Search

Summary Risks due to the occurrence of climatic aberrations pose an impediment to the economic growth of the households in vulnerable regions. The frequency of these events is projected to increase in the foreseeable future, with developing countries being the worst sufferers. Dealing with this appears to be an additional burden on the resources of such countries, a large part of which is already devoted to providing better living standards for its inhabitants. Does this imply that developmental interventions should be discontinued? Is there a link between these programs and adaptation to environmental shocks? In an effort to answer such questions, the paper examines the impact of the developmental schemes on the livelihood of the households in Western Odisha, India and investigates whether they augment post disaster coping and adaptation as well. The results indicate that overall the programs have made an impact concerning their intended goals but the diffusion of benefits across beneficiary groups is heterogeneous. Additionally, the programs have contributed in post disaster coping, but only in the regions where either they performed well or their penetration was extensive. Activities promoting livelihood diversification, food security, and poverty reduction also tacitly facilitate improvements in the resilience of the individuals and communities thereby enhancing their capacity to deal with climatic risks. Policy implication advocates the continuation of developmental interventions. However, realigning their framework to incorporate actions intended toward disaster risk reduction and management would result in more inclusive impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tenure security systems—which determine who lives where and under what terms and conditions—are processes of governance that make and effect the relationship between those who confer tenure security and those on who tenure security is conferred. Yet, in dominant analyses of land and housing tenure security, and in policy recommendations for property rights and legal tenure security in developing countries, governance implications are overlooked in favour of analyses of the relative merits of different tenure systems mainly in terms of security, livelihood and economic impact. Using interview data and observations from a resettlement scheme in Ahmedabad, India, this paper empirically examines citizen-state relations in the context of a major shift from de facto (in practice) to legal tenure security and asks how do citizens who have recently come to live under legal tenure security encounter the state and make sense of it. I find a bureaucracy of tenure security that exerts control over low income citizens largely through fear. However, such control is incomplete and acts of resistance suggest an emerging ‘paralegal’ space to renegotiate tenure rules. I conclude by examining the findings through a conceptual framework that explains the relationship between state power and legal tenure security. I also discuss the need for greater scrutiny of the political effects of urban land and housing tenure systems on poor people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Unlike migration, scant attention has been paid to the phenomenon of commuting by workers in developing countries. This paper fills this gap by using a nationally representative data set from India to analyze factors that affect the decision of workers to commute across rural and urban areas daily. Our results suggest that regions with large peripheral urban areas or concentration of secondary sector jobs are more likely to have commuting workers. Regional rural and urban unemployment rates and rural–urban wage differentials are important push and pull factors in the decision to commute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable intensification (SI) of agriculture combines the dual goals of increasing productivity while staying within safe limits of resource use. In practice, how can thresholds which operate at resource scale guide intensification driven by social, economic and biophysical factors at the farm scale? In this paper, we present the case of agricultural intensification in the shallow hard-rock aquifer region of western India to illustrate how cross-scale feedback effects are crucial determinants of not only the resource sustainability and farm productivity but also of social dimensions of SI such as equity and justice. Supported by private investment in plastic-lined farm-ponds, the increasing shift to horticulture in the study area raises questions about the sustainability of the practice. We use a socio-hydrological lens and develop a system dynamics model to analyze how the growing technology-mediated intensification may lead to SI. We find that from a static farm-level view, the plastic-lined farm-pond is beneficial in shielding farmers from droughts and in enhancing productivity. However, when within and across scale socio-hydrological dynamics are considered, the practice is found to instead aggravate the drought impact on the community. This happens when intensification level accelerates, driven by aspiration and vulnerability induced feedbacks, resulting in groundwater demand exceeding the system threshold. In practice, SI is complicated by the fact that this threshold for safe groundwater use is dynamic. In drought years the carrying capacity falls significantly, so that even a low level of intensification may tip the system resulting in a tragedy of the commons. Therefore, achieving SI requires seasonally agile intensification which retains the adaptive capacity of farmers instead of locking them into fixed annual irrigation requirement in a highly uncertain and resource-scarce environment. We thus conclude that the recognition and translation of resource level thresholds to an actionable level is key to practicing SI. • Sustainable intensification requires recognition of local resource thresholds. • Socio-hydrological feedbacks are important to determine sustainability of practice. • Plastic-lined ground-water filled farm-ponds drive intensification to horticulture. • They support dry season irrigation but increase groundwater risk for community. • Adaptive cropping pattern can respond to dynamically changing resource threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]