Innovation in environmental assessment of community‐based projects in sub‐Saharan Africa

Although environmental assessment (EA) has been applied to large resource and infrastructure projects in developing countries, recent innovations in EA concepts, processes and tools have facilitated its application to small projects focused on basic human and livelihood needs. This paper describes innovations in the application of EA to community projects implemented by Canadian nongovernment organizations and their partners in sub‐Saharan Africa. Innovations include: (1) the dovetailing of environmental constructs in neopopulism with a conceptual shift in EA toward participatory, transactive planning; (2) assessment methodologies adapted from participatory rural appraisal; (3) development of grassroots EA capacity; and (4) linkage of community EA with project planning. Community EA is demonstrated for five cases involving agriculture and charcoal retail in Uganda, water supply and flood control in Niger and integrated rural development in Zambia. Future prospects and challenges include cultural adaptation, community empowerment through realignment of power relationships, mutual development of local and national EA capacity and increased training and resources for enhancing grassroots EA capacity .     

Understanding the Shortcomings of Commodity‐based Technology in Input–Output Models: an Economic‐Circuit Approach

Abstract.  The Make‐Use Model serves as a basis for most national accounting systems as the System of National Accounts (SNA) and is acknowledged as the most suitable model for interregional analysis. Two hypotheses are traditionally made featuring either industry‐based technologies (IBT) or commodity‐based technologies (CBT). While industry‐based technologies can be easily interpreted in terms of a demand‐driven economic circuit, it will be shown that: (1) commodity‐based technologies cannot be interpreted as a demand‐driven economic circuit because this involves computing the inverse of a matrix (the matrix of industry output proportions), which is either impossible or generates negative terms; (2) the only way to obtain a plausible explanation of CBT is to convert it into a supply‐driven model. This provides a new reason for rejecting CBT: either IBT is adopted but violates Kop Jansen and ten Raa's axioms, or CBT is chosen but must be converted into a poor or unrealistic supply‐driven model.     

Questioning the credibility and capacity of community‐based resource management

This paper reviews and critiques a potential innovation in resource and environmental management as a means of stimulating further research and refinement. Given the perceived limitations of top‐down, centralized management of natural resources, calls for the devolution of authority for local resources to local communities have increasingly been expressed. Proponents of community‐based resource management argue that, situating decision‐making closer to the place of resource use and subjecting decision‐makers to the repercussions of their decisions creates the potential for more flexible and prudent resource management. Further, by empowering communities to develop their own strategies for local economic development, greater community stability may be achieved. However, neither of these potentials will be realized if the credibility and capacity of communities are assumed rather than interrogated. These hypothesized contingent conditions of effective community‐based resource management are described and illustrated based on two examples in western Canada in which communities have been empowered to determine the use of local resources: the siting of a hazardous‐waste treatment facility near the town of Swan Hills, Alberta; and the development of the Community Forest Pilot Project in British Columbia. These examples raise a series of concerns and questions that suggest a need for further, in‐depth investigation. Ultimately, by identifying barriers to effective community‐based resource management, a more refined model of this potentially innovative approach can be fostered. Cette dissertation étudie et critique une innovation potentielle quant à la gestion de l’environnement et des ressources dans le but de stimuler des recherches plus approfondies et d’affiner les résultats. Étant donné les limitations perçues d’une gestion centralisée et descendante des ressources naturelles, on demande de plus en plus fréquemment que les collectivités locales soient responsables de la gestion des ressources locales. Les partisans d’une gestion des ressources par les collectivités avancent qu’en rapprochant la prise de décision du lieu d’utilisation des ressources et en soumettant les décideurs aux répercussions de leurs décisions, on favorise potentiellement une gestion plus souple et plus prudente des ressources. De plus, en habilitant les collectivités à déterminer leurs propres stratégies de développement économique local, une plus grande stabilité des collectivités est possible. Toutefois, ni l’un ni l’autre de ces potentiels ne seront réalisés si l’on admet sans les mettre en question la crédibilité et la capacité de gestion de ces collectivités. Ces conditions contingentes d’une gestion efficace des ressources par les collectivités sont décrites et illustrées par deux exemples provenant de l’Ouest du Canada, où les communautés ont toute discrétion quant à l’utilisation des ressources locales : l’implantation d’un centre de traitement des déchets dangereux près de la ville de Swan Hills, dans l’Alberta, et l’exécution du Community Forest Pilot Project (projet pilote de forêt domaniale) en Colombie britannique. Ces exemples soulèvent une série de questions et de préoccupations qui suggèrent le besoin de nouvelles recherches plus approfondies. En fin de compte, en identifiant ce qui s’oppose à une gestion efficace des ressources par les collectivités, on pourra stimuler l’élaboration d’un modèle plus perfectionné de cette démarche potentiellement innovante.     

