Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation

Abstract: By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy‐making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the conditions for the formation of a dynamic alliance among representatives of the US Congress, the US Agency for International Development, environmental NGOs and the private sector around biodiversity conservation. In this alliance, idealized visions of NGOs as civil society and a countering force to corporations have underpinned their influence, despite their contemporary corporate partnerships. Furthermore, by focusing on international biodiversity conservation, the group has attracted a broad spectrum of political and corporate support to shape public policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion.     

The environment becomes a political issue. Highlights of the Brundtland Commission Report

The Report of the Brundtland Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development) has been released by the UN. The Report points out that environmental survival requires development and development is only possible if the resources of the global environment are conserved. Although the UN and the World Bank must make commitments to development, each nation must devise its own strategy because development is inextricably linked to political, economic, and social factors such as poverty, overpopulation and the status of women. The Report makes 3 specific recommendations: 1) An independent body should be set up to assess global risks; 2) A universal declaration on environment and development should be made and followed by a convention; and 3) The UN General Assembly should set up a UN Program on Sustainable Development. The highest priority should be given to finding alternatives to nuclear energy as well as making the use of nuclear energy safer. Other major environmental problems include desertification, acid rain, the "greenhouse effect" and its impact on global climate and sea levels, and the destruction of the ozone layer with concomitant increase in cancer.     

Shattering the silence of violence against women

The UN Development Fund for Women has selected 23 projects in 18 developing countries to be beneficiaries of a $1.2 million trust fund dedicated to the elimination of violence against women. While the projects offer a variety of approaches to preventing and eliminating the domestic violence suffered by a third of the women in developing countries, all involve awareness-raising and advocacy, capacity-building, literacy, training, action research, and prevention/deterrence activities. A project in the Philippines will train women migrant workers who have been victimized by abuse to produce videos about their experience in order to raise consciousness about the rights of women and of workers. A South African project, which will address sexual assaults of high school students that occur in dating relationships, will involve a prevalence survey, a pilot project, an expansion of the project and curriculum development, a play on date rape, crisis intervention counseling, production of a video and manual, a national conference, and publication of essays produced by students who participated in the program. The Trust Fund was proposed by Japan in response to the urgent call for action issued by the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women and is funded by donations from governments and private sources.     

POOR MEN: ON THE MASCULINIZATION OF POVERTY IN SWEDEN, 1957–1981

This paper discusses the underlying causes behind the masculinization of poverty during the period of 1957–1981 in Sweden. Testable hypotheses are derived from a theoretical framework. The findings suggest that the male role as breadwinner disappeared during the analysed period. Lowly educated men and especially male immigrant labour lost their labour market position when industrial society gave way to a new post-industrial society, with an expanding service sector bringing numerous new employment opportunities for women. When sick or unemployed, social assistance was the only social security these men had available. On the other hand, the welfare-state expansion targeted women, particularly single mothers and widows, and thus reduced the number of native women claiming social assistance. The findings also point to the process character of the masculinization of poverty, arguing that women gained significantly more than men from the expansion of the welfare state.     

REPLY TO SUBSIDIES, ADDITIONALITY AND FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS

ABSTRACT. In Wren (1994) I find that industrial subsidies have significantly greater employment effects in small firms, and interpret this as arising from the poorer access that these firms have to private funds. Holden and Swales (1996) criticize this interpretation, arguing that financial constraints typically limit the effectiveness of subsidies. In this paper I show that their results arise from the particular properties of the homogeneous production function. More generally, I show that the effectiveness of assistance increases with the marginal cost of private funds and is greater in those firms facing financial constraints. As such, differential access to private funds can explain the greater effectiveness of assistance found in small firms.     

