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The purpose of this paper is to present, from a critical point of view, the current legal framework of livestock grazing in public forests in Greece, to present the implementation problems that have arisen and to suggest possible solutions.

The authors are trying to combine and implement some of the rangeland ecology results as a tool to explain the legal status and the reform proposals.

Livestock grazing is a misunderstood activity when it occurs in forests. In fact, when livestock grazing is controlled and based on the capacity of a forest area, it has been proven that it does not degrade an ecosystem; on the contrary, it contributes to biodiversity and to the prevention of forest fires. The prohibition of grazing for a long period of time, along with the establishment of a legal framework by which the forestry service is required to abide, which does not provide for alternatives or compensatory measures to farmers, has resulted in the creation of extremely unpleasant conditions for farmers.

There are hardly any relevant studies in Greek and international literature specifically focused on the Greek legal status of livestock grazing. The scarce contributions on this topic have been investigated and are incorporated in the justification of the study.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the implications of policies, practices and new “non‐equilibrium” management approaches in mobile grassland management.

The author takes an actor‐oriented perspective on the narrative of land‐use practices, notional sustainable stocking rates and the problematic of state policy interventions in local context. The paper is based on two years in the field on a bilateral aid‐funded grassland management project at Xing'an League, Inner Mongolia and follow‐up among selected informants.

The constitution of grasslands “degradation” is in fact contested by resource users. Most grassland scientists, Party and Government officials in China have tended to associate ethnic “minority” mobile pastoralists with destructive cultural practices that, they argue, have led to ecological decline on the steppes. This argument is integral to the “degradation narrative” that underpins the discourse on grassland science. The conventional bio‐ecology emphasis on species dominance (growth‐form), in fact says little about the extent of anthropogenic impacts on above‐ground biomass and whether these factors have been the cause of degradation. The paper suggests that greater consideration is given to specific changes in human activity, climatic and plant productivity over time and space, based on endogenous, flexible seasonal estimates.

Although presenting challenges to conventional grassland science based on endogenous experiences and herder practices, it may have specific geopolitical limits to more general scaling‐up in different contexts.

The paper discusses new modalities of non‐equilibrium grassland management, inverting normative top‐down approaches to controlling environmental degradation, livestock distribution and stocking rates.

The paper suggests rethinking the use of customary practices, vernacular knowledge and the social organisation of herders in the design of sustainable grassland management.

The paper may be valuable to practitioners, rural development planners, funders and researchers interested in the use of integrated, cross‐disciplinary, new ecological knowledge in grassland management.

This chapter attempts to critically examine the wildlife conservation discourse that argues for curtailing the livestock grazing inside the Changthang Wildlife Sanctuary, situated on the India’s international borders with China in southeast Ladakh. The conventional conservation discourse points at the (supposed) greed of the Changpa pastoralists in accumulating an increasing number of pashmina goats as a primary environmental cause of wildlife loss in Changthang; however, there is a critical lack of insight into the political and historical mechanisms that lie within the dynamic interaction between resource access and socio-economic inequalities, critical for understanding Changpa pastoralism today.

Ethnographic inquiry into the Changpa economy before the closure of Ladakh–Tibet border trade in 1962, and afterwards, has highlighted the political and economic transformations in the area, as well as the cultural politics of market integration and increasing inabilities of the mobile Changpa pastoralists to access vital productive resources. Inequalities reflected in the contemporary livestock data, acquired from the pastoralists, underscore the processes of institutional bricolage, non-cooperative labour, exchange/wage herding and capital-dominated market networks, making pastoralism impossible for several of the households.

The chapter argues against making livestock withdrawal a major aim of conservation sciences. It calls instead for the recognition of state-provisioned commodified pashmina rearing, seen through the prism of changing abilities and shifting institutions, where unequal access to productive resources is a reflection of both historical dispossessions and also economic impoverishments of Changpa today.

The ecological decline of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and the violent and explosive characteristics of post‐Columbian colonial ecologies might well remain comfortably remote from us in our twentieth century world were it not for the disturbing parallels that such case histories seem to evoke as we consider our contemporary global circumstance. Just as in ancient times and in the age of colonial expansion, it is in the “remote environments,” usually quite distant from the centers of power, that the crucial indicators of environmental catastrophe first become apparent within the system as a whole. These regions are frequently characterized by weak economies and highly vulnerable ecosystems in our time, just as they were in the past. Accordingly, the environmental circumstances in these regions constitute for the modern world a kind of monitoring device that can provide early warnings of ecological instabilities in the global ecosystem.

The present effects of transnational corporations (TNCs) on social, health, and environmental aspects of local societies have a long history. The pre-conditions for the insertion of the types of economic initiatives now seen in the Global South, and driven by TNCs, were set through histories of colonialism and development schemes. These initiatives disrupted local economies and modified environments, delivering profound effects on livelihoods. These effects were experienced as structural violence, and have produced social suffering through the decades.

