Local links, local knowledge : choosing care settings and schools

This paper draws on data from two recently completed ESRC-funded projects in order to examine class differences and similarities around choice of school and choice of childcare. We argue here that there is every reason to believe that in many circumstances, within its particular mechanisms and practices, choice produces specific and pervasive forms of inequity.The processes by which working class parents in one study chose care settings and schools could be seen as less skilled, less informed, less careful than the decision-making of many of the middle class respondents. However, this is not an argument we advance, noting instead that the practices and meanings of choice are subject to significant social, cultural and economic variations in terms who gets to choose, who gets their choices, and what, how and why people choose when they are able to. We argue here that there are alternative sets of priorities in play for our working class respondents, involving attachments to the communal and the local

Local Ecological Knowledge on Forest Clearing: a Case Study of Parak and Rimbo Practices in Simancuang Community, Indonesia

Local communities are frequently judged as the main driver of forest degradation and deforestation because of the weak recognition to local ecological knowledge (LEK) or traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We assessed that it is important to elaborate the attributes of LEK and TEK as a way to describe why and how the local community clears the forest, as well as its relation to local practices, named parak and rimbo. Our research uses case study method to describe the local practices in Simancuang community, Alam Pauh Duo Village, South Solok District, West Sumatra Province. We conducted unstructured interviews, observations, and documents selection which were analyzed through categorization and codification as well as complemented with history analysis, spatial analysis, and related document analysis. The results showed that Simancuang community knowledge can describe the attributes of LEK and TEK as a unified whole of local knowledge for sustaining their livelihoods. Therefore, the forest clearing by Simancuang people is one of the livelihoods strategies, but they were not the main driver of forest degradation and deforestation in South Solok District

Knowledge Loss: Managing Local Knowledge in Rural Uzbekistan

Knowledge loss is not a remote phenomenon, unique to one knowledge system. Rather we argue that the loss of knowledge is an issue for other knowledge systems as well. Knowledge loss is certainly a concern for anthropologists working on indigenous knowledge, fearful of ‘losing’ indigenous knowledge entirely as a result of modernisation (cf. Cox, 2000). Equally, staff movements within the corporate world probably lead to a large amount of knowledge displacement, yet staff (and thus knowledge) retention is more often seen as a human resource than a knowledge management issue. Similarly in academia, which thrives on the wide interchange of knowledge and ideas and openly promotes the exchange of knowledge, much of this knowledge can be ‘leaked’ (i.e. it leaves academia for another knowledge community, say, a corporation) or it can be ‘lost’ altogether. Thus we attempt here to explain in theoretical terms how knowledge loss operates, what are the drivers of knowledge loss and how these can be ameliorated. We suggest that knowledge loss is a failure of knowledge management insofar as it demonstrates a lack of knowledge sharing, dissemination and use. The central argument being that knowledge must be reproduced (or stored in a repository) for it to be used and to continue to exist. Because local knowledge resides in individuals, who are apt to move to different knowledge systems (leakage) their doing so carries with them a considerable amount of knowledge. Key to reducing this is effective knowledge sharing during the time they are within the community or organisation. This provides the inherent benefit of greater knowledge utilisation through greater knowledge sharing, as well as reducing the risks of knowledge loss. Yet, individuals do not always share knowledge, when they do this sharing can be partial. In many cases this is because of the high transaction cost (and risk) associated with sharing their knowledge. We argue that knowledge management and knowledge governance theory needs to inform institutions (informal and formal policies) which can introduce better protections for individuals to share knowledge, in order to reduce the transaction costs of knowledge sharing. These transaction costs can be lowered by guaranteeing continued ownership of intellectual property, by establishing a proper policy framework for academic honesty and by enforcing these rules in a transparent manner. In the case of local knowledge the transaction costs are somewhat reduced by knowledge sharing within the family, shown in generational transfer of mastership. In the same way should projects, corporations and ultimately nation states develop structures which allow for enhanced knowledge sharing, by reducing the transaction cost of sharing this knowledge. Part of these systems must allow for knowledge which is no longer relevant, which is not useful or which is simply wrong, to be replaced by more appropriate knowledge. In this regard simple databases are somewhat counterproductive as they do not encourage the dynamic displacement and replacement of knowledge, which whilst it involves some knowledge ‘loss’ is actually a knowledge creation and sharing process. Thus we theorise knowledge loss as a phenomenon to be evidence of poor knowledge management. In its own right it is a failure of management and governance to allow knowledge resources, expensively produced within the community, to be lost. On a wider level it evidences a lack of knowledge reproduction and retention, which can be seen as a result of excessive transaction costs and risks to knowledge sharing.knowledge; knowledge management; development; rural economy; Usbekistan

Controlling Chaos Through Local Knowledge

We propose an duopoly game where quantity-setting firms have incomplete information about the demand function. In each time step, they solve a profit maximization problem assuming a linear local approximation of the demand function. In particular, we construct an example using the well known duopoly Puu's model with isoelastic demand function and constant marginal costs. An explicit form of the dynamical system that describes the time evolution of the duopoly game with boundedly rational players is given. The main result is the global stability of the system.Cournot duopoly, incomplete information, isoelastic demand function, time evolution, boundedly rational players.

