Search results

This study looked at the potential applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) for inclusive community development and participation, sustainable tourism, and rural community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in sub-Saharan Africa and other rural areas worldwide.

To evaluate resource management systems for rural tourism and the environment in Africa and abroad. The study makes use of reviews of relevant literature and documents, and while linking applications for sustainable tourism and local community empowerment with CBNRM and GIS, vital content was manually analyzed.

The study shows a potential affinity between agricultural and tourism businesses that GIS in line with the CBNRM conception can strengthen. In many rural and underdeveloped regions of the continent, this highlights the need for a credible and varied tourism strategy to develop and empower the relevant communities.

Most agricultural communities in Africa are located in low-income regions. Such areas are rich in natural wildlife and have popular tourist destinations. A mix of regional community development initiatives can be built using GIS, sustainable tourism, CBNRM, and community-based tourism (CBT).

In the process of making agricultural production decisions in rural households, severe weather conditions, either extreme cold or heat, may squeeze the labor input in the agricultural sector, leading to a reallocation of labor between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, reveal the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

This study utilizes data from Chinese meteorological stations and two waves of China Household Income Project to examine the impact and behavioral mechanism of extreme temperatures on rural labor reallocation.

(1) Extremely high and low temperatures had led to a reallocation of labor force from agricultural activities to non-farm employment, with a more pronounced effect from extreme high temperature events. (2) Extreme temperatures influence famers’ decision in abandoning farmland and reducing investment in agricultural machinery, thus creating an interconnected impact on labor mobility. (3) The reallocation effect of rural labor induced by extreme temperatures is particularly evident for males, persons that perceives economic hardship or labor in economically active areas.

By applying a dataset with a wide latitude range, this study empirically confirms the influence of extreme temperatures on the agricultural labor reallocation, and reveals the mechanism of farmers’ adaptive behavioral decision and therefore enriches the research on the impact of climate change on rural labor markets and livelihood strategies.

Historically, governments have favoured the economic benefits associated with tourism development resulting in many tourism destinations being confronted with overdevelopment, crowding, environmental degradation as well as damage to the social and cultural fabric, especially pronounced in high attractivity destinations. The devastating consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic for tourism have led to a realisation that actors participating in tourism are especially susceptible to major health and security crises or natural disasters, mainly because their services are location bound and cannot be sold elsewhere. The involuntary ‘pause’ in travel worldwide has led many governments to realise that tourism policies must be placed in a broader context and that stakeholders, including residents and the environment where the brunt of the negative consequences are most deeply felt, must be an intrinsic part in determining the outcomes to be achieved. To Snowclone John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what your destination can do for tourism, ask what tourism can do for your destination’. Indeed, the visitation process involves the demand-driven co-creation or co-production between visitors (resident, day and overnight) and hosts, mostly based on the use of public goods. The complexity of this visitation system with its myriad stakeholders means that there cannot be a single tourism or visitation policy, but that there must be different policies that intervene at different points in the system and create an impact. Thus, policy formulation must be context-specific, individualised and take into account the interdependence among policies to achieve the desired outcomes.

Climate change has been universally recognized as a major threat to human well-being, necessitating a comprehensive transformation of people's activities. Various measures have been proposed to contain climate change among which the green transformation grabs special attention, thanks to its desirable properties. Within the green transformation process, green tourism comes to prominence with huge potential. As one of the largest carbon emitters, the transition towards green tourism may offer substantial benefits not only for tourism companies but also for the whole economy. Yet, most studies tend to focus on the adverse effects of tourism on climate change while overlooking the potential impact of climate change on tourism. This chapter clarifies the feedback relationship between climate change and tourism and makes some recommendations.

Female smallholder farmers in low-income countries face barriers to accessing capital and commodity markets. While agricultural cooperatives provide services that contribute to the income and productivity of small-scale producers, evidence of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social and economic position within their household. First, we study the relationship between women's cooperative participation and their household coffee sales and savings. Second, we investigate the link between women's cooperative participation and their intra-household decision-making and whether the inclusion of the husband in his wife's cooperative strengthens or lowers women's decision-making power.

We carry out a case study of a hybrid coffee and microfinance cooperative that promotes social innovation through the integration and empowerment of female smallholders in rural Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey of 411 married female cooperative members from 26 randomly selected self-help groups of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative and 196 female non-members from the identical area, employing propensity score matching, this paper investigates the benefits of women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda. We present and discuss the results of our case study within an extensive literature on the role of institutions in collective action for women's empowerment.

Our findings provide new empirical evidence on female smallholders' participation in mixed cooperatives. Our results indicate that women's participation in microfinance-producer cooperatives appears to be a conditional blessing: even though membership is linked to increased women's intra-household decision-making and raised household savings and income from coffee sales, a wife with a husband in the same cooperative self-help group is associated with diminished women's household decision-making power.

The focus of this study is on female coffee smallholders in an agricultural cooperative in rural western Uganda. In particular, we focus on a case study of one major coffee cooperative. Our cross-sectional survey does not allow us to infer causal interpretations. Also, the survey does not include variables that allow us to measure other dimensions of women's empowerment beyond decision-making over household expenditures and women's financial performance related to savings and income from coffee cultivation.

Our empirical results indicate that female smallholders' cooperative membership is associated with higher incomes and coffee sales. However, husband co-participation in their wives' cooperative group diminishes wives' decision-making, which suggests that including husbands and other family members in the same cooperative group may not be perceived as an attractive route to empowerment for female smallholders. For these reasons, an intervention that encourages the cooperation of both spouses and that is sensitive to context-specific gender inequalities, may be more successful at stimulating social change toward household gender equality than interventions that focus on women's autonomous spheres only.

While the literature thus far has focused on microfinance's potential for women's empowerment, evidence on agricultural cooperatives' affecting women's social and economic position is limited. First, our findings provide novel empirical evidence on the empowering effects of women's participation in a self-help group-based coffee cooperative in rural Uganda. Second, our data allows us to explore the role of husbands' participation in their wives' cooperative and SGH. We embed our hypotheses and empirical results in a rich discussion of female entrepreneurship, microfinance and cooperative literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the South African government has used accounting technologies to manage the pervasive issue of racial inequality.

Premised on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, we conducted a qualitative case study. Publicly available archival data are used to determine the extent to which accounting techniques have helped to shape policy responses to racial inequality.

We show that accounting techniques and calculations give visibility to the problems of government and help design a programme to solve racial inequality. The lived experiences and impacts of racism in the workplace have been problematised, turned into statistics, and used to rationalise the need for ongoing government intervention in solving the problem. These processes underpin the development of the scorecard system, which measures the contributions firms have made towards minimising racial inequalities.

This study augments the existing body of Foucauldian literature by illustrating how power dynamics can be counteracted. We show that in governmental processes, accounting can exhibit a dual role, and these roles are not always subordinate to the analysis of political realities. The case of B-BBEE reveals the unintended consequences of utilising accounting to control the conduct of individuals or groups.