Panchayati Raj in West Bengal: Popular Participation for the People or the Party?

Since 1978 the Left Front government in West Bengal, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — CPI(M) — has pursued a strategy of decentralized planning through locally elected panchayats (councils) in the countryside. The stated ideological commitment of the CP1(M) is to support and eventually empower the poor and oppressed and this has resulted in Panchayati Raj assuming the status of not just a state sponsored decentralization strategy, but the institutional forum for the mobilization of the poor and the expansion of the party's base. However the CPI(M)'s strategy is to some extent ambiguous in that it combines a need to maintain an electoral status as a party leading a state government within the Indian Union and a political status as a party promoting the conditions for, and the transition to, a people's democracy and thereby socialism.     

The Equity and Legitimacy of Markets for Ecosystem Services

Markets for ecosystem services are being promoted across the developing world, amidst claims that the provision of economic incentives is vital to bring about resource conservation. This article argues that equity and legitimacy are also critical dimensions in the design and implementation of such markets, if social development goals beyond economic gains are to be achieved. The article examines this issue by focusing on two communities involved in a project for carbon sequestration services of forests in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The perceived legitimacy of the activities and the distribution of economic outcomes and project‐related information are found to be mediated by organizational allegiances and the history of social relations regarding access to property and forest resources. Political affiliation determines the project's legitimacy, while the poorest farmers and women have been excluded from project design and implementation. The authors argue that pitfalls such as these contribute to reinforcing existing power structures, inequities and vulnerabilities, and suggest that this is a product of the nature of emerging markets. Markets for ecosystem services are, in effect, limited in promoting more legitimate forms of decision making and a more equitable distribution of their outcomes.     

New Perspectives on the Bell-Beaker Culture

Bell-Beaker culture artefacts are not unequivocal expressions of male status, but helped instead to maintain ritual and symbolic demarcations of gender difference. The gendered nature of cultural production explains part of the variability seen in Beaker assemblages. More generally the spread of the Bell-Beaker culture cannot be explained by regional trajectories of social evolution or structuration. It is a spatially extensive phenomenon and interpretations/explanations must recognise this. A scenario is presented which links the eastwards spread of Beaker pottery in central Europe to the importation of copper metallurgy into north-west Europe.     

A Voice for Black Interests: Congressional Black Caucus Cohesion and Bill Cosponsorship

This study enhances our understanding of the vexing dilemma (i.e., the crosspressures emanating from individual goals and collective aspirations) confronting black legislators. Extant research based on roll call votes or on interest group scores that are also based on roll call votes is limited in what it can tell us about African-American representation in Congress. By examining African-American representatives' cosponsorship of legislation, this study uses a more accurate measure of members' legislative behavior and thus overcomes the "censored sample problem" associated with roll call data. Bill cosponsorship is a good indicator of a representative's intensity of commitment to constituent interests. We examine public bills cosponsored by African-American representatives from 1971 through 1993. The analysis finds that the cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) transcends policy arenas, notwithstanding higher rates of cosponsorship on social issues, and that the number of bills cosponsored by the CBC is noticeably higher after 1982. In addition, analysis suggests that CBC members, just like all members of Congress, respond to the structure that governs the House and the political forces that shape their electoral fortunes.     

Shake-Table Tests of Confined-Masonry Rocking Walls with Supplementary Hysteretic Damping

A shake-table investigation is conducted on a 40% scale model frame-wall system to validate the concept of rocking walls as primary seismic systems. The rocking wall concept was implemented on confined masonry walls, but the findings can be extended to any rocking wall system. As the inherent damping of this system is low, a pair of supplemental steel hysteretic energy dissipating dampers is used at the base of the wall. It is concluded that with careful detailing, damage is not only eliminated but the structure re-centers itself following a large earthquake.     

The large Roches moutonnées of upper deeside

EUROPE

Tourist Map of the Cairngorms. 1:63,360. 42 x 33 ¼. Chessington: The Ordnance Survey, 1964. Paper flat 7s. 6d. Paper folded 10s. 6d. Mounted and folded 15s.

Map of Hadrian's Wall. 1:31.680. 31 ¼ x 40 ¾. Chessington: The Ordnance Survey, 1964. 10s. paper folded. 7s. 6d. paper flat.

The Resorts of Western Europe. 1:2,500,000 with insets. Compiled by G. W. S. Robinson with the assistance of M. G. Webb. Drawn by A. C. Clark. 33 x 37 ½. London &; Bude: Geographical Publications Ltd., 1962. 15s.

ASIA

South‐East Asia. 1:5,800,000. 29 ½ x 40. Edinburgh: John Bartholomew &; Son Ltd., 1964. 5s. paper folded. 7s. 6d. cloth folded.

Historischer—Geographisches Kartenwerk: Indien. Entwicklung Seiner Wirtschaft und Kultur. 16 plates. 18 pp. text. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopadie, 1958, 55 DM.     

Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children's movement in Benin and Ethiopia

This paper challenges policy discourses that frame children's independent movement as intrinsically exploitative and threatening to their development. Drawing on research with children and adults in Benin and Ethiopia, two countries caught up in current efforts to eradicate child migration and the trafficking with which it has become associated, the paper critiques assumptions about children's vulnerability and physical dependence and contests the idea that appropriate childhood is necessarily fixed spatially within stable family structures. It, thus, situates children's migration within socio-cultural and economic contexts and suggests that it should be understood as part of a moral economy that confounds simplistic paradigms that conflate migration with trafficking. Policy suggestions are offered for how best to secure children's well-being through acknowledgement of the important relationship between mobility and child maturation.