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Copyright of Methaodos: Social Science Journal / Methaodos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales is the property of Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicacion y Sociologia, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Globalisation - characterised by dynamic economic growth, increasing exploitation of the natural environment, and deepening social inequalities - brings negative consequences and is strongly perceptible also in local communities. A new approach to development policy based on the idea of sustainable development must be incorporated into local governments' strategies, programmes, and actions. We adopted exploratory approach to determine the level and identify the spatial patterns of sustainable development of Polish poviats. The aggregated (synthetic) indicators of economic, social, and environmental development were developed to analyse the spatial patterns of the poviats' development trends. Our research shows that in Poland there are overwhelmingly more poviats characterised by lower development than those better developed in all three analysed categories. Hierarchical analysis using the Ward's method revealed that Polish poviats can be divided into three relatively homogeneous clusters in terms of development levels. The largest group consists of poviats characterised by the relatively lowest level of sustain-ability in economic and social areas, and the highest - by environmental development. Analyses using the Moran method made it possible to determine the so-called spatial regimes of clusters. The captured spatial relationships indicate that selected poviats have a significant impact on the level of development in the neighbouring poviats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy justice is a rapidly developing area of research and policy advocacy. Recently, some critiques have been formulated, particularly from postcolonial, political ecology, and more-than-human perspectives, such as the concept's rootedness in Western thought and its too narrow anthropocentric focus. This paper presents an integrative model of various energy justices including perceptions that allow for a more nuanced and expanded understanding, drawing on recent concepts of environmental and energy justice. This analytic perspective integrates understandings of justice as a subjective belief, including increased consideration of the role of emotion in evaluating justice. According to this understanding, there is no "one" energy justice. Instead, there are multiple, sometimes contradictory, and fluid perceptions of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As specialty crop production has become increasingly important to U.S. agriculture, public and private stakeholders have called for research and outreach efforts centered on risks posed by climate change. Drawing on a survey of specialty crop farmers, this study explores farmers' perceptions of climate change risks. Underlying cognitive, experiential, and socio-cultural factors hypothesized to influence farmers' climate change risk perceptions are tested using structural equation modeling techniques. Results show that specialty crop farmers exhibit an overall moderate concern about climatic risks. The more capable and prepared farmers feel themselves to be, the less concerned they are about climate change. Farmers who have recently experienced more extreme weather events perceive climate change to present greater risks. In addition, farmers' risk perceptions are also shaped by attitudes toward human exemptionalism and productivism values. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for outreach and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente is the property of Universidade Federal do Parana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Gestão Ambiental e Sustentabilidade (GeAS) is the property of Revista de Gestao Ambiental e Sustentabilidade / UNINOVE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Much of the effort to address environmental issues at the local level has focused on defining principles and aims rather than addressing the operational difficulties of implementation. Drawing upon insights from sustainability scholarship, this study reviews two cases: the development of a Swedish standard for implementing sustainable development at municipality, county council, and regional levels, and attempts by a small rural municipality to establish a process towards implementing the Aalborg Commitments. The research illustrates the specific organizational and managerial complexity of these case study experiences. It concludes that an organizational focus on integration and mainstreaming deserves particular attention to achieve broader sustainability, or related environmental or adaptation goals. The results, in particular, highlight the role that integrated management systems can play for sustainability work at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of materiality was understudied in most social sciences, there was a sensibility for these issues in political ecology. The different approaches of political ecology focused on the political character of ecology and the ecological (and thus material) character of politics. But a conceptual framework that captures the different dimensions of the societal nature relations was seldom explicitly elaborated. Following the considerations of Michel Foucault, this article explores whether dispositive analysis as a concept and as a method offers a way to integrate both social and material conditions into studies of political ecology. By examining water infrastructure and the dispositive of drought in Northeastern Brazil, this paper displays how dispositive analysis is a means to identify different elements, their autonomies as well as their interconnectedness. Focusing on the entanglements of discourses, institutionalizations, subjectivity, practices and materiality allows capturing the materiality of discourses and the discursivity of material orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So long as sustainability represents the attempt to pacify the relationship between societies and their natural environments, the concept must remain attentive to any findings about the character of such relation. In this regard, the rise of the Anthropocene cannot be ignored by environmental sociologists if a realistic understanding of sustainability is to be produced. The Anthropocene is a scientific notion, grounded on geology and Earth-system science, that plausibly suggests that human beings have colonized nature in a degree that has irreversibly altered the functioning of planetary systems. As a result, social and natural systems have become "coupled". This paper tries to elucidate the consequences that an "Anthropocenic turn" would have for sustainability studies. To such end, it will explore the related notions of hybridity and relational agency as key aspects of a renewed view of nature. Correspondingly, it argues that cultivated capital (rather than natural or manmade) must be the most important unit for measuring sustainability and devising sustainable policies in a postnatural