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This chapter uses discourse analysis to explain why entrepreneurship has become a primary response to Africa’s youth employment challenge. It analyses almost 20 years of academic literature and publications from one of the world’s foremost authorities on entrepreneurship: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The study found that youth were positioned within a discourse of entrepreneurial essentialism; where entrepreneurship was narrativised as the only option for youth employment; and youth were framed as entrepreneurship being the natural solution for them. Youth were concurrently framed within numerous contradictory entrepreneurial discourses which were used to elevate and legitimise entrepreneurship as the key pathway for addressing Africa’s youth employment challenge. An important finding in this study was that the dominant model of entrepreneurship being promoted by GEM to address the challenge is a mainly skills-based pathway to self-employment and low-growth microenterprise development. This is concerning for two reasons: firstly, global evidence does not demonstrate much support for such an approach, and secondly, it undermines other responses to youth unemployment, particularly those which seek to address more structural, demand-side barriers to employment.

I present here a review and critique of social scientific analyses of the global spread of Prosperity Christianity. My argument is that at least two phases of research can be discerned: an initial phase where economic factors are given strong causal explanatory force in accounting for the upsurge in Health and Wealth congregations; and a more recent phase that complicates our understandings of the relationships between religious and economic action. My review of the literature reveals that sacrifice is a theoretical trope common to both phases of writing, and in the latter half of the chapter I explore the ways in which notions of the sacrificial economy can point to nuanced understandings of the forms of materiality deployed in many Prosperity contexts. The wider implications of this chapter refer in part to how we might understand notions of rational and irrational action in relation to economic behavior; and also to an appreciation of the ways in which ritual action can be productive of, and not merely a response to, perceived ambiguity and risk.

In Sabah, Malaysia, illegal hunting has increased in recent years putting considerable pressure on large mammal populations. The causes for this phenomenon lie in increasing rural poverty, ineffective policies to regulate hunting, as well as a ready market for many wildlife products in the Chinese medicine markets. This paper examines how Community-Based Ecotourism has some potential to be used as a tool to reducing poaching using the Tidong community in Sabah as a case study. The key finding is that successful conservation outcomes for Community-Based Ecotourism projects are only sustainable over the long run if projects are structured to ensure that the local community is able to continue effective management once sponsoring organizations hand over control and that revenue from tourism does not decline. If tourist revenue declines communities may be forced to revert to previous practices reversing any initial conservation gains.

Three themes dominate Hunting Causes. The first is that cause is a plural concept. The methods and metaphysics of causation, Cartwright believes, are context dependent. Different causal accounts seem to be at odds with one another only because the same word means different things in different contexts. Every formal approach to causality uses a conceptual framework that is “thinner” than causal reality. She lists a bewildering variety of approaches to causation: probabilistic and Bayes-net accounts (of, for example, Patrick Suppes, Clive Granger, Wolfgang Spohn, Judea Pearl, and Clark Glymour), modularity accounts (Pearl, James Woodward, and Stephen LeRoy), invariance accounts (Woodward, David Hendry, and Kevin Hoover), natural experiments (Herbert Simon, James Hamilton, and Cartwright), causal process accounts (Wesley Salmon and Philip Dowe), efficacy accounts (Hoover), counterfactual accounts (David Lewis, Hendry, Paul Holland, and Donald Rubin), manipulationist accounts (Peter Menzies and Huw Price), and others. The lists of advocates of various accounts overlap. Nevertheless, she sometimes treats these accounts as if they were so different that it is not clear why they should be the subject of a single book. And she fails to explain what they have in common. If, as she apparently believes, they do not have a common essence, do they have a Wittgensteinian family resemblance? She fails to explore in any systematic way the complementarities among the different approaches – for example, between invariance accounts, Bayes-nets, and natural experiments – that frequently make their advocates allies rather than opponents.

Let me begin this essay with some propositions found in the preface to this study. “(A) dynamic of contradiction…stands at the heart of Marxist theory” (p. 8). And (quoting Engels) while “men make their own history…in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the result of these many wills operating in different directions and of their manifold effect upon the world outside that constitute history.” “What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the minds of actors?” (p. 9). Hunt's study demonstrates that Engels was certainly a most contradictory figure, alternating and sometimes conjoining a life of womanizing and carousing to one of the serious and dedicated political work to one of the capitalist manager. As to the second issue, while Hunt shows the various influences that prompted Engels to move toward, indeed, facilitate the development of what is termed Marxism, the question of motivation that caused him to honor those influences is left unanswered. That is, while many were subject to the same influences, the same historical forces, why did Engels “allow” these forces to pull him in a particular direction?