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Development and Change
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Wiley InterScience : Development and Change
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The Measurement of Socio-economic Gender Inequality Revisited
The measurement of socio-economic gender inequality has not received much attention from the development literature despite its great relevance and important policy implications. In this article we present two new indices to measure gender inequalities that overcome some of the limitations inherent in the UNDP gender-related indices and other indices presented in the literature. The proposed new indices are conducive to exploring the extent to which gender gaps favour women and/or men, and to showing the contribution of the different subcomponents to the overall levels of gender inequality. Using UNDP data, our calculations suggest that the levels of gender inequality are mostly explained by differences in the earned-income subcomponent and that the average difference between women's and men's achievement levels has been reduced by 12 per cent during the period 1995[ndash]2005.
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Post-Conflict Ambon: Forced Migration and the Ethno-Territorial Effects of Customary Tenure
In post-conflict contexts characterized by large-scale migration and increasing levels of legal pluralism, customary land tenure risks being deployed as a tool of ethno-territorialization in which displaced communities are denied return and secure land rights. This thesis will be illustrated through a case study of the Indonesian island of Ambon where a recognition of customary tenure [mdash] also called adat [mdash] was initiated in 2005 at the end of a high-intensity conflict between Christians and Muslims. Although a system of land tenure providing multiple forms of social security for the indigenous in-group, adat in Ambon also constitutes an arena of power in which populations considered as non-indigenous to a fixed historical territory are pushed into an inferior legal position. The legal registration of customary tenure therefore tends to be deployed to settle long-standing land contests with a growing migrant community, hereby legally enforcing some of the forced expulsions that were brought about by the recent communal violence.
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Payments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market-based Approaches Work?
The concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is gaining increasing attention among scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private land users, usually poorly motivated to protect nature on their land, will do so if they receive payments from environmental service buyers which cover part of the land users' opportunity costs of developing the land. However, this article warns against an over-enthusiastic adoption of a one-sided market-based PES approach. Based on a field study of the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management Project (RISEMP), one of the main PES pilot projects in Nicaragua, it suggests that a mixture of economic and non-economic factors motivated farmers to adopt the envisaged silvopastoral practices and that the actual role of PES is mistakenly understood as a simple matter of financial incentives. The authors argue that PES approaches should be understood as a part of a broader process of local institutional transformation rather than as a market-based alternative for allegedly ineffective government and/or community governance.
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Child Labour in African Artisanal Mining Communities: Experiences from Northern Ghana
The issue of child labour in the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) economy is attracting significant attention worldwide. This article critically examines this 'problem' in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, where a lack of formal sector employment opportunities and/or the need to provide financial support to their impoverished families has led tens of thousands of children to take up work in this industry. The article begins by engaging with the main debates on child labour in an attempt to explain why young boys and girls elect to pursue arduous work in ASM camps across the region. The remainder of the article uses the Ghana experience to further articulate the challenges associated with eradicating child labour at ASM camps, drawing upon recent fieldwork undertaken in Talensi-Nabdam District, Upper East Region. Overall, the issue of child labour in African ASM communities has been diagnosed far too superficially, and until donor agencies and host governments fully come to grips with the underlying causes of the poverty responsible for its existence, it will continue to burgeon.
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Does Patronage Still Drive Politics for the Rural Poor in the Developing World? A Comparative Perspective from the Livestock Sector
Is the analysis of patron[ndash]client networks still important to the understanding of developing country politics or has it now been overtaken by a focus on 'social capital'? Drawing on seventeen country studies of the political environment for livestock policy in poor countries, this article concludes that although the nature of patronage has changed significantly, it remains highly relevant to the ways peasant interests are treated. Peasant populations were found either to have no clear connection to their political leaders or to be controlled by political clientage. Furthermore, communities 'free' of patron[ndash]client ties to the centre generally are not better represented by political associations but instead receive fewer benefits from the state. Nonetheless, patterns of clientage are different from what they were forty years ago. First, patronage chains today often have a global reach, through trade, bilateral donor governments and international NGOs. Second, the resources that fuel political clientage today are less monopolistic and less adequate to the task of purchasing peasant political loyalty. Thus the bonds of patronage are less tight than they were historically. Third, it follows from the preceding point and the greater diversity of patrons operating today that elite conflicts are much more likely to create spaces in which peasant interests can eventually be aggregated into autonomous associations with independent political significance in the national polity. NGOs are playing an important role in opening up this political space although at the moment, they most often act like a new type of patron.
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