The State of Traditional Stone Spouts in Relation to Their Use and Management in Kathmandu Valley,Nepal

ABSTRACT

Water resource management is a major challenge throughout the world. People still use traditional water harvesting and conservation techniques in many long-established societies. However, traditional methods are in decline or have been abandoned in many countries even though they are more efficient and cost effective than modern water harvesting techniques. Nevertheless, traditional approaches continue to be valuable in some countries, including Nepal. This research documents the state of such traditional methods, in this case stone spouts, in relation to their use and management within urban and peri-urban areas of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. This study shows a somewhat surprising outcome that spout condition is better in unprotected areas than in protected areas.     

Artificial Scarcity in Housebuilding and the Impact on Affordability: The Return of Absolute Rent

The slow response of volume housebuilders to changes in demand has been cited as a contributing cause of a global crisis of housing affordability and allegations of land banking have persistently dogged the industry. This article reviews the supply responsiveness of speculative housebuilders in the United Kingdom and Australia through the neglected Marxian analytic category of absolute rent. Absolute rent directs attention to the relationship between the value of land and the cost of housing and models a market in which landowners may withdraw land from supply to inflate prices. Through the lens of absolute rent, the real estate practices of the housebuilding industry can be understood as a strategy of artificial scarcity straddling land and housing markets. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the insights to be gained by a return to absolute rent that valuably expand the current debate on the supply and cost of housing.     

China's Quiet Agricultural Revolution: Policy and Programs of the New Millennium

Two specialists on China's agricultural sector review the recent course of agrarian reform in the country since the year 2000. More specifically, they summarize the more significant policy changes occurring during the period 2000-2009 (including the rollout of major new programs and agricultural tax relief) while simultaneously tracking impressive improvements in a variety of standard indicators of agricultural performance and rural per capita incomes across China's province-level units. Among other things, the authors draw contrasts between the current (post-WTO accession) and earlier reform period (1980-1985) in agriculture in terms of level of government direction and commitment to develop the sector for its own sake, outline measures undertaken to address problems with the production of tainted and/or adulterated food products, trace significant spatial "reshufflings" of rice and corn production at the provincial level, and offer possible explanations for the outwardly confounding lack of positive relationships between aggregate value of field crops/total value of all agricultural activities and rural incomes at the provincial level. They argue that renewed (yet underpublicized) government attention to the farm sector since 2000 has helped promote social stability in China by increasing food supplies (thus reducing food price effects on inflation), encouraging more sustainable farming practices, and improving rural environmental quality in many areas.     

Prehistory of Native Americans on the Central American Land Bridge: Colonization,Dispersal, and Divergence

The Central American land bridge has served as a passageway for animals and humans moving between North and South America. Nevertheless, after the first waves of human immigration at the end of the Pleistocene, contact between the native peoples who remained on this isthmus and other peoples living in continental areas where civilization ultimately developed, is characterized, according to the field record, by the transfer of crops, technologies, and goods, until ca.1400 BP when speakers of Mesoamerican languages occupied the northwestern edge (Gran Nicoya). The ancestors of modern-day speakers of Chibchan and Chocoan languages underwent social and cultural diversification mostly within the confines of the land bridge. Some Precolumbian residents altered vegetation immediately after first arrival at least 11,000 years ago, and began to add domesticated crops to their subsistence inventory between 9000 and 7000 BP. Maize and manioc (or cassava), domesticated outside the land bridge, were introduced in Preceramic times, early in the period between 7000 and 4500 BP, and gradually dominated regional agriculture as they became more productive, and as human populations increased and spread into virgin areas. Diversity in material culture is visible ca. 6000 BP, and becomes more apparent after the introduction of pottery ca. 4500 BP. By 2000 BP culture areas with distinctive artifact inventories are discernible. Between 2500 and 1300 BP hierarchies among regions, sites, social groups, and individuals point to the establishment of chiefdoms whose elite members came to demand large numbers of costume and sumptuary goods. A few special centers with stone sculptures and low-scale architecture served a social universe larger than the chiefdom, such as clusters of recently fissioned social groups with memories of a common heritage. Social interactions on the land bridge, endowed with productive bottomlands, highland valleys, and coastal habitats, appear always to have been strongest among neighboring groups.     

Land reform in the 1950s in Italy and the United States: the thinking of Mario Einaudi

The article discusses the thinking of Mario Einaudi in relation to the ambitious measures with which the Italian government sought to move towards land reform in the immediate post–war period. Einaudi, an intellectual and academic, was by birth Italian but moved to the United States during the Fascist period. Like his father Luigi, the noted economist, he was convinced of the need to stimulate the free market in land in order to increase productivity and modernise cultivation methods; in his writings he repeatedly sought to develop a plan of action that would facilitate collaboration between Rome and Washington in this field, identifying the Tennessee Valley Authority approach as especially suited to the Italian case. However, while his ideas achieved a good public airing, they had a limited impact: on the political front, Cold War priorities pushed Italian and US Marshall Plan experts more towards the redistribution of landownership than towards stimulating the productivity of agricultural businesses, in the attempt to rapidly build a consensus behind the government; and on the cultural front, at the end of the 1950s the issue of backwardness in the rural South started to be interpreted in terms of cultural and social anthropology, an approach which did not directly relate to the development of political programmes.     

