Mapping Meaning : Critical Cartographies for Participatory Water Management in Taita Hills, Kenya

Participation of local people is often neglected in natural resource management, which leads to failure to understand the social aspects and historical construction of environmental problems. Participatory mapping can enhance the communication of local spatial knowledge for management processes and challenge the official maps and other spatial representations produced by state authorities and scientists. In this study, we analyze what kind of social meanings can be revealed through a multimethod participatory mapping process focusing on water resources in Taita Hills, Kenya. The participatory mapping clearly complicates the simplified image of the physical science mappings, typically depicting natural water supply, by addressing the impacts of contamination, inadequate infrastructure, poverty, distance to the sources, and restrictions in their uses on people's access to water. Moreover, this shared exercise is able to trigger discussion on issues that cannot always be localized but still contribute to place making. Local historical accounts reveal the social and political drivers of the current water-related problems, making explicit the political ecology dynamics in the area.Peer reviewe

Identifying National Level Education Reforms in Developing Settings: An Application to Ethiopia

Increasing enrollment in primary education has been at the center of international education policy for well over a decade. In developing parts of the world, significant increases in primary enrollment are often generated by large national level programs, which can simultaneously promote overcrowding and reductions in education quality. However, to analyze the trade-off between increased enrollment and potential reductions in quality one must first identify and evaluate the impact of the national reform on schooling. This paper provides a method with which these types of reforms can be identified in developing settings using both temporal and geographic variation, and readily available data. The method is applied to an early 1990s reform in Ethiopia based around the release of the Education and Training Policy, which removed schooling fees from grades one to ten. The model estimates that the reform led to an increase in schooling of at least 1.2 years, and provides initial evidence that the increased enrollment in Ethiopia outweighed any cost due to reductions in quality