How the Commons Was Changed: Politics, Ecology, and the History of Floodplain Institutions

A review of The Contested Floodplain: Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia. By Tobias Haller. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013

Qualitative Data Archiving in the Digital Age: Strategies for Data Preservation and Sharing

Given the combination of recent mandates from funding agencies for data management plans and data sharing, and the explosion of data in digital form over the past two decades, it is time for the qualitative social science community to embrace digital archiving as an inherent component of research methodology. Archiving digital data ensures, at the least, that an individual scholar’s data is preserved and accessible to the user many decades into his or her career. Digital archiving also has the potential to preserve for the broader scholarly community, the full range of social science knowledge far beyond an individual researcher’s lifespan, or field site. However, the qualitative social science community has shown resistance to the archiving and data sharing movement. In this article I discuss the key debates around data archiving and sharing for qualitative research community, with particular attention to ethnographic data, and outline basic steps qualitative researchers can take as they begin to implement plans for digital archiving in their own research methodology

COMPONENTES SOCIAIS DA MIGRAÇÃO: EXPERIÊNCIAS DA PROVÍNCIA SUL, ZÂMBIA

As suposições comuns atribuem causas econômicas e ambientais às decisões de migração. Este trabalho revela a importância das estruturas do poder local – ao nível da comunidade e da família – para entender a migração. São examinados os processos migratórios na Província Sul da Zâmbia por meio do uso de informações coletadas de dois projetos de pesquisa qualitativa. Até recentemente, quando a seca e as doenças bovinas começaram a devastar a área, a Província Sul era conhecida por suas condições ideais para agropecuária. Até os últimos anos de 1980, os agricultores da Província Sul começaram a migrar para áreas da fronteira norte, onde há terra e chuva em abundância. Contextos locais econômicos e ambientais eram os fatores decisórios na migração das populações; o controle sobre os recursos da zona rural e a habilidade de mobilizar as redes de apoio social nos vilarejos também demonstraram influenciar as decisões para deslocar-se. As informações apresentadas nesse trabalho são do Projeto de Pesquisa longitudinal Gwembe Tonga (GTRP) e de um estudo de dois anos sobre emprego e mercados de trabalho na Província Sul, liderados pelo Centro de Estudos sobre Desenvolvimento da University of Bath, Inglaterra

Carrying Capacity\u27s New Guise: Folk Models for Public Debate and Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change

Current public debates about the environment often assume a clear relationship between resource availability and population growth: more people mean fewer resources. Over the past three decades, scholars in the social and natural sciences have disassembled the notion of carrying capacity to demonstrate that relationships between humans and their ecosystems are more open, fluid, and complex than the concept allows. Despite scholarly recognition of the problems with carrying capacity, the term, and its underlying logic, endures. By reframing the concept as a folk model, we continue to highlight ecological relationships and advance arguments for conservation, but also acknowledge the complexity of human-environment links which formal applications of carrying capacity ignore