Lessons from a basic income programme for Indigenous Australians

This article examines the importance of basic income in supporting development and economic security in remote Australian Indigenous communities. Specifically we draw on the case of the Community Development Employment Programme (CDEP) and examine its significant basic income features: it provided economic security, flexible definitions of work, community control and a means to establish community development initiatives. We find that CDEP suited the economic and cultural circumstances of remote-living Aboriginal people whose livelihoods depend on a hybrid form of economy inclusive of customary (non-market) practices rather than market capitalism. We then trace shifts in Indigenous policy in recent times which saw the dismantling of CDEP in the name of ‘real’ employment, and we examine the consequences of this for Aboriginal people. We end by proposing the reinstatement of a more complete basic income scheme, initially for people in remote Indigenous communities in Australia who are in deepest poverty.     

Growing deep roots: Increasing Aboriginal authority in contemporary forest governance arrangements

The governance literature highlights a shift away from “government” to new and more complex governing arrangements that involve a greater set of institutions and actors in decision-making processes. According to a number of studies, this shift is ongoing in forestry. This article seeks a better understanding of contemporary forest governance by exploring the emerging role of Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian forest sector. It is well known that Aboriginal participation in forest management is crucial for achieving sustainable forestry. Yet we know little about how Aboriginal communities can induce a change in governing conditions. We examined the various governance arrangements through which the Essipit Innu First Nation in Quebec (Canada) was able to exercise authority over forest management. Using multiple qualitative data gathering techniques, our analysis shows that Essipit innovated in forest governance by creating a partnership with the forest company Boisaco and, thus, gained authority over forest management decisions at the operational level. Our analysis explains that this new governance arrangement is built on growing collaboration and interdependencies between these two parties. Common values, orientations, mechanisms and tools are also necessary conditions. Finally, this research highlights the need for greater cultural understanding.     

Agrarian Change and the Initial Development of an Aboriginal Bourgeoisie in Australia

While the commercial ambitions of indigenous capitalists are continuously displayed in Australia, little is known about the origins and initial development of the class. In this essay one area of the country, the north‐west of Western Australia (WA), is chosen to show how changes in the principal agricultural industry opened space for Aboriginal commerce. Despite the opposition of State governments and existing firms that dominated cattle and sheep production, this space was enlarged as pastoralism underwent major changes. The rise of the indigenous bourgeoisie was also facilitated by the growing power of the class's political representatives in electoral and in executive politics. Parallel with changes in Australian federalism, which gave the national government increased financial and other powers, Aboriginal representatives captured this shift for commercial advantage.     

试分析社区参与旅游发展的类型和层次

指出社区参与旅游发展的有关概念;剖析社区内部政治、社区内部文化、社区内部经济、社区外部政治、社区内部文化、社区外部经济6个影响社区参与旅游发展的因素;讨论目前社区参与旅游发展的4种类型:未参与型、被动参与型、主动参与型、成熟参与型。     

Tribals,Forests and Resource Conflicts in Kerala,India: The Status Quo of Policy Change

One of the constraints in policy analysis of tribal issues in India has been the lack of analytical approaches that have looked at the existential problem of tribal communities in an integrated manner. While restrictive forest policies have played a major role in fomenting tribal unrest in India and other parts of the world, the part played by “poorly designed” development programmes in creating the impasse cannot be ignored. With reference to the District of Wayanad in north Kerala, India, it is argued that natural resource conflicts involving tribal communities have their roots in both restrictive forest policies and misplaced development strategies. While it is true that, in recent times, there has been a serious effort in India to open forests to tribal communities, this has not been accompanied by a change in basic development thinking. It is argued that, for a paradigm change in policy to occur, tribal communities need to be nurtured in forest settings. This is particularly relevant at this juncture, when the ideal of “biodiversity conservation” is considered to be the defining mark of sustainable development in the “natural resource-rich” countries of the South.     

Support for regulatory and voluntary approaches to wildfire adaptation among unincorporated wildland-urban interface communities

Regulation of building standards and residential development practices in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is increasingly advocated as a possible avenue for wildfire risk reduction. However, many documented instances of successful wildfire adaptation occur in incorporated communities with local governments or formalized structures for channeling such efforts. Less research has explored whether regulatory approaches might be a viable option for adaptation in unincorporated communities without local governments, particularly from the perspective of community members and local professionals. The research presented here attempts to understand strategies, programs or incentives that local residents think would best advance fire adaptation in their communities given local social context, with a focus on both regulatory and voluntary approaches. Data presented come from focus groups of residents and professionals in Story, Wyoming, and Timber Lakes, Utah. Participants in both communities displayed low support for regulatory approaches due to distrust in local, state, or federal governments, preferring instead to conduct wildfire risk reduction activities on a voluntary basis. Each population was willing to consider regulatory approaches only if associated standards or policies were specifically tailored to their community, channeled through a trusted organizing body and organized by community leaders. Residents were interested in regulatory efforts that allowed community members the opportunity to act at the local level, govern efforts themselves, and produce tangible benefits for their community. We discuss implications for identifying appropriate voluntary and regulatory wildfire risk reduction approaches in unincorporated or rural communities and provide suggestions for encouraging collective action in similar local contexts.     