The Spatial Distribution of Wages: Estimating the Helpman‐Hanson Model for Germany

Abstract.  Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by Helpman (1998) and Hanson (1998 , 2001a ). The advantage of the Helpman‐Hanson model is that it incorporates the fact that agglomeration of economic activity increases the prices of local (nontradable) services, like housing. This model thereby provides an intuitively appealing spreading force that allows for less extreme agglomeration patterns than predicted by the bulk of new economic geography models. Generalizing the Helpman‐Hanson model, we also analyze the implications for the spatial distribution of wages once the assumption of real wage equalization is dropped. If we no longer assume real wage equalization we find support for a spatial wage structure as well as for the relevance of the structural parameters of the theoretical model.     

Progressive localism for an ethics of care: Local Area Co-ordination with people with learning disabilities

In the UK devolution to ‘new’ nations and localities is generating differences in the tone and substance of social care. In Scotland there is an apparent rejection of the ‘personalisation’ model dominant in England and other neoliberal welfare states; in its place, there is an emphasis on locally based co-produced care provision, involving local organisations, practitioners and individuals. The paper argues that this is an outcome of the open and deliberative nature of policy-making, and the further devolution of social care provision to local authorities in Scotland. Local scale networks and spaces of provision are generating a ‘progressive localism’, contesting the association between the local scale and financial austerity, drawing on a relational understanding of place. Non-commodified and locally-based provision expands the discourse of care from ‘caring for’ individuals to ‘caring about’ people and places, in what is termed an ‘ethics of care’. The paper uses the example of people with learning disabilities to examine a more broadly conceived ‘caring’ within local communities, offering possibilities for inclusion and belonging. The paper draws on interviews with key policy makers and place-based care practitioners, known as ‘Local Area Co-ordinators’.     

Beyond the ICF: Italian network strategies for job placement of persons with disabilities

The Second National Conference on Disability, held in Bari in 2003, took the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), adopted by all WHO member states in 2001, as its frame of reference for future action and policies on disability. The ICF broke decisively with the medical model by seeing disability as an interaction between a biological and psychological condition and environmental and attitudinal barriers. Although existing Italian legislation on access to work for persons with disabilities, particularly Law 68/1999 on ‘collocamento mirato’ (targeted placement), anticipated some of the principles and definitions of the ICF, its implementation in practice was often snared in complex bureaucratic procedures and compromised by narrowly medical assessments of impairment and by considerable variations in standard from region to region. In 2009–2011 a pilot project, Progetto ICF4, was launched in 11 regions of Italy. It applied ICF principles, using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to assess the suitability of a work environment in terms of the networks of relations between the different actors involved in it. The way this has functioned in practice is illustrated by a case study of Teramo, one of the provinces in the pilot.     

Image is everything: educator awareness of perceived barriers for students with physical disabilities in geoscience degree programs

ABSTRACT

This exploratory pilot study builds on the image issues associated with geoscience degrees (namely physical geography and geology) and the potential obstacles this creates for prospective applicants with physical disabilities; departmental faculty may not be aware of the exclusive image projected that is thought to attract more students. While the industry has moved from field-based data collection to more office-based observation and interpretation of those data, universities still heavily rely on “adventurous geoscience” in their marketing, depicting students tackling challenging environments. The context of perception issues within the geoscience discipline is illustrated through selected program promotional materials, and student registration data. These issues were used for the basis of our study survey, sent out to higher education geoscience educators, which asked questions reading fieldwork and accessibility of the curriculum. These surveys were followed up with semi-structured interviews, investigating educator awareness of the perceived importance of fieldwork within the curriculum. The awareness of accessibility issues were connected with opportunities to lower perceived barriers sufficiently to encourage students with disabilities to apply for geoscience degrees. Outcomes of this exploratory investigation are hoped to provide the springboard for further conversations amongst the geoscience community.     

