Search results

Conceptualizing development in terms of risk management has become a prominent feature of mainstream development discourse. This has led to a convergence between the rubrics of financial inclusion and risk management whereby improved access for poor households to private sector credit, insurance and savings products is represented as a necessary step toward building “resilience.” This convergence, however, is notable for a shallow understanding of the production and distribution of risks. By naturalizing risk as an inevitable product of complex systems, the approach fails to interrogate how risk is produced and displaced unevenly between social groups. Ignoring the structural and relational dimensions of risk production leads to an overly technical approach to risk management that is willfully blind to the intersection of risk and social power. A case study of the promotion of index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia – held as a model for innovative risk management via financial inclusion – is used to indicate the tensions and contradictions of this projected synthesis of development and risk management.

Among natural disasters, drought affected the most people worldwide during the past few decades (Obasi, 1994). Since the late 1970s, there has been a shift in El Niño-Southern Oscillation toward more warm events, closely related to a worldwide trend for intensified drought (Dai, Trenberth, & Karl, 1998). In particular, this trend was manifested as widespread droughts during 1999–2002 in the northern hemisphere (Lotsch, Friedl, Anderson, & Tucker, 2005), including Asia, and notably in Mongolia (Nandintsetseg, Shinoda, Kimura, & Ibaraki, 2010; Shinoda, Ito, Nachinshonhor, & Erdenetsetseg, 2007). The decade of 2000s has experienced increased vegetation degradation and wind erosion that resulted from decreased summer precipitation in wide areas of East Asia (Kurosaki, Shinoda, & Mikami, 2011a; Kurosaki, Shinoda, Mikami, & Nandintsetseg, 2011b). Furthermore, in general, projections of climate models have suggested that the frequency and intensity of extreme weathers will likely increase in the future (IPCC WG I, 2007). Given this background, it is vital to make an assessment of socioeconomic impacts of the extreme weathers and to develop proactive approaches to mitigating such impacts.

This paper explores the emerging articulations between microfinance and livestock production cycles among Mongolian pastoralists in contexts plagued by disaster and commodity market fluctuations. Ethnographic investigations of household production and vulnerability in two rural districts of eastern and western Mongolia demonstrates that both poor and wealthy households have become ensnared in a cashmere-debt cycle but that the bifurcation of livestock asset trajectories between large and small herds has also fostered diverse financial and herd management strategies that further exacerbate existing inequalities.

Academic libraries have been moving toward a culture of assessment by curating data and making future decisions based on these data. Managing all of the data collection can be a cumbersome task with heavy time commitments. For technical services departments, this culture shift presents new challenges for management of data, job descriptions, and workflows or procedures. Pennsylvania College of Technology's Madigan Library welcomes these challenges by recognizing the goals of its institution to create critical thinking students of the twenty-first century by assessing the effectiveness of library resources, especially ones that can be accessed in a digital format. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the various quantitative and qualitative methods a library can incorporate to collect data of e-resources, organize that data into comprehensible formats, and share results and make recommendations for future collections in an ongoing, holistic assessment format. Following the college's curriculum goals, this chapter will show how the Madigan Library collects data and assesses e-resources, online teaching resources, acquisitions workflows, and other aspects of the library with ongoing assessment and data collection. Managing data and making decisions within these departments are discussed.

In this chapter, the author has described the nexus between climate change and the evolution of refugee problems. The concept of climate refugee and the controversy between refugee and climate refugee were extensively elaborated. The estimates of climate refugees under various dimensions in different parts of the world were exemplified with statistical figures. The solutions of the refugee problems, funding, directions of estimates and social responsibilities towards refugees are described in the activities of international institutions like UNHCR, CCDO, UNFCCC, IPCC, the Red Cross and many others. The chapter also highlights some important policy issues such as charters, funds, response strategy to disaster and disaster recovery plans, support capacity building and climate change adaptation and so on and also cited policies taken by the G20 summit to care for refugees. Besides, the recommendations of COP23 were also included. In conclusion, ‘no climate change, no climate refugees’ slogan is incorporated with suggestions of taking care of sizable percentage shares of refugees by the rich nations.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an emergent type of INV (international new venture) – designated as “borderless firm” – present some recent cases and speculate about its future occurrence.

A search of the literature identified 25 cases that fitted, to a greater or lesser extent, the conceptual definition of a borderless firm presented in the chapter. We also found three teaching cases whose focus-firms fitted our definition.

The three firms present a combination of intentional design with fortuitous experimentation and intensively exploited relationships. They fulfill the key features of our definition.

This study is still embryonic and was driven by the authors’ conceptual thinking, based on their intuition about a new type of firm. Detailed data came from only three cases, but 25 other cases were identified, which did, to some extent, fit the definition of a borderless firm and, as such, could be studied with this focus in order to provide further evidence and to refine the conceptual definition and our understanding of the empirical manifestation of this type of firm.

We shed light on an interesting – and probably bound to occur more frequently in the future – type of firm with distinctive characteristics: a managerial mindset that does not feel constrained by geographical frontiers; a high geographical dispersion of value-added activities (beyond the sales and distribution activities that characterize most of the literature on Born Globals and INVs); and a multi-country pool of founders/managers and internationally dispersed staff.

The northwestern China has been suffering from severe droughts. Water management has been considered of great importance throughout the history. For drought disaster reduction, water management technologies such as ridge planting, water conservancy projects, and Karez irrigation systems have been developed since ancient times. In this chapter, water cellar system is introduced as an example of indigenous knowledge for water management in Chinese rural communities.