Minnesota Extension's Mixed Regional/County Model: Greater Impacts Follows Changes in Structure

The Cooperative Extension Service has as its mission helping the public use the research generated at land-grant universities. Since 1914, most states have used a county-based Extension model, with educators in every county and campus-based faculty supporting local educational efforts. This paper outlines why and how the Minnesota Extension Service has replaced this model with a mixed regional/county model, the major features of the new delivery model and the employment consequences of the shift as well as the non-financial advantages of the new model. The structural changes in Minnesota are of interest to Extension stakeholders in other states who are facing similar challenges and want to learn more about the benefits and costs of Minnesota's new model. Within Minnesota the public is beginning to ask a much more important question: What are the impacts of the programs being delivered? Structural change is only valuable if it results in increased programming and greater impacts than would have happened without the change. Although this paper starts to outline some of the changes in program impact, the bulk of that discussion will be reserved for later papers.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

The adaptation continuum: groundwork for the future

The focus of the program was to understand the challenges posed by climate change and climate variability on vulnerable groups and the policies needed to support climate adaptation in developing countries. The aim of the book is to share this experience in the hope that it will be helpful to those involved in shaping and implementing climate change policy

Climate change and variability, energy and disaster management: produced risks without produced solutions: rethinking the approach

Accelerated climate change and increasing climate variability is the single largest threat to the international goals of sustainable development, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and disaster risk reduction. Global discourses recognise the need for effective and sustainable responses tso produced climate risks. The risk types likely to occur are known, but only in broad terms - their scale, severity, longevity and frequency are not known. The challenge for policymakers is developing an effective framework within which sustainable responses can be formulated. To address the problems of produced risks a comprehensive approach to risk management is necessary. The mechanisms within the climate change, sustainable development and disaster risk reduction discourses are not sufficiently effective or integrated to respond to this challenge. Fundamental reform to current modes of risk reduction is needed, but this can only be achieved through a shift in the dominant perspective on formulating sustainable responses. This requires a shift to an enabling policy framework that encourages bottom-up resilient responses. Resilience is argued as a tool for policy development that can enhance adaptive capacity to current climate risks and shape energy policy to respond to mitigate future climate risks

Introduction: Peasants, Pastoralists and Proletarians: Joining the Debates on Trajectories of Agrarian Change, Livelihoods and Land Use

Recent changes in the agrarian studies and geography literatures present differing views on the pace and trajectory of change in rural developing areas. In this special section of Human Geography, we contrast the theoretical and practice implications of these differing approaches, namely depeasantization, accumulation by dispossession and deproletarianization. Depeasantization refers to change in livelihood activities out of agriculture, long theorized as necessary for an area’s transition into capitalism. Accumulation by dispossession is a process of on-going capital accumulation where a give resource is privatized, seized, or in some other manner alienated from common ownership in order to provide a basis for continued capital accumulation. Deproletarianization occurs when workers are no longer able to freely commodify and recommodify their only commodity, their own labour. In this section, we explore these three theses with case studies that draw upon empirical data. The papers in this collection all speak to one aspect or another of these debates. We do not intend to try to determine a “best approach”, rather we explore strengths and weaknesses of each argument. The production of nature, change in the mode of production and the political economy of nature are discussed in the first article by Brent McCusker. Phil O’Keefe and Geoff O’Brien examine the evolution of worked landscape under pre-capitalist modes of production in riverine ecologies. Through further case studies, Paul O’Keefe explores links between livelihoods and climate change in Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, while Franklin Graham explores the persistence of pastoralism in the Sahel. Finally, Naomi Shanguhyia and Brent McCusker examine the process of governance in dry land Kenya through the study of chronic food shortages

Could guns and rain spell the end for the Karamojong?

Over one million people live in Karamoja, a region found in the north Eastern part of Uganda. To a visitor passing through from the capital city Kampala, Karamoja may look like any other region in Uganda but appearances can be deceptive. The region is characterised by the worst humanitarian and development indicators in Uganda

Introduction: Raymond Williams and Working-Class Writing

Introduction to a Special Issue of Key Words on Working-Class Writing, co-edited and co-authored with Dr Phil O'Brien. The introduction discusses Williams' theories of working-class writing and his previously unpublished lecture, 'British Working-Class Literature after 1945' (1979) in the context of his other essays on working-class writing. The article goes on to discuss other working-class writers, including Buchi Emecheta and Isabel Waidner, and contemporary publishers endeavouring to support working-class writers today

Eleven Antitheses on Cities and States: Challenging the Mindscape of Chronology and Chorography in Anthropogenic Climate Change

Our basic argument is that we should be thinking in trans-modern ways when considering how to react to anthropogenic climate change. Showing that mainstream approaches to climate change theory and policymaking are overtly modern, we identify this as a mindscape inherently constrained by its particular chronology and chorography. Our contribution to necessary trans-modern thinking is a presentation of eleven basic and widely accepted theses on modern chronology and chorography that we contest through antitheses, which we argue are more suited to engaging with anthropogenic climate change. These support a consumption argument for urban demand being the crucial generator of climate for 8,000 years in direct contradiction to the production argument that greenhouse gases are the crucial generator of climate change for 200 years. The modern policymaking focus on curbing carbon emissions is thus fundamentally flawed - merely feeding energy for continuing an accelerating global consumption in a different way that is only marginally more climate-friendly. Reflecting on the antitheses, we conclude by discussing the difficulties of translating trans-modern ideas into political action