Using participatory rural appraisal and participatory research and extension in a post-independence environment: a case from East Timor

A participatory rural appraisal (PRA) conducted in East Timor in 2004 as part of an agricultural development project provided the basis for a number of community-based participatory extension initiatives. The PRA involved several communities throughout a watershed and also served as a training exercise for local agriculture ministry staff. Despite the poverty of many of the communities involved, and in contrast to published literature on the local agricultural situation, farmers clearly expressed their need for more marketable crops and alternative sources of livelihoods. Their desires contrasted with the project's initial assumption that the major need was for increased production of staple crops to alleviate food scarcity. The project consequently branched out from concentrating on basic agronomy of staple crops into developing marketable crops, improving livestock production and facilitating development of a local business. Farmers' groups were set up to allow farmers to develop their own agricultural enterprises. Some ministry staff who participated in the project welcomed the opportunity to move from the traditional authoritarian extension system set up under Indonesian colonial rule to a more collegial and educational system. The breakdown of institutions and lines of authority following independence may create new opportunities for participatory development in newly independent states.     

Governance of non-wood forest products in Russia and Ukraine: Institutional rules,stakeholder arrangements,and decision-making processes

Aspects of governance of non-wood forest products (NWFPs) include institutional rules, stakeholder arrangements, and decision-making processes that govern production systems from access to resources, their use, and to markets. Compared with other forest products, few studies have investigated the governance of NWFPs in European post-socialistic countries transitioning from a planned to a market economy. This study compares institutional frameworks and stakeholder arrangements related to NWFPs in Russia and Ukraine using a case study approach. Both countries have a legacy of top-down forest government, state-owned forests, and rural communities with a long dependence on plant- and animal-based NWFPs. We analysed legal documents for NWFPs in each country and conducted expert interviews with stakeholders from the public, private, and civil sectors involved in the decision-making process of NWFPs. Institutional frameworks for NWFPs in both countries are complex, unclear, and overlap. Multiple legal documents contain restrictions regarding the extraction and sustainability of NWFPs. However, no special laws or policies are solely for NWFPs; all measures are included in legislation that regulates nature conservation and forest management. The government of both countries tends to overlook non-industrial forest use undertaken by marginal local communities, even if economic, social, and cultural values of NWFPs are relatively high for local and regional development. A misfit is observed between legal frameworks and forest companies’ business policies with customary rights. This phenomenon caused a shift to introduce new stakeholder arrangements related to NWFPs as a special type of resource in areas where NWFPs are heavily used both for subsistence and for generating household income by local communities. Landscape approach initiatives such as model forests and biosphere reserves may empower local communities to find means to protect their rights, needs, interests, and values related to NWFPs.     

An economic model of aboriginal fire‐stick farming

Australian Aborigines faced a resource management problem, which they addressed though burning regimes, referred to as fire‐stick farming. While dynamic economic analysis is clearly applicable, to date there have been no attempts to use it to model burning regimes. This paper develops a delayed‐response optimal‐control model to describe Aboriginal fire‐stick farming. The model explains a collective welfare maximizing burning regime that successfully controlled wildfires, protected the resources essential to survival, and, incidentally, produced a biodiverse landscape and limited greenhouse gas emissions. When the parameters of the model are changed to reflect the current institutional realities of reduced access to the land, and less direct dependence on it, traditional Aboriginal burning is prevented or delayed, fuel loads build up and uncontrolled fires are more likely to occur, damaging previously protected species. If Aboriginal burning is to be used to control fires successfully in a modern resource management context, it is necessary to adjust for changes in the institutional incentive structure. Payments for carbon offsets are an example of replacing lost incentives with new ones.     

Family Farming,Farm Labour and Rural Employment. Who Works Where? An International Comparison

Family farming provides employment but we are not seeing a trend toward more paid agricultural workers. However, family farming appears to be the best way of maintaining a dynamic rural milieu and helping to establish the preconditions for the development of rural employment. In addition, a family farming structure creates a demand for off-farm (rural) employment for family members who want to use their time more profitably. Traditionally, rural communities were built around farming. Today, farming families depend upon employment in rural communities. The changing interdependent relationship may provide a new creative synergy.     

