Project Narratives: Investigating Participatory Conservation in the Peruvian Andes

This article shares findings from a participatory assessment study of a community-based environmental monitoring project in the Peruvian Andes. The objective of the project was to generate evidence to support sustainable livelihoods through participatory knowledge generation. With the use of narrative framing, the study retrospectively reconstructs the project's trajectory as perceived by the three stakeholder groups: the community, the researchers, and the implementing NGO. This analysis reveals discrepancies between the stakeholder groups both in their view of the course of events and their understanding of the purpose of the intervention. However, while the storylines depict differing project trajectories, they often agree in terms of long-term goals. The study also uncovers some neglected positive externalities that are of considerable significance to local stakeholders. These include community-to-community knowledge transfer, inter-generational knowledge sharing and ecosystem knowledge revival. The article illustrates how assumptions and expectations about participatory projects are encapsulated in narratives of positive change despite the limited level of agreement among stakeholders about what such a change should comprise. It sheds light on development narratives and their power to shape stakeholders’ perceptions in accordance with their beliefs and priorities. This is of special importance for ecosystem governance projects, which are sensitive to normative differences and subject to competing claims.     

Structural Adjustment and Diversification in Zambia

Structural adjustment should go hand in hand with measures to diversify the economy to make it less vulnerable to future changes in the external environment. However, adjustment programmes tend to concentrate on expenditure reduction policies, thereby hampering the necessary diversification. This proposition is elaborated for the economy of Zambia, which is still as dependent on mineral exports as it was twenty-five years ago at independence. During and after the minerals boom the country suffered from Dutch disease. The subsequent adjustment efforts, reinforced through IMF involvement, did not sufficiently change the bias against tradables production. The latter is taken as a yardstick for diversification. A balanced implementation of expenditure switching policies in a later stage became increasingly difficult when the country also had to adjust to debt repayments.     

Borrowing of Land,Security of Tenure and Sustainable Land Use in Burkina Faso

Lack of formal security of land tenure is often cited as a constraint for participatory land management programmes which try to motivate African farmers to grow trees and to realize other improvements in their fields in order to control soil erosion. According to this approach, the borrowing of land would represent an insecure form of land tenure hindering sustainable land use. However, on the basis of a case study in Burkina Faso, this article demonstrates that this is not necessarily so: borrowing arrangements may play a part in avoiding local overload of the carrying capacity and in an efficient distribution of village lands among the farming units. Furthermore, borrowing does not hinder some major intensification techniques of land use which are currently being applied in Burkina Faso. Legal interventions which aim to increase security of tenure and to create favourable conditions for sustainable land use may in fact have the opposite effect.     

Taming a land. Power politics and the growth of complexity in the north‐east of the iberian peninsula during the first millennium BC: The lower ebro region

In this paper we examine the structure of politically complex societies in the north‐east of the Iberian Peninsula during the first millennium BC, using the Lower Ebro region as an example. Drawing on data provided in recent years by archaeological research, we discuss the combination of territorially hierarchical and heterarchical phenomena. At the same time we reassess the chronological framework in which this sociopolitical process took place. To do so, we rely more on information about the evolution of the protohistoric societies in the region under study than on information about material culture. We present a model that may serve as a starting point for future research.     

The place of historiography in the network of logical empiricism

ABSTRACT

In this paper I investigate how intellectual problems concerning an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge played a role in the network of logical empiricist philosophers between 1930 and 1945. Specifically, I focus on the practical efforts of Hans Reichenbach and Otto Neurath to incorporate these intellectual stakes concerning history. I argue that Reichenbach was mainly concerned with creating more institutional space for scientific philosophy. Consequently, he was interested in determining his relation to historically oriented philosophy on the practical level only. Otto Neurath, I claim, was interested in promoting an intellectual incorporation of an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge into the Unity of Science movement. His attempts, however, largely failed. I conclude that the intellectual stakes concerning history did have an effect within the network of logical empiricist philosophers, but that, by 1945 these stakes were entirely dissolved. The displacement of the network to the United States removed Reichenbach’s practical problems, while Neurath was unable to persuade enough actors before his death.