Constructing a Gender Policy for Joint Forest Management in India

Policy makers and advocates of joint forest management (JFM) agree that women should be full participants and that their involvement is especially important because of the nature of women's work. This article examines how JFM policy has addressed gender in India. It argues that policy has been informed by instrumentalist positions in the debate over women's relationship to the environment. Consequently, gender planning in JFM has focused on two issues: formal representation for women in local institutions, and identifying women's ‘special’ values, knowledge and uses of forest resources. The scant evidence suggests that the impact of JFM on women has generally been negative. Finally, the article suggests that gender policy in JFM needs to be based on a more sophisticated understanding of gender relations and a wider examination of the gendered context of JFM processes.     

Equity, Diversity and Interdependence: Cultural Policy in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the new presence of "culture" within politics in Northern Ireland and attempts by cultural policymakers and community activists to constructively shift the meanings of "identity", "tradition" and "heritage". It focuses on the work of the Community Relations Council and the strategic development of its three principles of equity, diversity and interdependence, in relation to specific controversies about culture in Northern Ireland and wider debates about pluralism and multiculturalism. The distinctive configuration of questions of pluralism and culture in Northern Ireland highlights the ways in which multicultural theory is shaped by its geographies of development and circulation and how ideas of culture and multiculture work in different places and travel with sometimes ambiguous effects. At the same time, the pragmatic combination of optimism, realism, encouragement and critique in cultural policy in a context of continued division and political instability complicates familiar accounts of the geographies and politics of multiculture.     

Taxonomic, anatomical, and spatio-temporal variations in the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions of plants from an African savanna

Stable carbon (δ¹³C) and nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) isotope ratios are commonly used to reconstruct palaeodiets and palaeoenvironments. The method is based on our knowledge of isotopic patterns in plants, which are subject to taxonomic and environmental variability. While previous researchers have addressed isotopic variability amongst plants, no studies have looked extensively at a broad suite of taxa over multiple temporal scales from within the savanna biome so as to provide baseline data for palaeodietary and palaeoenvironmental studies. Here we document variations in the isotopic compositions of plants collected over two years from the Kruger National Park, South Africa, with respect to species and anatomical differences, and the influences of geological substrate and spatio-temporal shifts in climate. Results show that environmentally-induced carbon isotopic variations in plants within this region are generally smaller than 2‰, which is lower than what has been previously reported for plants compared across multiple habitat-types. These data suggest that δ¹³C differences of 2‰ or more (or 1‰ if the diet is predominantly C₄) between animals from a given area reliably indicate real dietary differences. Plant δ¹⁵N values vary greatly between different microhabitats (by up to 4‰), responding to a range of environmental influences that may, in turn, significantly influence variation in animal δ¹⁵N values.     

Perceived Risk and Citizen Preferences for Governmental Management of Routine Hazards

Risk perceptions are important to the policy process because they inform individuals’ preferences for government management of hazards that affect personal safety, public health, or ecological conditions. Studies of risk in the policy process have often focused on explicating the determinants of risk perceptions for highly salient, high consequence hazards (e.g., nuclear energy). We argue that it is useful to also study more routinely experienced hazards; doing so shows the relevance of risk perceptions in individuals’ daily lives. Our investigation focuses on the impact perceived risk has on citizens’ preferences over hazard management policies (as distinct from identifying risk perception determinants per se). We use a recursive structural equation model to analyze public opinion data measuring attitudes in three distinct issue domains: air pollution, crime, and hazardous waste storage and disposal. We find that citizens utilize perceived risk rationally: greater perceived risk generally produces support for more proactive government to manage potential hazards. This perceived risk–policy response relationship generally holds even though the policy options respondents were asked to consider entailed nontrivial costs to the public. The exception seems to be when individuals know less about the substantive issue domain.     

Head Start's Comparative Advantage: Myth or Reality?

In recent years, Head Start's prominent role in preparing low‐income 4‐year‐olds for school has been affected by rapid growth in state‐funded pre‐K programs, some of which are based in public schools. This has led to questions about the comparative advantages of these two approaches to early education. An analysis of data from Tulsa, Oklahoma, indicates that the school‐based pre‐K program is more effective in improving early literacy outcomes, while Head Start is more effective in improving health outcomes. The two programs are comparable with regard to early math learning. Social–emotional effects are more subtle, but the school‐based pre‐K program has demonstrable positive effects, while the Head Start program does not.     

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the paper's title thus stands both for the issue of physically crossing the border whose difficulties and effects have been central to the lives of those who have lived near the border, and for recent arguments that shared experiences of the impact of the border may be the basis for new senses of identity and commonality that imaginatively cross the borders of old categories of religion, culture and political affiliation. Recent efforts to reconceptualise border identities are emerging within a context still dominated by more polarised perspectives on identity and history, but they represent one significant strand of engagement with the Irish border. They suggest possibilities for forms of border identities that co-exist with, run counter to or cross cut old categories of division and difference.     

Digital Dialogue? Australian Politicians' use of the Social Network Tool Twitter

The recent emergence of online social media has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding of this remains less than complete. This article adds to current understanding of the online engagement between politicians and the public by presenting the first quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the social network tool Twitter by Australian politicians. The analysis suggests that politicians are attempting to use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians are noisier than Australians in general on Twitter, though this is due more to broadcasting than conversing. Those who use Twitter to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. Though politicians cluster by party, a relatively ‘small world’ network is evident in the Australian political discussion on Twitter.