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This report provides a comprehensive review of the challenges for low and moderate income housing. It focuses on the issues of affordability, accessibility and sustainability in resolving the housing problem. It looks at both formal and informal instruments and how experiences in developed countries and instruments in addressing middle income households can help inspire solutions for low and moderate income housing. The report examines a whole range of major instruments and experiences across the developing and developed worlds.
Since its publication in 2004, Civil Society has become a standard work of reference for all those who seek to understand the role of voluntary citizen action in the contemporary world. In this thoroughly-revised edition, Michael Edwards updates the arguments and evidence presented in the original and adds major new material on issues such as civil society in Africa and the Middle East, global civil society, information technology and new forms of citizen organizing. He explains how in the future the pressures of state encroachment, resurgent individualism, and old and familiar forces of nationalism and fundamentalism in new clothes will test and re-shape the practice of citizen action in bo...
The Changing Dynamics of Civil Military Relations in Pakistan offers a unique insiders’ perspective on the political climate in the country, presenting the challenges established in boundaries of interaction between the state and its military. This book argues that the prospects of another military coup in Pakistan are minimal because of the military extending its presence in the civil arenas and thus discovering new avenues of concretising its hegemony. Based on primary data sources in the form of interviews with senior military personnel, civil bureaucrats and other relevant technocrats and using military and government publications to verify their claims, the author discusses the milita...
Human Rights, Power and Civic Action examines the interrelationship between struggles for human rights and the dynamics of power, focusing on situations of poverty and oppression in developing countries. It is argued that the concept of power is a relatively neglected one in the study of rights-based approaches to development, especially the ways in which structures and relations of power can limit human rights advocacy. Therefore this book focuses on how local and national struggles for rights have been constrained by power relations and structural inequalities, as well as the extent to which civic action has been able to challenge, alter or transform such power structures, and simultaneous...
An increasing proportion of the world's poor is dependent on NGOs for the support the state cannot or will not provide, but little has been written to analyze or guide best management practice, which is so critical to their success. Managing for Change addresses the key operational issues facing NGO managers, drawing lessons from the reality of southern NGOs. It explores areas such as the formation of strategy, effective NGO leadership, the handling of donor relations, staff motivation and development, and the management styles most appropriate to crises and change.
This book provides a detailed history of farming systems research (FSR). While it includes the application of FSR to developed country agriculture, its main focus is on FSR in its original role, with small scale, resource-poor farmers in less developed countries. There are some 40 contributions from nearly 50 contributors from 20 countries, illustrating both the diversity and yet the coherence of FSR. The five parts of the book cover: (1) FSR - understanding farmers and their farming (FSR origins and perspectives; understanding farming systems); (2) the applications of farming systems research (FSR in technology choice and development; FSR in extension and policy formulation); (3) institutional commitment to FSR (FSR: some institutional experiences in national agricultural research; dimensions of the organization of FSR; training for FSR); (4) FSR: the professional dimension (regional and international associations; FSR and the professional disciplines); and (5) cutting edge methods, abiding issues and the future for FSR.
This book investigates the identity issues of South Asians in the diaspora. It engages the theoretical and methodological debates concerning processes of culture and identity in the contemporary context of globalisation and transnationalism. It analyses the South Asian diaspora - a perfect route to a deeper understanding of contemporary socio-cultural transformations and the way in which information and communication technology functions as both a catalyst and indicator of such transformations. The book will be of interest to scholars of diaspora studies, cultural studies, international migration studies, and ethnic and racial studies. This book is a collection of papers from the journal South Asian Diaspora.
Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.
There is a deep chasm between the promises of the new global capitalism and the reality of social breakdown, spiritual emptiness, and environmental destruction it is leaving in its wake. In this important book, David Korten makes a compelling and well-documented case that capitalism is actually delivering a fatal blow not only to life, but also to democracy and the market. Among his startling ideas: Capitalism is a pathology that commonly afflicts market economies in the absence of vigilant public oversight. Since the economy internal to a corporation is a planned economy, the current consolidation of economic control under a handful of global corporations is a victory for central planning-n...
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