Local Environmental Management In A North South Perspective

How can weaker sections of society exercise their rights and participate in the management of their physical environment? What factors enhance the development and adaptation of knowledge in view of sustainable natural resource management in rural as well as urban contexts? What roles do development agents such as public administration, community development organizations, training and research institutions and international development agencies assume in these regards?

This volume represents a first attempt at holistically classifying and mapping ecological regions across all three countries of the North American continent. A common analytical methodology is used to examine North American ecology at multiple scales, from large continental ecosystems to subdivisions of these that correlate more detailed physical and biological settings with human activities on two levels of successively smaller units. The volume begins with an overview of North America from an ecological perspective, concepts of ecological regionalization. This is followed by descriptions of the 15 broad ecological regions, including information on physical and biological setting and human activities. The final section presents case studies in applications of the ecological characterization methodology to environmental issues. The appendix includes a list of common and scientific names of selected species characteristic of the ecological regions.

Environment, mountain biodiversity, ecological changes.

This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, landscape-based analyses of political, economic and social issues, which impact environmental changes, challenges and conflicts at local and micro-local levels. The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives through a combination of approaches from sociology, anthropology, geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural-urban transitions, middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural resource management and the role of political institutions. Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South Asian Environmental Studies.

This open access book revisits the theoretical foundations of urban planning and the application of these concepts and methods in the context of Southern countries by examining several case studies from different regions of the world. For instance, the case of Koudougou, a medium-sized city in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, with a population of 115.000 inhabitants, allows us to understand concretely which and how these deficiencies are translated in an African urban context. In contrast, the case of Nueve de Julio, intermediate city of 50.000 dwellers in the pampa Argentina, addresses the new forms of spatial fragmentation and social exclusion linked with agro export and crisis of the international markets. Case studies are also included for cities in Asia and Latin America. Differences and similarities between cases allow us to foresee alternative models of urban planning better adapted to tackle poverty and find efficient ways for more inclusive cities in developing and emerging countries, interacting several dimensions linked with high rates of urbanization: territorial fragmentation; environmental contamination; social disparities and exclusion, informal economy and habitat, urban governance and democracy.

Perspectives on Social Media presents the most current research on the effectiveness of social media across sectors. Progress in finding better applications for social media relies on the difficult task of integrating media technologies into fields such as engineering, marketing, health, learning, art, tourism, and the service industry. This book is based on cutting-edge creative work among top international researchers and renowned designers and provides readers with a preview of the most visionary outcomes in the field of social media. Some of the major topics that the book discusses are: New social media design Sense of community in web applications App design and development for mobile devices. Perspectives on Social Media uniquely builds on recent disputes among the top scholars around the world, thus including the dynamics of knowledge-sharing and cross-fertilization that one would expect to happen on the web but that are rarely found in a book.

Growing awareness of the crises faced by underserved communities in the developing regions of the world has led engineering educators to reflect on how they can contribute solutions to the basic needs of such communities. Student engineers today are searching for opportunities to work with communities in the developing world to improve the living conditions of the multitudes who suffer chronic poverty and live in desperate conditions. The research in this thesis was inspired by the experiences of students working on a project aimed at creating sustainable prosperity through the introduction of visual literacy in a chronically poor community where it was found that such research collaborations can prove to be overwhelming. Viewing these disruptive experiences from the perspectives of Zimbardo's discontinuity theory showed that such unbounded learning environments that expose students to disorienting experiences of discontinuity restrict the students' ability to learn. Viewing the experiences of Zimbardoean discontinuity through Dewey's philosophy of education led to the creation of a research inquiry space that identified the feasibility of restoring continuity of learning through innovation in engineering education research and practices. In this space student and teacher experiences can be visualized as a function of the learning environment and modes of learning and teaching. Engineering education research and practices currently face open questions about preparing students for working with developing communities safely and enabling them to continue learning. This dissertation attempts to respond by asking the following two questions: 1. How can the experiences of discontinuity be shifted to learning experiences? 2. How do student engineers learn under such conditions? To answer these questions, a research project was conceived that brought together undergraduate engineering students at Stanford University and a community of handloom weavers from a chronically poor village in India to collaborate on an engineering design problem faced by the community. The students and weavers together addressed the challenge of creating retrofits for the handloom to make it more ergonomic. The project was implemented in accordance with a framework that was developed to incorporate five project parameters for creating a safe learning environment. The research project data was collected in the form of entries made in reflection journals by the student participants. A coding scheme was developed to observe and analyze the shift from experiences of discontinuity to experiences of learning. In response to the two research questions, the analysis showed that the research project was successful in providing a learning environment that enabled the student engineers to transition out of discontinuities and learn in that process. The learning mechanism was found to be an augmentation of the Deweyan inquiry process resulting in continuity of learning. The future research directions emerging from this project are the creation of a curriculum as well as a learning environment. These will prepare student engineers to work sustainably on problems of the developing world, through collaborating with and learning from local communities. Continued commitment from engineering researchers and educators will, in time, help build sustainable, trusted, collaborative relationships with underserved communities and encourage them to explore their own creative potential to help solve their problems.