Fostering Social Change in Peru Through Communication: The Case of the Manuani Miners Association

Much has been done to formalize miners in Peru; since its inception in 2006 the Ministry of Environment passed laws to align mining policies with international standards. However, the combination of the necessity to have a source of income and the rapid acquisition of money that illegal and informal gold mining provides has proven a serious impasse for the Peruvian government; hence these mining practices keep growing. As part of the Initiative for the Conservation of the Andean Amazon II (ICAA II), the Manuani Miners Association in Madre de Dios, one of the regions more prone to illegal mining and bad environmental practices in Peru, started a land restoration, remediation, and reforestation process of the degraded rainforest. This case study analyzes how a program within ICAA II used communication to promote this significant change in behavior, what communicational tools were used, and what is their possible further applicability in similar scenarios to foster positive change

New policies to deal with climate change and other drivers impacting on resilience to flooding in urban areas: The CORFU approach

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Environmental Science and Policy. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Environmental Science and Policy, Vol. 14 Issue 7 (2011). DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2011.05.008In the context of urban flood management, resilience is equal to resisting, recovering, reflecting and responding. The variety of causes of flooding and their consequences underpin the need for increased and internationally coordinated efforts to enhance technologies and policies for dealing with floods. This paper addresses this issue and presents some novel research ideas related to resilience to flooding in urban areas, which are under development within the EU FP7 project ‘Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas’ (CORFU). The approach adopted in this project aims to quantify the cost-effectiveness of resilience measures and integrative and adaptable flood management plans for different scenarios of relevant drivers: urban development, socio-economic trends and climate changes. It is believed that the way in which the different models are being put together, combined with the variability of conditions in case study areas in Asia and in Europe, will ultimately enable more scientifically sound policies for the management of the consequences of urban flooding

Distributional impacts of cash allowances for children: A microsimulation analysis for Russia and Europe

This article analyses programmes of cash allowances for children and compares their effectiveness in combating child poverty in Russia and four European Union (EU) countries representing alternative family policy models – Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Using microsimulation models, this article estimates the potential gains if the Russian system were re-designed along the policy parameters of these countries and vice versa. The results confirm that the poverty impact of the programme design is smaller than that of the level of spending. Other conditions being equal, the best distributional outcomes for children are achieved by applying the mix of universal and means-tested child benefits, such as those employed by the United Kingdom and Belgium. At the same time, the Russian design of child allowances does not appear to be less effective in terms of its impact on child poverty when transferred to European countries in place of their current arrangements

Social movements and the politicization of chronic poverty

Discussions of chronic poverty emphasize the extent to which poverty endures because of the social relationships and structures within which particular social groups are embedded. In this sense chronic poverty is a socio-political relationship rather than a condition of assetless-ness. Understood as such, processes of social mobilization become central to any discussion of chronic poverty because they are vehicles through which such relationships are argued over in society and potentially changed. This article explores the ways in which social movements, as one form of such mobilization, might affect chronic poverty. Four domains are discussed: influencing the underlying dynamics of the political economy of poverty; challenging dominant meanings of poverty in society; direct effects on the assets of the poor; and engaging with the state. The inherent fragilities of social movements limit these contributions, the most important of which is to destabilize taken-for-granted, hegemonic discourses on poverty and its reduction