In this paper, we compare two African cases across time; the conjunction of development initiatives and structural adjustment in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe in the early 1990s and industrial plantation forestry in present-day Uganda. Each case presents a specific constellation of political and economic forces that has produced prejudicial effects on local populations in their time period of application and are, essentially, different versions of structural violence that produce social suffering. While each case depicts a specific type of violent encounter manifest at a particular historical moment, these are comparable in the domains of environmental impacts, disruptions to societies, co-opting of local economies, disordering of systems of meaning and social reproduction, and nefarious effects on well-being. We analyze the conjunction of these effects through a theoretical lens of structural violence and social suffering. Our analysis draws particular attention to the role of TNCs in driving this structural violence and its effects.

The most significant sources and environmental pathways of manmade radionuclides have recently been examined by the RADPATH (Biochemical Pathways of Artificial Radionuclides) project, which was initiated under the auspices of the SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) unit. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, with its associated radionuclide release, has provided an unexpected data source concerning movement of materials within various environmental compartments. Outlines some of the findings of the SCOPE‐RADPATH project, a particular focus of which was the Chernobyl accident, with reference to the atmospheric, terrestrial, aquatic and urban environments.

Traditional architectural forms and structures develop under the influence of such physical and non-physical determinants as climate, topography structure, socio-cultural values, economy and technology, and are based on centuries of accumulated knowledge. This study is an analysis of the rural Yayla settlements of four towns in the province of Antalya, located on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The southern inclines of the Taurus Mountain range facing the Mediterranean, are host to number of rural settlements at different altitudes that bear some region-specific architectural features. This study aims to understand settlement pattern and house design features that have developed under the specific climate, socio-cultural and socio-economic conditions of the traditional households in rural yaylas in the different bio-climatic zones of the region. The study has revealed that designs have developed over time to result in spaces that are comfortable and climate sensitive, and which attribute importance to the local resources, economy and culture; and that the housing designs have developed offer natural means of heat control and ventilation. The new understanding offered in this paper may contribute to the conservation of the local cultural features of the area, allowing their sustainable perpetuation into the future and serving as examples of good design practise for future settlements

Much of contemporary institutional theory rests on the identification of structured, coherent, and encompassing logics, and from there proceeds to examine multilevel dynamics or the relationship between logics in a field. Less research directly studies the internal properties and dynamics of logics and how they are structured over time. In this paper, we propose a method for understanding the content and organization of logics over time. We advocate for an analysis of logics that is grounded in a repertoire view of culture (Swidler, 1986; Weber, 2005). This approach involves identifying the set of cultural categories that can make up logics, and measuring empirically the dimensions that mark a cultural system as more or less logic-like. We discuss several text analytic approaches suitable for discourse data, and outline a seven-step method for describing the internal organization of a cultural repertoire in term of its “logic-ness.” We provide empirical illustrations from a historical analysis of the field of alternative livestock agriculture. Our approach provides an integrated theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of logics across a range of settings.

Much of contemporary institutional theory rests on the identification of structured, coherent, and encompassing logics, and from there proceeds to examine multilevel dynamics or the relationship between logics in a field. Less research directly studies the internal properties and dynamics of logics and how they are structured over time. In this paper, we propose a method for understanding the content and organization of logics over time. We advocate for an analysis of logics that is grounded in a repertoire view of culture (Swidler, 1986; Weber, 2005). This approach involves identifying the set of cultural categories that can make up logics, and measuring empirically the dimensions that mark a cultural system as more or less logic-like. We discuss several text analytic approaches suitable for discourse data, and outline a seven-step method for describing the internal organization of a cultural repertoire in term of its “logic-ness.” We provide empirical illustrations from a historical analysis of the field of alternative livestock agriculture. Our approach provides an integrated theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of logics across a range of settings.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the technical inefficiency of dairy farms and subsequently investigate the factors affecting technical inefficiency in the Malaysian dairy industry.

This study uses multi-directional efficiency analysis to measure the technical inefficiency scores on a sample of 200 farm observations and single-bootstrap truncated regression model to define factors affecting technical inefficiency.

Managerial and program inefficiency scores are presented for intensive and semi-intensive production systems. The results reveal marked differences in the inefficiency scores across inputs and between production systems.

Intensive systems generally have lowest managerial and program inefficiency scores in the Malaysian dairy farming sector. Policy makers could use this information to advise dairy farmers to convert their farming system to the intensive system.

The results suggest that the Malaysian Government should redefine its policy for providing farm finance and should target young farmers when designing training and extension programs in order to improve the performance of the dairy sector.

The existing literature on Southeast Asian dairy farming has neither focused on investigating input-specific efficiency nor on comparing managerial and program efficiency. This paper aims to fill this gap.