Geographic information system‐based edge effect correction for Ripley's K‐function under irregular boundaries

Ripley's K‐function is a test to detect geographically distributed patterns occurring across spatial scales. Initially, it assumed infinitely continuous planar space, but in reality, any geographic distribution occurs in a bounded region. Hence, the edge problem must be solved in the application of Ripley's K‐function. Traditionally, three basic edge correction methods were designed for regular study plots because of simplified geometric computation: the Ripley circumference, buffer zone, and toroidal methods. For an irregular‐shaped study region, a geographic information system (GIS) is needed to support geometric calculation of complex shapes. The Ripley circumference method was originally implemented by Haase and has been modified into a Python program in a GIS environment via Monte Carlo simulation (hereafter, the Ripley–Haase and Ripley–GIS methods). The results show that in terms of the statistical powers of clustering detection for irregular boundaries, the Ripley–GIS method is the most stable, followed by the buffer zone, toroidal, and Ripley–Haase methods. After edge effects of irregular boundaries have been eliminated, Ripley's K‐function is used to estimate the degree of spatial clustering of cities in a given territory, and in this paper, we demonstrate that by reference to the relationship between urban spatial structure and economic growth in China.     

Calcareous nannofossils in medieval mortar and mortar‐based materials: A powerful tool for provenance analysis

Calcareous nannofossils—very small‐scaled marine microfossils—occur in many archaeological materials. Foremost, these include limestones used in masonry, material which has not experienced significant modification by humans. Poorly documented are nannofossils in mortars, because the burning process of quicklime requires the heating of the raw material to > 800°C. Here we focus on calcareous nannofossils in mortar and mortar‐based samples of four medieval buildings in northern Germany. The study documents the presence of nannofossils in historic mortars. It supplies evidence for the provenance of the mortars used, thereby introducing a new tool for mortar provenance studies.     

‘Travel in parallel with us for a while’: sensory geographies of autism

Drawing on autobiographies by authors with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs), we consider how ASD authors use travel analogies and spatial metaphors to explore questions of difference in autistic sensory experience. ASD authors often appeal to the geographical imagination in an effort to communicate with ‘neuro‐typical’ others for whom autistic behaviour can seem so peculiar as to be almost alien. Blurring the boundaries between pathology and normality, ASD authors counter typically negative and/or dismissive assessments of deficiency, disability and deviance with explanations of reasonable difference in environmental response. This paper takes up the challenge of ASD authors to ‘travel in parallel’, circumventing biomedical ‘checkpoints’, if only temporarily, in order to better understand the construction and experience of autistic lifeworlds, wherein spatial and embodied coherence is challenged at every turn and ‘sensory mapping’ is a means of survival. Rather than viewing perceptual and processing challenges characteristic of ASDs as problems to be fixed, we suggest non‐autistic others might instead attempt to understand and appreciate sensory diversity in, and on, authors' own terms.     

p‐Functional Clusters Location Problem for Detecting Spatial Clusters with Covering Approach

Regionalization or districting problems commonly require each individual spatial unit to participate exclusively in a single region or district. Although this assumption is appropriate for some regionalization problems, it is less realistic for delineating functional clusters, such as metropolitan areas and trade areas where a region does not necessarily have exclusive coverage with other regions. This paper develops a spatial optimization model for detecting functional spatial clusters, named the p‐functional clusters location problem (p‐FCLP), which has been developed based on the Covering Location Problem. By relaxing the complete and exhaustive assignment requirement, a functional cluster is delineated with the selective spatial units that have substantial spatial interaction. This model is demonstrated with applications for a functional regionalization problem using three journey‐to‐work flow datasets: (1) among the 46 counties in South Carolina, (2) the counties in the East North Central division of the US Census, and (3) all counties in the US. The computational efficiency of p‐FCLP is compared with other regionalization problems. The computational results show that detecting functional spatial clusters with contiguity constraints effectively solves problems with optimality in a mixed integer programming (MIP) approach, suggesting the ability to solve large instance applications of regionalization problems.     