环境压力与土地利用形式的转变——以汾阳文湖变迁为例

文湖是古代晋中重要湖泊之一,宋、金以前,湖域广阔,有着重要的社会经济效益。随着人地矛盾压力增大,宋、金已有两次开渠泄湖,到了万历四年彻底泄湖,文湖随即消亡。通过对文湖变迁过程的环境因素分析,本文认为文湖土地利用形式的转化,是区域自然、人文环境压力日趋紧张作用的结果,在看到泄湖为田之后的负面影响时,也应指出在区域生态环境长期发展下的行为适应性和无奈。这种因环境压力而导致的适应性土地利用行为,是历史时期人类土地利用形式转变的共性之一。     

‘We Live Like This’: Local Inequalities and Disproportionate Risk in the Context of Extractive Development and Climate Change on New Hanover Island,Papua New Guinea

This study examines the local processes, effects, and responses to large‐scale logging and agricultural development efforts in subsistence communities on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Recently, New Hanover became the site of three special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79% of the island. The proliferation of SABLs within PNG is an outcome of recent national development initiatives promoting a significant increase in the production of commercial agricultural crops such as oil palm and biofuel. Accordingly, SABLs are designed to facilitate the development of long‐term commercial agricultural industries in rural locations across the country through the conversion of forested lands and the simplification of communal land tenure, for the purposes of private lease. However, SABLs have simultaneously provided a convenient loophole around more restrictive national forestry policies and thereby become attractive to traditional logging interests in the Asian/Pacific region. Consequently, many SABLs across PNG have failed to produce viable agricultural development or broad local benefit. It is within this context, that this study pays particular attention to the experiences of women and lower‐status landowners living through the processes of SABL conversion, during the El Nino drought of 2015. The study details the statuses and roles of these groups within the overall development process, the ways in which their social relationships changed in the context of development, why these groups were particularly vulnerable to the broad livelihood effects of forest conversion and drought, how they adapted to these effects, and what their hopes were regarding the future of the development project and life on the island. This study adds to current theoretical interests on emerging neoliberal frontiers of land and resource control by examining these SABL landscapes on New Hanover as contemporary examples of land grabs and documenting the very real local level consequences of this phenomenon. The study is also particularly significant in light of the growing threats to forests and forest‐dependent livelihoods and the recognition of the importance of local forest practices to global sustainability.     

“本土安全”思想对中国近代海疆安全战略的影响

本土安全是近代中国海疆安全战略的终极目标。由于战略目标的局限,中国虽然拥有具备远洋作战能力的海军,但却无法在海军军备建设、军力部署,以及战略战备等方面摆脱海岸防御战略的影响。受本土安全思想的影响,中国的战略决策者在甲午战争中屡失战机,而近代中国海疆安全战略体系也因此崩溃。     

Etching the Law on the Land: The Role of Landscape and Custom in Defining the Space of the Hungarian Village in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article explores the interaction between the historical landscape of Hungary and the structure of rural society that developed therefrom. It establishes the means through which the Hungarian peasantry were able to construct the spatial order of the village in response to the particular environment of the Hungarian plain, and how this informed attempts to reform Hungarian rural society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this, it argues that customary practices and customary rights, in particular ‘beating the bounds’ (határjárás), provided a means for the peasantry to assert their own claims to the landscape in the face of reforms imposed from beyond the boundaries of the village.     

Land use change in Northeast China in the twentieth century: a note on sources,methods and patterns

Studies of historical change in cultivated land use in Northeast China have become important in the discussion of food supply safety and the reconstruction of land use/cover changes in China. This paper subjects a number of sources relating to land use change in the three provinces of Northeast China to comparative analysis. The data examined include Russian survey data (1914), data from local and regional Chinese governments during the Republic of China (1931), data from the Japanese Society of Manchuria Railway (SMR) for 1940 and various sets of contemporary Chinese data for the second half of the 20th century. A unified method of reconstructing the data and estimating the rate of cultivated land use change in Northeast China during the 20th century is developed here. A relational model is proposed for this purpose. It establishes a general framework for relating the various sets of data generated in different time periods and indicates ways in which the data have to be calibrated to ensure their comparability. The calibration of the data involves correlation and regression analysis. The results of the comparative analysis show that the area of and rate of change in cultivated land use in Northeast China increased until the last decade of the twentieth century. Increase rates were particularly high between 1914–1931 and 1950–1960.