Indigenous peoples and the capability approach: taking stock

Ideas about how development is conceived, designed and implemented play an important role in determining whether and how indigenous peoples are able to pursue and realize self-determination. According to the human development and capability approach, people are the ends and means of development, understood as the expansion of capabilities people have reason to value. While conversations between the capability approach and indigenous communities are growing, the literature remains disparate and (largely) unpublished. The papers included in the first section of this special issue explore indigenous values as they apply to nature, the concept of indigenous autonomy in international law, as well as the realities of indigenous communities in Latin America, New Zealand and Australia. The second group of papers explores the usefulness of the human development and capability approach for indigenous peoples. The conclusions in this special issue range from the contention that the capability approach has severe limitations, to the contention that the approach provides helpful tools and insights.     

Aboriginal Labour and the Pastoral Industry in the Kimberley Division of Western Australia: 1960–1975

This paper surveys the Kimberley pastoral (or livestock) industry – historically the economic mainstay and largest employer in this remote region of Western Australia – and its relationship with Aboriginal labour, utilizing empirical material, much of which is presented for the first time. Part of the analysis reviews the labour market and employment conditions that existed during the period 1960–1968, when a significant labour shortage occurred. However, in the Kimberley (as elsewhere), beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unemployment grew rapidly. Reasons for the rapid growth in unemployment, of which Aboriginals constituted the greatest proportion, included, among other things, a global downturn in commodity prices for livestock products and especially beef in this case, concentration of ownership and increased capitalization in the livestock industry, and the decision to pay Aboriginal pastoral workers award rates. The period 1960–1975 graphically illustrates the changing nature of the Kimberley pastoral industry, as well as the repercussions of global dynamics for regional economies.     

Performance of success and failure in grassroots conservation and development interventions: Gender dynamics in participatory forest management in India

Co-governance of forests, or participatory forest management, has been a wide-spread conservation and development (C&D) intervention in India for over two decades. The practice began in the 1990s as Joint Forest Management (JFM), where local communities – organised into forest protection committees (FPCs) – worked in cooperation with various state forest departments. Later on, this intervention took shape of Community Forest Management (CFM), where communities managed their forests largely independent of the forest departments. Under both the JFM and CFM models, gender mainstreaming – enabling equal distribution of opportunities and services across genders – held a pivotal position. This study shows that despite continued marginalisation, female FPC members often performed as if initiatives were successful. Thus, the central question investigated in this paper is: "Why women performed success in participatory forest management interventions while experiencing marginalisation in the FPC?” This paper adopts an ethnographic case study methodology (immersion), utilising in-depth ethnographic case studies from three states of India for analysing performances of success and the resulting dynamics of participation, to explain the gendered nuances of the grassroots conservation and development interventions. The concept of 'situated agency' of community actors is explored to understand the practices around the performances of success in C&D interventions in forest-dependent communities in India. The paper argues that these performances hold the promise of a slow, but steady progress towards the creation of a gender-sensitive system in an otherwise patriarchal social structure.     

Rural 'Community', Chiefs and Social Capital: The Case of Southern Ghana

Social capital emphasizes community and social cohesion as the foundation of development. In Africa, this has prompted the promotion of traditional authorities as agents of development because chiefs and elders are assumed to embody communal norms. Critics have argued that this vision is ahistorical. In response, social capitalists have attempted to 'historicize' their analyses. But in many cases, 'history' simply refers to the micro-level production of trust, networks and norms. From a historian's perspective this is problematic because it ignores historical processes that often produce social hierarchies and inequality within 'traditional' communities. Using a case study from southern Ghana, I argue that, because of their particular view of history, many social capitalists remain blind to differentiation and conflict at the community level. As a result, social capital-driven projects run the risk of reproducing deeply rooted inequalities.     

五峰土家族自治县柴埠溪旅游扶贫开发探讨

通过分析五峰柴埠溪旅游资源的特色,探讨了当地利用优美自然生态环境和高品位旅游资源发展生态旅游的紧迫性和重要意义,提出了五峰柴埠溪旅游扶贫开发的构想。     

Long distance commuting: A tool to mitigate the impacts of the resources industries boom and bust cycle?