Expanding Women's Co-operatives in China through Institutional Linkages

This article examines the institutional linkages between three women workers' co-operatives, the first women's credit co-operative in China, and the co-operative support organization, the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Co-operatives (ICCIC). The study shows that Chinese women in rural areas have increasingly adopted co-operatives as a form of organization in their efforts to address the problem of their lack of access to resources, including land, credit, jobs, training and information, and to participate in the mainstream economy as an organized force. This article demonstrates that stronger institutional linkages between local offices of the All-China Women's Federation and the ICCIC encourage the growth of women's co-operative activities. It raises two sets of policy issues that are central to the development of co-operatives and women's banking: the continued growth of these activities will depend upon the government adopting legislation to define the legal framework governing co-operative relations and management systems, and establishing gender-inclusive policies to increase credit to women's income-generating activities.     

Gendered division of labour and feminisation of responsibilities in Kenya; implications for development interventions

Analysing gender roles as a social organisation element of a community is critical for understanding actors’ rationales and agency with regard to allocation and use of resources. This article discusses gender relations and how they determine development outcomes, based on a highland-lowland case-study of participants of Farmer Field Schools in Kakamega Central Sub-County (highland) and Mbeere South Sub-County (lowland). The gender relations at stake include the gendered division of labour, gender roles and intra-household power relations as expressed in access and control of resources and benefits and their implications for agricultural development. The study used mixed methods, the Harvard Analytical Framework of gender roles and draws on the Neo-Marxist position on exploitation, categorisation and institutionalisation of power relations, empowerment and the critical moments framework to discuss the results. Results in both Sub-Counties show that patriarchy prevails, determining institutional design, access and control of resources and benefits. Social positions shape capabilities and strategies of actors in decision-making and use of resources to justify gender-specific institutional arrangements. In Kakamega, men get the lion share of incomes from contracted sugarcane farming despite overburdening workloads on women, while in Mbeere, both men and women derive incomes from Khat (Catha Edulis) enterprises. However, women are expected to spend their earnings on household expenditures, which were hitherto responsibilities of men, thereby contributing to the feminisation of responsibilities. Development policies and interventions thus need to be based on an understanding of men and women’s differential access and control over resources and the institutions underpinning men and women’s bargaining power in order to adopt more effective measures to reduce gender inequalities.     

Environmental Education in Russian Universities

This paper presents the results of a simulation exercise designed to explore and understand the implications of trying to survive in a marginal and poverty-stricken African community. The aim of the simulation was to create an approximation of a community involved in an income-generating project, akin to a Public Works Programme. This project sought to enable every person to earn a dollar a day on which to live. In addition, the exercise helped the participants to question and assess whether the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have a chance of reaching their proposed targets. The nearly one hundred participants were undergraduate geography students, reading Development Studies and Demography at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The outcome of the simulation was that the students developed a clearer understanding of poverty, particularly the ‘Deprivation Trap’, and how complex the development process is in practice.     

Women With AIDS: Will It Change aids Service Organizations?

In the early 1980s, gay men formed AIDS service organizations (ASOs) in areas hardest hit by the disease, such as San Francisco and New York City, to provide assistance to infected members of their own communities. The Ryan White CARE Act of 1990 made funds available for community-based groups, such as ASOs, to provide support services to all people with HIV/AIDS. The epidemiology of AIDS has changed greatly in recent years, and increasing numbers of poor, minority women with children now contract HIV/AIDS. To determine if ASOs are in compliance with the CARE Act, this study surveyed 20 ASOs across the country and a number of their female clients to see if ASOs, some of which were started by gay men, have tailored their services for a growing minority, heterosexual population. The results indicate that a number of ASOs have been slow in responding to the diverse needs of women. Recommendations are offered to make the organizations more responsive.     

Supporting women's empowerment in Djibouti

This article reports on the work carried out by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in the small island of Djibouti, Africa. The republic's population has been plagued with problems of high levels of unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, an almost non-existent family reproductive health care service, 100% prevalence rate of female genital mutilation and low literacy rate, especially for women. In addition, refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea have settled in the country increasing the risks of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, prostitution, and other social ills. In 1983, UNFPA started funding family planning and later reproductive health projects aimed at assuring access to services for a majority of Djiboutan women. The first country population program of assistance was started in 1992. This would help the government with health care for its population and to conduct a population census. In addition, the Fund has paid for training of doctors, midwives, and traditional birth assistants in the country and for rehabilitating maternity clinics and information centers. Moreover, it has supported agencies concerned with educating people on STDs, HIV/AIDS, safe motherhood and reproductive health for men and women, and other important issues.     

