1,720,973 research outputs found
User-Based Pasture Management in Kyrgyzstan: Achievements, Challenges, and Trends
Get PDFIn Kyrgyzstan, a high mountain country in Central Asia, grasslands occupy almost half of the territory. These extensive resources represent the basis for seasonally mobile animal husbandry, which is relevant for both individual households and the national economy. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Kyrgyzstan’s transition into a market economy, these formerly state-owned grasslands were parceled out and privatized. Considerable socio-economic distortions and ecological problems occurred during this process. In order to meet such unintended effects, a legal framework for user-based pasture management was established in the course of an institutional learning process. This package of measures corresponded to a decentralization of responsibilities in natural resource management through the stronger involvement of rural communities and, thus, aligns with a central paradigm of the global development discourse at the time. Positive examples can be observed in terms of increasing equal access to grazing land, the empowerment of rural communities, and reduced ecological damage. At the same time, there are local cases of pasture-related ecological problems and overstrained management institutions. In addition to the challenges posed by cross-border pastoral mobility and scrub encroachment on summer pastures, social issues came into focus in current pasture-related interventions in Kyrgyzstan. This paper traces the developments of the regulations and practices of pasture management after 1991, placing an emphasis on the analysis of current trends, achievements, and challenges
Exploring Institutional Complementarity and Social Thresholds of Mobility in Pastoral Social-Ecological Systems in Mongolia
Get PDFBiodiversity continues to decline worldwide, affecting dryland ecosystems that are of significant importance for global biodiversity conservation. Accelerated by climate change, undergoing transformations have been pushing the entire social-ecological system across ecological and social thresholds. Particularly, the decline of pastoral mobility in Mongolia is of great concern, as flexible responses to the dynamic environment are crucial for the sustainability of drylands’ ecosystems. Responding to this concern, Mongolian policymakers design new pasture use and conservation policies. However, the policies might be ineffective in preventing systems from crossing the thresholds, unless policy implementation succeeds in systematically shaping the perceptions of a critical mass of herders and their strategic choices regarding pastoral mobility. We evaluate whether the enacted policies generate the intended consequences. First, we reconstruct the strategic choice and resulting institutions regarding pastoral mobility in the commons domain, where herders jointly use common pastures. Second, we track the process in the political economy domain, where pasture users choose to support or resist policies. Finally, we evaluate the complementarity of the strategic choices and institutions in both domains. In our field research, we employ the “process tracing” method. It relies on observations to trace recurring processes within and between herding communities and incorporates triangulation via various tools, such as expert interviews and focus group discussions. Our findings identify complementarity between the enacted policies and pastoral mobility as individual households comply with the rules and select mobile herding strategies. However, for the complementarity conditions to be held and to create an overall institutional arrangement, a critical mass of herders choosing to comply with the regulations and practice pastoral mobility to reach a social threshold will be crucial
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Constraints and opportunities for mainstreaming biodiversity and ecosystem services in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy: Insights from the IPBES assessment for Europe and Central Asia
No full textThe European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), being one of the strongest drivers of agricultural landuse practices, has a substantial impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Member States. The initial focus of the CAP to increase and intensify agricultural production affected water and land qualities and contributed to the degradation of traditional agricultural landscapes, cultural identities, and erosion of typical farmland biodiversity. Recent CAP reforms have begun to consider biodiversity and ecosystem services, but still
fall short of a thorough mainstreaming approach. The objectives of this paper are to point out main findings regarding (i) key shortcomings of the current CAP, and (ii) major opportunities to enhance the mainstreaming of biodiversity and ecosystem services within the CAP. The paper is based on insights generated in the sub-global assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) for Europe and Central Asia1. Our results illustrate the evolution of agricultural policy objectives and instruments
applied in the CAP, and their effects on selected ecosystem services and biodiversity. We shed light on key shortcomings of existing policy and provide recommendations for further CAP reforms to achieve more effective biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of ecosystem services
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
