Farmer-herder relations and conflict management in agro-pastoral zone of Niger

Farmer-herder conflicts are enduring features of social life in the Sudano-Sahelian zone. A survey was carried out between August and December 2004 in four sites in Niger, namely Bokki, Katanga, Sabon Gida and Tountoubé to determine the proximate and long-term causes of conflict over natural resource use, to evaluate the appropriateness of existing institutional arrangements for managing conflicts and identify innovative options and incentives to reduce the incidence and severity of conflicts. The research was implemented in three phases: (1) collection of village and household level socioeconomic information, (2) social network mapping, and (3) collection of conflict history and conflict management strategies. Additionally, governmental and NGO agencies in Niamey that address conflict management and/or resolution at the regional and national levels were interviewed. The research employed both quantitative and qualitative survey instruments. Surveys collected information on: historical micro-geographies of cropping and herding in the area encompassing village territory; local day-to-day relationships between transhumance herders, settled herders, and farming households at the study site; nodes of communication under different types of disagreements and negotiative settings; documentation of past conflicts and role of government officials, customary authorities and NGOs in conflict management. Results from this study showed that in all sites, damage to crops was the first reported cause of conflict between farmers and herders. Crop damage is not limited to damage to growing crops on the field but also included unauthorized grazing of crop residues after harvest. Other causes of conflict reported were access to watering points, expansion of crop fields across corridors for animal passage and thefts of animal. The ability of rural communities to prevent and manage conflict is largely based on the strength of networks of communication between herding and farming interests, respected community leaders, and leaders in neighboring communities. Overall, the local institutional arrangements are functional and a high percentage of conflicts are effectively managed at local levels. In all the study sites except Bokki, there was a high level of involvement of internal mediators

Case Based Representation and Retrieval with Time Dependent Features

Abstract. The temporal dimension of the knowledge embedded in cases has often been neglected or oversimplified in Case Based Reasoning sys-tems. However, in several real world problems a case should capture the evolution of the observed phenomenon over time. To this end, we propose to represent temporal information at two levels: (1) at the case level, if some features describe parameters varying within a period of time (which corresponds to the case duration), and are therefore collected in the form of time series; (2) at the history level, if the evolution of the system can be reconstructed by retrieving temporally related cases. In this paper, we describe a framework for case representation and retrieval able to take into account the temporal dimension, and meant to be used in any time dependent domain. In particular, to support case retrieval, we provide an analysis of similarity-based time series retrieval techniques; to support history retrieval, we introduce possible ways to summarize the case content, together with the corresponding strategies for identifying similar instances in the knowledge base. A concrete ap-plication of our framework is represented by the system RHENE, which is briefly sketched here, and extensively described in [20].

Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters

Emotions play a significant role in the workplace, and considerable attention has been given to the study of employee emotions. Customers also play a central function in organizations, but much less is known about customer emotions. This chapter reviews the growing literature on customer emotions in employee–customer interfaces with a focus on service failure and recovery encounters, where emotions are heightened. It highlights emerging themes and key findings, addresses the measurement, modeling, and management of customer emotions, and identifies future research streams. Attention is given to emotional contagion, relationships between affective and cognitive processes, customer anger, customer rage, and individual differences

Conflict management, decentralization, and agropastoralism in dryland West Africa

This paper reports on a four-site study conducted in the Sahelian zone of Niger. The study takes a novel mixed methods approach for understanding conflict management from the perspective of rural peoples by not only describing past highly publicized conflicts but also by analyzing the steps rural peoples follow to management disagreements that arise in their everyday lives. This “bottom-up” approach reveals both a capacity and preference among our informants to manage disagreements informally without involving village or extra-village authorities. Decentralization initiatives, by reworking the authority and responsibilities of authority-based systems, affect the role that these informal mechanisms, as mediated by social norms and relations, play in conflict management

Livelihood transitions and the changing nature of farmer-herder conflict in Sahelian West Africa

The accommodation of livestock husbandry with crop agriculture is crucial for the future of the West African Sahel. Present trends are leading to greater restrictions on livestock husbandry and a growing convergence of livelihood practices among groups whose identities are tied to herding and farming. Using the cases of four rural communities in Niger, this study adopts an 'access to resources' framework to analyse the causal connections among: rural peoples' livelihood strategies, everyday social relations of production, perceptions of social groups' identities, and the potential for farmer-herder conflict. While the convergence of livelihoods arguably increases the frequency of conflict triggers, it has also, through the expansion of shared common interests and cross-group, production-related relationships, improved the ability of communities to effectively manage these incipient conflicts

Final report SOH program review for the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism Energy Division

Final report of findings of the Scientific Observation Hole program

Long-term exposure of /sup 238/PuO/sub 2/ to a terrestrial environment. Volume III

A plutonium oxide source consisting of a single piece of 83% /sup 238/PuO/sub 2/ and weighing 38 g was exposed for 2.9 years to a humid, temperate terrestrial environment in an environmental simulation chamber. The soil tray of the chamber was divided into four compartments so that different soil types could be studied under identical conditions. Soils examined in this experiment included loam, silt loam, sand, and humus. Plutonium released into the soils, the soil drainages, and the condensates from the dehumidifier was monitored throughout the experiment. The total plutonium release rate from the PuO/sub 2/ source was approximately 2 ng/m/sup 2//s. The generation of short-ranged airborne plutonium, able to travel from a few centimeters to half a meter, was one of the most significant release pathways. The amount of plutonium released in this way was 10 times that washed directly off the source by rainwater and 20 times that from the fully airborne (longer ranged) release. Of the 200 ..mu..g of plutonium deposited in the soils, less than 0.1 ..mu..g was released into the soil percolates. In fact, the soil percolates constituted the least significant release pathway. Within the uncertainties in deriving the plutonium inventories of the soil compartments, we found no discernible differences among the behaviors of the four soil types towards plutonium. There was little or no seasonal effect on the release of plutonium from the soil

Monitoring Interactions with RFID Tagged Objects using RSSI

Abstract. In this paper, we present SVM and HMM-based methods for monitoring interactions with passive RFID tagged objects. We continuously track the motion status of an object and declare the status as standing still, randomly moving or linearly moving. Inspired by phone transition modeling in speech processing, each interaction type is represented with two sub-states to handle transitions and continuity. Experiments were designed to simulate our target application: monitoring interactions with medical equipment during trauma resuscitation. Our system identified interaction status with 85% accuracy using an HMM. The most useful feature for discrimination was the difference between the average RSSI of two consecutive windows