age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Antropología Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past twenty years, agricultural biotechnologies have generated chronically unresolved political controversies. The standard tool of risk assessment has proven to be highly limited in its ability to address the panoply of concerns that exist about these hybrid techno/organisms. It has alsofailed to account for both the conceptual and material networks of relations agricultural biotechnologies require, create and/or perform. This paper takes as a starting point that agricultural biotechnologies cannot be usefully assessed as isolated technological entities but need to be evaluated within the context of the broader socio-ecological system that they embody and engender. The paper then explores, compares and contrasts some of the methodological tools available for advancing this systems-based perspective. The article concludes by outlining a new synthesis approach of comparative cartographies of agri/cultures generated through multi-sited ethnographic case-studies, which is proposed as a way to generate system maps and enable the comparison of genetically modified (GM) food with both conventional and alternative agri-food networks for sustainability assessment. The paper aims to make a unique theoretical and methodological contribution by advancing a systems-based approach to conceptualising and assessing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and proposing a synthesised methodology for mapping networks of relations across different agri/cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Prior studies suggest that infant mortality in rural areas of India is substantially higher than in urban areas. However, little is known about the determinants explaining such excess of rural mortality. OBJECTIVE This study systematically assesses the role of socioeconomic and maternal and child health (MCH) care-related programme factors in explaining the rural-urban gap in infant mortality during the past two decades. METHODS Long-term changes in rural and urban infant mortality were assessed using Sample Registration System (SRS) data. Binary logistic regression was used to analyse the association between socioeconomic and MCH care-related programme factors and infant mortality using data from the three rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Fairlie's decomposition technique was applied to understand the relative contribution of different covariates to the rural-urban gap in infant mortality. RESULTS Relative inequality between rural and urban India has increased over time. The rural-urban gap in infant mortality can be largely explained by the distributions of the covariates in rural and urban area. The largest part of the rural disadvantage in infant mortality is attributable to the underlying disadvantage in household wealth and maternal education, whereas breastfeeding and knowledge of Oral Rehydration Solution has contributed to narrowing the gap. The share of women using modern contraceptive methods and the percentage of fully vaccinated children in the community have also contributed to widening the rural-urban gap in infant mortality. CONCLUSION In addition to strengthening MCH programmes in rural areas, substantial efforts must also be made to improve household wealth and female education levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non-human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a 'system' with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic-cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social-metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of 'persons' in a physical-biological sense and 'culture' in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social-metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems - an open and blind non-orthogenetic evolutionary process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature about sustainable development is abundant and expanding, and syntheses are therefore increasingly necessary. This paper represents an effort to characterize the main principles behind the concept of sustainability and to identify and describe the scientific approaches at the root of each of those principles. From a scientific point of view, the identification of sustainability principles is possibly more interesting than providing one rigid definition because they are more abstract and conceptual. As a first step, three scientific approaches relevant in the context of sustainability-ecological economics, sustainability transition, and sustainability science-were characterized and synthesized into four sustainability principles. The next step was the identification and description of the scientific approaches at the root of each sustainability principle. All descriptions are based on a literature review. Four sustainability principles were identified: the stressing of biophysical limits that constrain the scale of the human economy; the focus on societal welfare and development; the understanding that each system has its own minimum irreducible needs in order to be viable; and the acknowledgment of system complexity. From an evolutionary perspective, scientific approaches at the root of sustainability progressed from a static view of environmental limits and human impacts to a dynamic and integrative vision of them; from an emphasis on human impacts and availability of natural resources to a more balanced position that puts human and social capital at the center; from a rigid definition of goals to the understanding that the process of transition toward goals is as important as the goals themselves. The four principles of sustainability incorporated in varying degrees a broad range of scientific contributions. Sustainability may, as such, be regarded as a step toward consilience, an attempt to bring together scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines in order to create an integrated thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article points to several very up-to-date issues that occur in relation with the vanishing of traditional forms of land use and introduction of new, other than indigenous, management styles in Poland. Current processes of deterioration of the structure of the cultural landscapes have been discussed with regard to natural values and the historical process of land management by man. The article is a peculiar case study for quite common negative transformation of the polish countryside caused by relatively free use of the space, legal negligence, low awareness and poor identification of residents with the landscape - the countryside which loses its peculiar and typical features as the result of "mass consumption". The text also presents positive examples of care taken for the regional landscape and lists initiatives aimed at improving the image of polish area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author proposes a new qualitative method for building conceptual frameworks for phenomena that are linked to multidisciplinary bodies of knowledge. First, he redefines the key terms of concept, conceptual framework, and conceptual framework analysis. Concept has some