The “Blind” State: Government Quest for Formalization and Conflict with Small‐Scale Miners in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian government is attempting to implement a formalization plan to deal with the chaotic expansion of small‐scale mining activities in the Amazon. However, this plan has been contested, delayed and halted by local miners. Why exactly has it been so hard for the government to enforce a formalization plan in Madre de Dios? This article aims to answer this question by analysing both government efforts to establish control over the region and the challenges it faces in enforcing its formalization plan. It is argued that current resistance to and conflict over the formalization process in Madre de Dios reveals a state governance problem due to the region having been historically governed as a zone for exploitation rather than for social and economic development. Similarly, the analysis highlights the absence of major corporations through which the state can establish a basis for governance, as in other parts of the country.     

Redefining ‘sub‐culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East‐Central Europe with a case study from early 20th century L'viv‐Lwów‐Lemberg

This paper proposes a new definition of the term ‘subculture’, as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East‐Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now‐Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state – either from the ‘top down’, or else the ‘bottom up’ as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno‐linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term ‘subcultures’ to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg (German) or Lwów (Polish). It argues that Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence – in particular, court records – is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating ‘hybrid’ identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio‐political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19–65; King 2002; Zahra 2008).     

Building intersectoral partnerships as place‐based strategy for immigrant and refugee (re)settlement: The Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership

This paper examines the role of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership in the Syrian refugee resettlement in Canada's national capital following the federal government's 2015–2016 resettlement plan. Based on the findings of qualitative data collection—including semi‐structured interviews with representatives from community organizations, settlement agencies, and the City of Ottawa—two main arguments are advanced. First, while the current literature tends to portray the Canadian settlement sector as a passive victim in the face of neoliberal restructuring and austerity measures, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective by reflecting on the sector's ability to exert agency by developing initiatives and devising strategies that are rooted in the local context. Second, the case of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership sheds light on the significance of intersectoral networks and partnerships that extend beyond the settlement sector to build a sound approach for welcoming refugees and newcomers more generally. These findings serve to demonstrate the potential of partnerships as a place‐based settlement model that is responsive to context‐specific needs and enhances local community strengths, thus providing important lessons that can inform future immigrant and refugee (re)settlement and integration in other Canadian cities and regions.     

A Multivariate Model for Spatio‐temporal Health Outcomes with an Application to Suicide Mortality

This article considers models for multivariate mortality outcomes (e.g., bivariate, trivariate, or higher dimensional) observed over a set of areas and through time. The model outlined here allows for spatially structured and white noise errors and for their intercorrelation. It also includes possible temporal continuity in such types of error via structured temporal effects. An extension to spatially varying regression effects is considered, as well as the option of nonparametric specification of priors for spatial residuals and regression effects. Allowing for spatially correlated intercepts or regression effects may alter inferences regarding the changing impact on mortality of socioeconomic or environmental predictors. The modeling framework is illustrated by an application to male and female suicide mortality in London, focusing on the impact on suicide of deprivation and social fragmentation (“anomie”) in the 33 London boroughs during three periods: 1979–83, 1984–88 and 1989–93. Suicide trends by age group are also considered and show considerable differences in the trends in impacts of deprivation and social fragmentation.     

“Now let me share this with you”: Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research

Abstract: In this article we attempt to “seize back the creative initiative” to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re‐representing and interpreting data collected through in‐depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng‐Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas.     

Inferences for Selected Location Quotients with Applications to Health Outcomes. 选择性区位商推断及其在医疗成效中的应用

The location quotient (LQ) is an index frequently used in geography and economics to measure the relative concentration of activities. This quotient is calculated in a variety of ways depending on which group is used as a reference. Here, we focus on a simultaneous inference for the ratios of the individual proportions to the overall proportion based on binomial data. This is a multiple comparison problem and inferences for LQs with adjustments for multiplicity have not been addressed before. The comparisons are negatively correlated. The quotients can be simultaneously tested against unity, and simultaneous confidence intervals can be constructed for the LQs based on existing probability inequalities and by directly using the asymptotic joint distribution of the associated test statistics. The proposed inferences are appropriate for analysis based on sample surveys. Two real data sets are used to demonstrate the application of multiplicity‐adjusted LQs. A simulation study is also carried out to assess the performance of the proposed methods to achieve a nominal coverage probability. For the LQs considered, the coverage of the simple Bonferroni‐adjusted Fieller intervals for LQs is observed to be almost as good as the coverage of the method that directly takes the correlations into account.