United States Policy Toward the Multilateral Development Banks

During its first several decades, the World Bank operated with few constraints on its lending authority. Lending policies reflected primarily the economic and political objectives of Bank management and staff. With the establishment of the International Development Association (IDA) soft loan window 1960 this autonomy began to erode. The funds needed to support the IDA soft loans had to be replenished. This opened the door to greater political pressure on Bank policy by the administration and Congress. Since the mid-1980s environmental interest groups increasingly have been effective in bringing pressure to bear on World Bank and other MDB policy.     

"To change the world." Cairo conference reaches consensus on plan to stabilize world growth by 2015

After 6 days of debate and 200 speakers during September 5-13, 1994, participants from 180 countries at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) agreed on a strategy for curbing global population growth over the next 20 years. The objective was sustained economic growth and sustainable development. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said that the objective was to balance humanity and the environment with the means to sustain life, and that the efficacy of the world economic order depended to some extent on the ICPD. Participants were urged to use rigor, tolerance, and conscience in conference deliberations. Men and women should have the right and the means to choose their families' futures. The preamble stated that the ICPD would probably be the last opportunity in the twentieth century to address globally the issues relating to population and development. UN Population Fund Executive Director Nafis Sadik remarked that the ICPD had the potential to change the world. Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak was elected president of the ICPD. Mubarak stated that solutions to population problems must go beyond demographic accounting and incorporate change in social, economic, and cultural conditions. Norway's Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland stated that development in many countries never reached many women. She called it a hypocritical morality that allowed women to suffer and die from unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, and miserable living conditions. US Vice President Albert Gore called for comprehensive and holistic solutions. The essential features of social change would involve democracy, economic reform, low rates of inflation, low levels of corruption, sound environmental management, free and open markets, and access to developed country markets. Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir urged the empowerment of women. Many expressed the concern about unsustainable consumption in industrialized countries. Prior world population conferences had been held in Rome (1954), Belgrade (1965), Bucharest (1974), and Mexico City (1984). The first World Plan of Action was adopted in 1974 and changed at the 1984 conference.     

Population. The new challenge: translating Cairo success into meaningful activities

The newly named Commission on Population and Development, at its 1995 session in New York, stated it should have the primary responsibility for reviewing the implementation of the Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September 1994. The Population Commission was renamed the Commission on Population and Development by the General Assembly. In debate, some countries reviewed their national experiences in population matters, stressing how the Program of Action would influence their policies. At mid-1994, world population stood at 5.63 billion persons, a report on world population trends and policies revealed. During the preceding 12 months, population had grown by 86 million and was expected to grow by an additional 87 million during the next 12 months. While China's representative described a near-crisis situation marked by a net increase in population of 14 million per year in her country, the representative of the Russian Federation expressed concern over the decrease in Russia's population. Between 1990 and 1994, world population had grown at 1.57% per annum. UN medium-fertility-variant projections indicated that the population growth rate would continue declining to 1.33% per annum between 2000 and 2010; 1.15% in 2010-2020; 0.95% in 2020-2030; 0.72% in 2030-2040; and 0.54% in 2040-2050. Consequently, the world population was projected to reach 7.5 billion by 2015 and 9.8 billion by 2050. Assistance for population programs had increased from $220 million in 1988 to $305 million in 1992, the bulk of which came from UNFPA. Family planning, integrated with reproductive health and carried out through a primary health care system, continued to receive the bulk of multilateral resources. Projects to improve the status of women, such as education for girls, leadership training, literacy programs, and projects designed to increase the income of women and their families were being supported by multilateral agencies. An update on global contraceptive requirements from 1994 to 2005 estimated that the total cost of contraceptive commodities would be $7.7 billion.     

