Elite Capture or Capture Elites? Lessons from the ‘Counter-elite’ and ‘Co-opt-elite’ Approaches in Bangladesh and Ghana

Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power seriously in their institutional designs. The solar home system in Bangladesh, represents the ‘counter-elite’ approach and explicitly excludes local elites from the decision-making process. The trans-boundary water governance project in Ghana, in contrast, adopts the ‘co-opt-elite’ approach and deliberately absorbs local elites into the water committee. This paper suggests that, while the ‘counter-elite’ approach is not necessarily effective in challenging elite domination, because of the structural asset dependence of poor people on the elites, the ‘co-opt-elite’ approach risks legitimizing the authority of the elites and worsening poverty by implementing ‘anti-poor’ policies. This paper concludes that the success of dealing with elite capture lies in the flexible use of the ‘counter-elite’ and ‘co-opt-elite’ approaches together with the need to secure alternative livelihoods and to achieve empowerment with the poor.elite capture, power, poverty, community development, water management, solar lighting

Exploring ‘Gender-ICT-Climate Change’ Nexus in Development: from Digital Divide to Digital Empowerment

How gender influences the effectiveness of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in tackling climate change is under-researched. Gender is social expectations and stereotypes of how men, women, boys and girls, should behave in society. Gender enables some groups of men and women to get access to ICTs, whilst constraining others from doing so. Different control over ICTs, built on unequal power relationships, affects how poor people adapt to the changing climate and respond to climate-related disasters. Conceptually, this paper explains why, and how, women are more constrained than men from using ICTs in tackling climate change. In term of assets, compared to men, women have less access to technology, to information, to finance, and are more deprived of land rights. Women are more institutionally-constrained than men. With regard to social structures, women are excluded from decision-making in policy design and resource allocation. They are less represented in formal decision-making bodies, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative. In addressing these limitations, this paper makes four digital empowerment proposals in an attempt to make 'ICT-climate change' interventions more gender-sensitive: (1) Contextualise gender mainstreaming: gender mainstreaming helps integrate gender analysis into ICT policies. It acknowledges that men and women perceive and receive information differently, and that this requires diverse approaches to adaptation. However, the attempt to re-position women and girls as 'eco-carers' is problematic because this fails to capture their protective, as well as their destructive, role in relation to natural resources. Without addressing the unequal power relations between women and girls, e-adaptive practices can also help reproduce the inter-generational equalities. (2) Strengthen governance: crafting new and reforming old, institutional arrangements is essential to improve gender inclusion. Women-only interventions are sometimes necessary to empower previously-excluded women to engage in ICT-related decisions. However, poor and powerless men should also have their say in climate change policies. (3) Develop gender-sensitive funding mechanisms: securing adequate funding to support ICT interventions is crucial to gender empowerment. Yet, targeting women by micro-credit projects risk putting an additional financial burden on them, and that needs serious re-consideration. (4) Recognise agency-structure dynamics: women are active agents, but they are socially constrained from engaging in ICT-related decisions. Women's preferences, institutional arrangements and politics need to be taken into account in order to tackle digital exclusion. These four proposals will be useful for development agencies, governments and NGOs seeking to improve the gendered outcomes from use of ICTs in response to climate change

Linking Light Scalar Modes with A Small Positive Cosmological Constant in String Theory

Based on the studies in Type IIB string theory phenomenology, we conjecture that a good fraction of the meta-stable de Sitter vacua in the cosmic stringy landscape tend to have a very small cosmological constant $\Lambda$ when compared to either the string scale $M_S$ or the Planck scale $M_P$, i.e., $\Lambda \ll M_S^4 \ll M_P^4$. These low lying de Sitter vacua tend to be accompanied by very light scalar bosons/axions. Here we illustrate this phenomenon with the bosonic mass spectra in a set of Type IIB string theory flux compactification models. We conjecture that small $\Lambda$ with light bosons is generic among de Sitter solutions in string theory; that is, the smallness of $\Lambda$ and the existence of very light bosons (may be even the Higgs boson) are results of the statistical preference for such vacua in the landscape. We also discuss a scalar field $\phi^3/\phi^4$ model to illustrate how this statistical preference for a small $\Lambda$ remains when quantum loop corrections are included, thus bypassing the radiative instability problem.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures; added subsection: Finite Temperature and Phase Transitio