Western Australia experienced a prolonged resources boom for more than a decade commencing in 2001. The majority of mining industry employees commute long distances from their homes, living onsite in company accommodation and working compressed rosters for a prescribed period before commuting home again for furlough and recommencing the work and commute cycle. Many community leaders, politicians and businesses complain that company policies and industrial relations arrangements, which enabled long distance commuting (LDC), undermine regional economic development. They argue that the host communities closest to mining operations bear the brunt of globally driven boom and bust markets and experience many of the disadvantages but few of the opportunities associated with booms or busts, while source communities, particularly large cities, reap the benefits from repatriated salaries, increased populations and investment derived from mining activities in the host communities.This paper examines the role of long distance commuting as a tool for mitigating the impacts of the boom and bust cycles in the resources industries of Western Australia, focusing on the resources-rich region of the Pilbara. The paper will also speculate the social and economic impact on the mining communities and the state more broadly if government had capitulated and restricted long distance commuting.     

The impact of exurban development on forested areas in Kurgan City,Russia

Exurban communities—a significant form of urban sprawl—can transform natural land cover. Exurban development refers to an expansion of communities located outside a city and its suburbs. One of the main reasons these settlements develop is a desire by residents to live closer to nature and developers’ recognition of the profitability of addressing this desire. Additionally, exurbs can become prosperous regions settled by people with high income. However, exurban development not only directly affects community patterns, but also species patterns, habitat reduction and disconnection, as well as land cover and land use alterations. The purpose of this paper is a quantitative analysis of the land cover transformation and forest fragmentation in Post-Soviet Russia, based on an empirical case study of the city of Kurgan. This case study also contributes to the overall research of urban sprawl in Russian provinces by adding to the discussion of homeowners’ behavior, regional environmental policies, and their role concerning the impacts of exurban settlements on the natural environment. This paper uses remote sensing imagery, census data, and primary data to analyze land cover change due to the emergence of exurban communities around Kurgan, Russia, with specific emphasis on the changes to native vegetation resulting from human behavior and stakeholder preferences.     

Socio‐economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history

This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio‐economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism‐oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), many communities went from a production model based on subsistence farming and livestock breeding first to a specialization in milk production and later to tourism. The industrialization of milk production, the radical transformation of the scale of their operations, and the monetization of life transformed the identity and structure of these communities. The subsequent transformation of many of these farms to accommodate the leisure industry changed the shape of these households again. This paper reflects on how science, governance, commodification, and technology played a role on the transformation of the rural mountain areas, their people, and their everyday life.     

Empowering residents and improving governance in low income communities through urban greening

This paper describes the objectives, process and outcomes of three urban greening projects and how they contributed to sustainable development. The first two were conducted in low-income communities in Bangkok, Thailand, and in Badulla, Matale and Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. The lessons from these two projects were then incorporated in a post-tsunami project in Moratuwa and Matara, Sri Lanka. In addition to achieving urban greening objectives, the projects developed and validated a conceptual framework of sustainable community development (the Four-Directional Framework) using participatory action research. This framework facilitated rapid community learning and development objectives such as urban greening and consequential poverty reduction, empowerment of women, and improvements to the environment. Urban greening, incorporating urban agriculture, was an effective tool to improve the relationship between local authorities and the residents of marginalized and low-income communities and build a foundation for continuing sustainable development initiatives and city-to-city learning.     

Effects of industrial plantations on ecosystem services and livelihoods: Perspectives of rural communities in China

This paper addresses the current research void on local community views of changes in ecosystem services associated with rapid land use transformation in the context of plantation-based forestry. This interview-based study, conducted in southern China, aims at assessing the perspectives of local communities of: 1) the effects of Eucalyptus industrial plantations on selected ecosystem services and on local development; and 2) opportunities for future community livelihood development, based on the relations with the government and with forest industry operating locally. We analysed data from semi-structured interviews with 70 villagers for their views on changes in ecosystem services after the establishment of plantations, and their future expectations on the local livelihood development. Most interviewees mentioned some negative development on environmental quality after the establishment of the industrial plantations, especially on soil and water. Furthermore, the reduced productivity of cropland surrounding industrial plantations, coupled with other financial drivers, induced several villagers to switch from agricultural crops to household plantations. In the absence of destructive typhoons, household plantations can provide owners more free time, higher income, while industrial plantations provided some employment opportunities. Interviewees’ expectations for the future included receiving financial support and capacity building for household plantations and crops, support to local roads and schools, and higher employment opportunities. Some interviewees suggested that solutions should be implemented for improving degraded water quality, while others suggested reducing forestry operations. Even though being highly context-specific, our findings open up the discussion about the further community development opportunities in the context of plantation forestry. In particular, the potential of value sharing mechanisms between the private sector and the local communities should be further studied.