Earth observation for sustainable urban planning in developing countries: needs, trends, and future directions

Abstract: Cities are constantly changing and authorities face immense challenges in obtaining accurate and timely data to effectively manage urban areas. This is particularly problematic in the developing world where municipal records are often unavailable or not updated. Spaceborne earth observation (EO) has great potential for providing up-to-date spatial information about urban areas. This article reviews the application of EO for supporting urban planning. In particular, the article overviews case studies where EO was used to derive products and indicators required by urban planners. The review concludes that EO has sufficiently matured in recent years but that a shift from the current focus on purely science-driven EO applications to the provision of useful information for day-to-day decision-making and urban sustainability monitoring is clearly needed

Skills for sustainable development: transforming vocational education and training beyond 2015

There have been recent calls to transform VET and to transform development. This double call leads us to ask: how can skills development best support development that is sustainable for individuals, communities and the planet, whilst promoting social justice and poverty reduction? In considering this question we critique the idea of green skills for the green economy as being inadequate for achieving a transformed and transformative VET that shifts the target from economic growth to the well-being of individuals, and that enables vocational education to play a role in challenging and transforming society and work. Rather, we argue that we must see human development and sustainable development as inseparable, and plan and evaluate VET for its contribution to these. Such an approach must be grounded in a view of work, and hence skills for work, that is decent, life-enhancing, solidaristic, environmentally-sensitive and intergenerationally-aware. It must confront the reality that much current VET is complicit in preparing people for work that lacks some or all of these characteristics. It must be concerned with poverty, inequality and injustice and contribute to their eradication. It must be supportive of individuals’ agency, whilst also reflecting a careful reading of the structures that too often constrain them. In doing all this it must minimise the costs and risks of any transformation for the poor and seek to lock them into better individual and collective lives, not out of them. Finally, it must transform skills, work and the world in ways that are truly sustainable of the people of today but also those who are to inhabit the earth tomorrow

Opportunity or necessity? Conceptualizing entrepreneurship at African small-scale mines

This article critically examines the policy environment in place for artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in sub-Saharan Africa, with a view to determining whether there is adequate ‘space’ for the sector's operators to flourish as entrepreneurs. In recent years, there has been growing attention paid to ASM in the region, particularly as a vehicle for stimulating local economic development. The work being planned under the Africa Mining Vision (AMV), a comprehensive policy agenda adopted by African heads of state in February 2009, could have an enormous impact on this front. One of its core objectives is to pressure host governments into Boosting Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining by following a series of streamlined recommendations. It is concluded, however, that there is a disconnect between how entrepreneurship in ASM has been interpreted and projected by proponents of the AMV on the one hand, and the form it has mostly taken in practice on the other hand. This gulf must be rapidly bridged if ASM is to have a transformative impact, economically, in the region. © 2017 Elsevier Inc