Local Knowledge and the Adoption of Science Knowledge in Cocoa Cultivation Community in East Kolaka Regency

This study aims to analyze the existence of local farming knowledge by cacao farmers community and their integration with science knowledge from outside.The results showed that local knowledge in cacao cultivation is based on customs and traditions as well as the insistence of family life which has been the custom of farmers and then processes through repetitions which then form a farming experience. Science knowledge in cacao cultivation is formed based on the response to the decline in productions and user preferences and the inovation in farming technology which is introduced to users through technology transfer by researchers, extension agents and plantation assistants. The acceleration of technological innovation by the government was not followed by the speed and utilization of science knowledge by cacao farmers, and the weaknesses are in the delivery subsystem and the recipient subsystem. It takes a continuous bridge between research institutions as suppliers of science technology/ knowledge with their users, so that the resulting science knowledge is guaranteed to be followed by users on an ongoing basis

REdGENERATION: art, enterprise, local knowledge and the curriculum

The theme of this paper is engagement in art as a stimulant to enterprise education with young people. Reflecting on their experiences of initiating and managing the case study outlined, the paper describes a process of arts intervention in a school based enterprise project. Set against the social backdrop of urban renewal, the project outlined effectively establishes a voice for young people that counters the imposition of regeneration initiatives whilst maintaining the imperative of an art that is free from the absolute requirements of function. Education and Teaching Context - Art and enterprise cells in local schools

The Role of Local Knowledge in Developing Indigenous Indonesian Medicine

Peranan pengetahuan lokal dapat memberikan informasi tentang tumbuhan obat untuk mengobati penyakit, serta penelusuran adanya hubungan antara komponen bio-aktif yang dapat menyembuhkan penyakit tersebut. Pengetahuan lokal ini sangat beragam karena Indonesia mempunyai ± 370 etnis yang bermukim tersebar di seluruh kawasan hutan/kepulauan Indonesia yang luasnya 119,7 juta hektar. Saat ini baru ditemukan ± 1300 jenis tumbuhan obat yang pemanfaatannya sesuai/mengikuti pengetahuan lokal dari masing-masing etnis. Adanya “biological prospecting” yang berkembang di dunia barat dapat mendorong industri bioprospeksi terutama industri farmasi untuk menghasilkan produk obat asli Indonesia yang berdasarkan pengetahuan lokal etnis setempat dan tumbuhan obat dari kawasan hutan Indonesia. Serta mengikuti Kebijakan Nasional yang mengatur akses ke Sumber Daya Alam atau Biologi Asli (Indigenous)

Using Local Knowledge to Shrink the Individual Carbon Footprint

Entire texts have been devoted to exploring the meaning of the term “lifestyle” and sociological understandings of lifestyle are complex and nuanced.For present purposes, however, a more simple articulation of the term will suffice. Lifestyle can mean “mode of living,” including “patterns of action” and “patterns of ways of living.” Without rendering judgment, one observation that can fairly be made about the current lifestyles and associated behaviors of Americans is that they indirectly and directly lead to the emission of a high volume of greenhouse gases (“GHGs”).7 Although an American diplomat is said to have remarked in preparing for the Rio Earth Summit that “‘the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation,”’ a growing number of legal scholars recognize the need for environmental policy to capture individual GHG emissions, and have begun to explore whether and how the law can or should be used to change individual, GHG-emitting lifestyles and behaviors. One consideration in designing a policy aimed at individual, GHG-emitting behaviors will be the division of authority between different levels of government. As evidenced by the opening quotations, local governments are often characterized as well-situated to influence individual behavior, particularly GHG-emitting behaviors. This Idea links concepts developed in the environmental federalism literature with work discussing the use of law to influence environmental behaviors to consider the competence of local governments with respect to influencing individual, GHG-emitting lifestyle and behavior choices

Searching in Unstructured Overlays Using Local Knowledge and Gossip

This paper analyzes a class of dissemination algorithms for the discovery of distributed contents in Peer-to-Peer unstructured overlay networks. The algorithms are a mix of protocols employing local knowledge of peers' neighborhood and gossip. By tuning the gossip probability and the depth k of the k-neighborhood of which nodes have information, we obtain different dissemination protocols employed in literature over unstructured P2P overlays. The provided analysis and simulation results confirm that, when properly configured, these schemes represent a viable approach to build effective P2P resource discovery in large-scale, dynamic distributed systems.Comment: A revised version of the paper appears in Proc. of the 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks (CompleNet 2014) - Studies in Computational Intelligence Series, Springer-Verlag, Bologna (Italy), March 201