilgesellschaft' entwickelte, die sich in wichtigen Bereichen von der angloamerikanischen Betonung der Sphäre des Marktes unterschied. Es zeigt, dass in dieser Tradition, wurzelnd in Montesquieus Esprit des lois und in den bekannten Schriften von Alexis de Tocqueville, die Existenz einer dritten, intermediären Sphäre zwischen Regierung und Volk postuliert wurde, welche als unverzichtbar für die Bewahrung politischer Freiheit angesehen wurde. Zugleich zeigt das Papier, dass die hier untersuchten französischen Denker befürchteten, die Entwicklung der modernen individualistischen Gesellschaft bedrohe die Wahrung dieser intermediären Sphäre der Zivilgesellschaft. Die französischen Verteidiger der Zivilgesellschaft waren daher gegenüber der Moderne äußerst kritisch eingestellt - eine Haltung, die auf ihre geistigen Nachkommen in der Gegenwart wie beispielsweise Robert Putnam abgefärbt zu haben scheint." (Autorenreferat

Monitoring arthropods in a tropical landscape: relative effects of sampling methods and habitat types on trap catches

To discuss the challenge of monitoring multi-species responses of tropical arthropods to disturbance, we considered a large dataset (4 × 105 individuals; 1,682 morphospecies representing 22 focal taxa) based on the work of parataxonomists to examine the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on arthropods at Gamba, Gabon. Replication included three sites in each of four different stages of forest succession and land use after logging, surveyed during a whole year with four sampling methods: pitfall, Malaise, flight-interception and yellow pan traps. We compared the suitability of each sampling method for biological monitoring and evaluated statistically their reliability for 118 arthropod families. Our results suggest that a range of sampling methods yields more diverse material than any single method operated with high replication. Multivariate analyses indicated that morphospecies composition in trap catches was more strongly influenced by habitat type than by sampling methods. This implies that for multi-species monitoring, differences in trap efficiency between habitats may be neglected, as far as habitat types remain well contrasted. We conclude that for the purpose of monitoring large arthropod assemblages in the long-term, a protocol based on operating a set of different and non-disruptive traps appears superior in design than summing a series of taxa-specific protocols

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc

De blinde vlek in praktijk en discussie rond orgaandonatie

status: publishe