The Politics of Economic Diversification: Reconceptualizing the Rural Informal Sector in South-east Tanzania

This study examines how economic diversification is changing a Tanzanian village under economic liberalization. More specifically, it asks how different wealth groups are able to incorporate income-generating activities into their livelihood strategies. The conclusion is that while diversification (as a division of labour) is advanced at the village level, it appears that different activities enhance the division of the village into segregated cultural spheres and increase economic differentiation. At village level the diversity of income-generating activities reduces any single line of economic dependency either on the state or on market actors.     

自养与本色之深入：1929年世界经济危机冲击下的华北基督教

1929年世界经济危机发生后,西方基督教差会被迫减少对华传教事业经费,裁减传教士人数,对华北基督教产生重要影响。华北教会为此提倡受托主义,鼓励教徒捐献,并减少职员薪金;同时,教会为减轻经济负担,还组织各种义工训练班,注意培养义务工作人员为教会服务;教会学校与医院在差会经费减少的形势下,通过裁员减支、增收学费与住院费及向政府、社会力量请求援助等多种形式维持运营。此次经济危机有利于增强中国教会及教会机构的自养,破除教徒的依赖心理,推动了中国教会的本色化进程,但不能从根本上使其摆脱对西方经费的依赖。     

After Beijing: emphasis on poverty eradication

In March 1996, during its first meeting since the Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), called for a gender perspective to be integrated into policies and programs dealing with poverty, child and dependent care, and the media. Three expert panels examined each of these areas through a format which encouraged dialogue and led to the adoption of 17 resolutions, decisions, and agreed conclusions as well as a recommendation that the UN adopt a multi-year work program for the CSW to allow it to review progress in elimination of the 12 main obstacles to women's advancement identified at Beijing. Among the resolutions adopted by the CSW were calls to 1) take a broad and integrated approach to poverty eradication, 2) enhance women's empowerment and autonomy, 3) promote equity and equality in the public domain, 4) promote women's employment, 5) give women social and economic protection when they are unable to work, 6) counteract negative images of women and sex-stereotyping in the media, 7) reduce the representation of violence against women in the media, 8) strengthen the role of women in global communications, 9) encourage the participation of men in child and dependent care, and 10) recognize women's double burden of work. The CSW also agreed to pursue further discussions about drafting an optional protocol to the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Among its other actions, the CSW called for mechanisms to protect the rights of women migrant workers, to protect women and children during armed conflicts, to include gender-based human rights violations in UN activities, and to address the root factors which lead to social ills such as trafficking in women and girls. In addition, the CSW submitted a draft resolution demanding that Israel protect the rights of Palestinian women and their families.     

ADMINISTRATIVE LOBBYING EFFECTIVENESS: WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE

This paper compares the administrative lobbying efforts of women's and environmental groups to nudge the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) to conform with Congressional mandates. In 1973, Congress mandated that AID involve women in its development programs, and AID responded with the establishment of a small, resource-poor monitoring office whose leader nurtured a wider constituency for the issue. In contrast, AID ignored its responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act, but once established environmental groups initiated a suit against AID, its General Council joined the environmental monitoring office and other executive branch advocacy units to increase environmentally sound programming. The progress of these two issues is compared, focusing on interest groups, internal AID structure, and the issues themselves.     

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.     

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village‐based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over‐representation of better‐off and higher‐status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.     

The European union's support for new technology‐based firms: An assessment of the first three years of the European seed capital fund scheme

In 1988, the European Commission launched a pilot programme, the European Seed Capital Fund Scheme, designed to create 24 new seed capital funds in the 12 member states and to increase the availability of equity finance to innovative start‐up and early‐stage enterprises. The findings of a pan‐European assessment carried out in the spring of 1992 on 21 of the 22 supported funds and 40 of their investee companies are presented. The actions of the funds have allowed additional resources to be directed to young technology‐based firms. However, the research findings also suggest that the majority of supported funds are under‐capitalized which will result in major problems of financial viability in the medium term. The research also questions the sufficiency of supply side policies alone to address issues of regional ‘equity gaps’ particularly related to the support for NTBFs within Europe.