A review of the rural-digital policy agenda from a community resilience perspective

© 2016 The Authors This paper utilises a community resilience framework to critically examine the digital-rural policy agenda. Rural areas are sometimes seen as passive and static, set in contrast to the mobility of urban, technological and globalisation processes (Bell et al., 2010). In response to notions of rural decline (McManus et al., 2012) rural resilience literature posits rural communities as ‘active,’ and ‘proactive’ about their future (Skerratt, 2013), developing processes for building capacity and resources. We bring together rural development and digital policy-related literature, using resilience motifs developed from recent academic literature, including community resilience, digital divides, digital inclusion, and rural information and communication technologies (ICTs). Whilst community broadband initiatives have been linked to resilience (Plunkett-Carnegie, 2012; Heesen et al., 2013) digital inclusion, and engagement with new digital technologies more broadly, have not. We explore this through three resilience motifs: resilience as multi-scalar; as entailing normative assumptions; and as integrated and place-sensitive. We point to normative claims about the capacity of digital technology to aid rural development, to offer solutions to rural service provision and the challenges of implementing localism. Taking the UK as a focus, we explore the various scales at which this is evident, from European to UK country-level

La investigación en materia de cooperativas de crédito y de grupos cooperativos

This work proposes to provide an overview of the research carried out over the last twenty years by a number of authors who have focused their research on credit unions and their cooperative groups. The intention is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the works that have been published, but rather to give a general overview of the work that has been done in this broad field of research and its various ramifications. It shows the timeframe of these studies and the gradual consolidation of more specific subjects, which have provided us with a great deal more knowledge about a sector of cooperativism that had been studied very little twenty years ago.Cooperativas de crédito, secciones de crédito, banca cooperativa, cajas rurales, grupos cooperativos.

Towards an affordable housing strategy for mineworkers in South Africa

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Architecture, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Development Planning Johannesburg, 1998Mine companies are experiencing a change in the political system of the country (South Africa). This political change from apartheid government to the government of National Unity has brought about a totally different system of government; this. change has led to the transformation of mines companies from employment section to housing of mineworkers from their operation system, how are the mine companies /houses dealing with this change? Changes in the political and economy of the gold mining in the 19705-19805 have prompted management to begin moving away from migratory labour and implementing alternative accommodation strategies for black mine workers. this topic we will look at the different I alternative approaches for housing black mine workers and how they can afforded housing in their nearby work placeGR201

Social Enterprise in Western Europe

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. Social Enterprise in Western Europe –the third volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide – will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region

The Growth and Development of Coffee and Cotton Marketing Co-operatives in Tanzania, c.1932-1982

By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had the biggest co-operative movement in Africa and the oldest in East Africa. Despite such achievement, for decades, the literature on Tanzania’s small-scale coffee and cotton cultivation and marketing co-operatives has suffered from a dearth of substantive historical accounts. The available literature is fragmented along various academic disciplines, mostly political science and sociology. In addition, there is no single substantive secondary historical study specifically dedicated to the co-operative movement since the inception in 1932. The neglect is more critical given the current renaissance in Africa and increasing international interest in the co-operative movement at either national or local levels. This thesis seeks to fill this gap by utilising primary sources from the Co-operative College archive in Manchester and Tanzania National Archive (TNA) to examine and evaluate the coffee and cotton marketing co-operatives during the 1932 to 1982 period. The study further explores the interlocking forces and policies that led to its growth and development. The development is also examined against the changing political and ideological influences during the interwar, and post-war to independence periods. This thesis is structured under three cases, two of which are coffee marketing co-operatives, the Kilimanjaro Native Co-operative Union (KNCU) and Bukoba Co-operative Union (BCU) in Kagera; and the cotton apex marketing co-operative in the WCGA, the Victoria Federation of Co-operative Unions (VFCUS) which was formed in 1955. Study findings show that the time gap in the formation of the mentioned co-operatives were due to the colonial authority neglecting its own co-operative development policy. The evidence shows that, the KNCU which was formed in 1933 and BCU in 1950 were both established at the behest of the British colonial government in a move to control the coffee industry. Importantly, the study examines the power relations involved and the government interventions in the process and the extent to which the co-operatives were promoted and controlled by the government through the co-operative and agricultural marketing policies and legislations. This was particularly provided under Section 36 of the 1932 co-operative legislation and was further reinforced by three policies, the 1934 Chagga Rule, the 1937 Native (control and marketing) Ordinance and the Defence Ordinance, Orders of 1939 and 1940; and the African Agricultural Products (Control and Marketing) Ordinance, 1949. The post-colonial authority perpetuated the colonial policies in promoting co-operatives and the control of agricultural export revenues provided under the 1962 by the National Agricultural Products Board (Control and Marketing) Act by intensifying the intervention, effectively strangling and restructuring them to provide for effective control. Again, there was an increased politisation of the movement’s function as they became an integral part of the propagation of the socialist/ujamaa ideology and the national development plan as the 1976 villagisation policy. This study is of the view that the colonial and post-colonial authorities intervened in the formation of co-operatives given the fact that they were economically strategically vital. During the phases covered in this thesis, the established legislations reinforced the government’s control over the co-operative movement and the producers; and granted themselves a monopoly over the handling and export of small-scale produced coffee and cotton through the control of marketing boards by appointing co-operatives as crop handling agents. Thus, the co-operative movement never attained autonomous status as it became part of the government machinery in extracting resources and exploiting small-scale growers

Political economy of agrarian politics in Kerala: A study of state intervention in agricultural commodity markets with particular reference to dairy markets.

This thesis analyzes the nature of State intervention in agricultural commodity markets in the Indian province of Kerala in the period 1960-80. Attributing the lack of dynamism in the agrarian sector to market imperfections, the Government of Kerala has intervened both directly through departmentally run institutions and indirectly through public sector corporations. The failure of both these institutional devices encouraged the government to adopt marketing co-operatives as the preferred instruments of market intervention. Co-operatives with their decentralised, democratic structures are, in theory, capable of combining autonomous decision-making capacity with accountability to farmer members. The Government of Kerala believed that this institutional mechanism would aggregate the interests of peasants and thereby transform them into powerful market agents. We, however, argue that the nature of the interest group process, both within the organisation and in the larger polity, significantly, distorts policy outcomes. First, the nature of the intervention - the deployment of massive financial resources, the top-down approach with its commitment to the achievement of quantitative targets and the capital intensity of many of the projects-afford opportunities to powerful groups such as professional politicians and State bureaucrats to maximise their own interests. Second, groups within the organisation such as farmer-politicians with their proximity to decision-makers and trade unions with their links to political leaders are able to divert an increasing share of the organisation's resources to themselves. In the process, farmers, in whose name these policies are initiated, experience negative consequences. The above hypothesis is tested by analysing the implementation of Operation Flood-India's dairy development programme. Operation Flood (OF) was launched by the Government of India with the avowed aim of increasing farm incomes through an institutional framework( the Anand Pattern Co-operative of Gujarat) in which farmers would have control over their own resources. This research, however, finds that owing to interest group processes, the programme has produced sub-optimal results in Kerala. Producer prices have remained stagnant, while production costs have soared. Farmers have responded by restricting supplies, which has led to massive shortages in the market. Meanwhile the fiscal foundations of the organisations have been undermined, as powerful groups appropriated an increasing share of the organisations' resources. An intervention intended to optimise benefits for farmers, in fact, resulted in the dominant interest groups within the polity maximising their benefits