components that define it. A conceptual framework is defined as a network or a "plane" of linked concepts. Conceptual framework analysis offers a procedure of theorization for building conceptual frameworks based on grounded theory method. The advantages of conceptual framework analysis are its flexibility, its capacity for modification, and its emphasis on understanding instead of prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical review of the multidisciplinary literature on sustainable development reveals a lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding sustainable development and its complexities. A critical review shows that the definitions of sustainable development are vague; there is a lack of operative definitions and disagreement over what should be sustained; the concept is unclear in terms of emotional commitment; and it “remains a confused topic”, “fraught with contradictions”. This article aims to theoretically synthesize the interdisciplinary literature on sustainable development, and then identify the results by broad categories. Therefore, this article uses conceptual analysis, which reviews multidisciplinary literature on sustainable development, which recognizes patterns and similarities within the literature, then it synthesizes the patterns to different categories and independent concepts, where each concept has distinctive meanings and represents close ideas on sustainability. The analytical process elaborates seven concepts that together assemble the theoretical framework of ‘sustainable development’ and each concept represents distinctive meanings of the theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposition that environmental scarcity causes violent conflict attracts both popular and academic interest. Neomalthusian writers have developed theoretical arguments explaining this connection, and have conducted numerous case studies that seem to support the view that scarcity of biological assets such as land and other renewable resources causes conflict. So far there have been few systematic quantitative or comparative studies, and the few that exist have focused on particular forms of environmental degradation or on a small subset of resources, particularly mineral wealth. We test a more general argument about the effects of resource scarcity by examining the most widely-used measure of environmental sustainability: the ecological footprint. Contrary to neomalthusian thinking, we find that countries with a heavier footprint have a substantially greater chance of peace. Biocapacity and the ecological reserve also predict to peace, but these results are more fragile. Separate tests for smaller conflicts, for the post-Cold War period, and with additional control variables do not yield stronger support for the scarcity thesis. On the whole, the neomalthusian model of conflict receives little support from this analysis. We cannot exclude that erosion of the earth’s carrying capacity can increase conflict in the long run, but an empirical analysis with the ecological footprint measure does not provide any support for such a position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has evolved out of a growing dissatisfaction with the relatively uncritical acceptance in contemporary debates that agriculture in advanced societies has moved from ‘productivism’ to ‘post-productivism’. A brief review of current conceptualizations of productivist and post-productivist agricultural regimes reveals inconsistencies in current understandings these dualistic terms. The problem has partly been that the conceptual literature on post-productivism has largely failed to take into account the wealth of actor-oriented and behaviourally grounded research. Productivist and post-productivist agricultural regimes have also been conceptualized from a UK-centric perspective that has largely failed to discuss whether the concept has wider applicability within Europe and beyond. The paper discusses the time-lag and spatial inconsistencies in the adoption of post-productivist action and thought, and emphasizes that different localities are positioned at different points in a temporal, spatial and conceptual transition from ‘pre-productivist’ to ‘post-productivist’ agricultural regimes. The notion of the ‘territorialization’ of productivist and post-productivist actor spaces highlights the wide-ranging diversity that exists within the productivist/post-productivist spectrum, and that productivist and post-productivist action and thought occurs in multidimensional coexistence leads one to question the implied directionality of the traditional productivist/post-productivist debate. It is suggested that the notion of a ‘multifunctional agricultural regime’ better encapsulates the diversity, non-linearity and spatial heterogeneity that can currently be observed in modern agriculture and rural society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the changes in the agricultural landscape in Sweden from the 1940s to the 1990s. Abandoning of agricultural lands; Willingness to pay for preservation of agricultural landscape; Need for a differentiated area subsidy for a large fraction of the agricultural land and individual contracts; Value of agricultural land use.

The article presents the list of authors and reviewers of the December 1979 issue of the "British Journal of Sociology."

This paper shows how vulnerability to natural hazards can be measured and analyzed and how drought vulnerability might relate to new agricultural technologies and land tenure in Mexico. Several authors have suggested that the impacts of drought on agricultural systems are determined as much by the technological, economic, and political characteristics of a region as by the severity of meteorological events. But the literature on natural hazards and cultural ecology lacks both detailed quantitative assessments of drought impacts at the regional scale and empirical measures of vulnerability to drought and climate change. In Mexico, agricultural losses from natural hazards are severe, varying widely between regions and between different farm sectors. This study analyzes the pattern and severity of drought losses in municipios in the states of Sonora and Puebla, using data from the 1970 Mexican agricultural census. These states represent a range of physical conditions, technological and economic resources, and land-ownership structures, and thus permit an examination of how the Green Revolution and land reform affect the relationships between climatic variation and agricultural production. Reported drought losses were severe in many parts of Sonora and Puebla in 1969; some losses can be explained by rainfall deficits, especially in Puebla. Low drought losses in dry regions of Sonora often can be explained by the widespread use of irrigation. In general, technologies like irrigation, fertilizer, and improved seeds are associated with lower rather than higher drought losses in both states. Drought losses also are higher on the communally held ejido lands than on large private farms, supporting previous research documenting the economic and environmental vulnerability of ejido farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]