1,720,956 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textThe state of rivers throughout the world is a cause for concern. Large rivers like Ganga and Yamuna have been the subject of much attention, and various remedial measures have been introduced for years with varying levels of success. On the contrary, small rivers are usually seen, at best, as tributaries of something more important, but are often not considered. This is what made us decide to start our enquiry with a small dying river. The Champa River, a small tributary of the Ganga River in Bihar's Bhagalpur district, is one of thousands of such rivers. It may seem inconsequential in the context of the broader Ganga basin, but it is nonetheless a full river, with its own catchment, biodiversity and riparian communities. It is recognised as a critically endangered water system, and for all practical purposes is a dead river since it has little to no flow for large parts of the year. Some of the reasons of its degradation are extraction of silt, garbage dumping and riverbed encroachments by settlements. As a result, the erstwhile river is now locally known as Champa Nala. Recently, the Government of Bihar has marked nineteen rivers for rejuvenation, and Champa Nala is one of them
River Rights – Framing, Recognition and Beyond
No full textThis chapter starts by engaging with the conceptual framing of river rights. It highlights some of the potential that the river rights discourse offers as an alternative to the dominant paradigm of sustainable development. A river rights framing provides a basis to question the primacy that sustainable development effectively gives to economic development and its anthropocentric understanding of nature. Other elements considered include the potential of a river rights framing for rethinking the top-down nature of environmental protection, for moving away from the property rights focus that has been the highlight of water law, and for giving more attention to people’s concerns in addition to the support that natural sciences offer to environmental protection. The next section examines the evolving river rights jurisprudence, focusing on the two decisions of the Uttarakhand High Court concerning Ganga and Yamuna. The last section then offers some pointers towards rethinking river rights. This includes framing river rights within a context of equity, engaging with the balance of rights and obligations, and considering potential modes of representation. It concludes by suggesting that river rights should be conceived as rights that bring together the anthropo- and eco-centric dimensions of protection through a framing as eco-human rights
River Rejuvenation and River Rights: Evolving Debates in India
No full textThis book draws on interdisciplinary research deploying ‘river rights’ and ‘water justice’ as conceptual frameworks to engage with laws and politics around waterbodies. It underlines the simultaneity of micro and macro aspects to make sense of the complexities around ‘river rejuvenation’ in India.This book engages with different ideas of rejuvenation, illuminating what goes under the name of rejuvenation, its impacts on the environment and communities dependent on rivers for their livelihood. At the micro level, several case studies offer a framework for understanding the reasons behind dying/degenerating small rivers across the country. At the macro-level, several chapters engage with the impact of laws, policies and role of community in river conservation. The volume also highlights the ongoing programmes such as Namami Mission for Clean Ganga and riverfront development projects.The book will be useful to students, researchers, and teachers in the field of Water Resources, Water Supply, Management of Climate-Induced Disasters, Development Studies, Law, Politics and Ecology. It will also be an invaluable companion to policy makers, general administrators, civil society organizations, media persons, and bilateral agencies like WHO, UNICEF, UNDP, UNEP, World Bank and Gates Foundation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
WATER AS A NATURAL RESOURCE: RIGHT VERSUS NEED DEBATE
Full text linkThis paper is an attempt to understand the complexity inherent inthe ongoing debate on water. It discusses the theoretical premise of thedebate by analysing the concepts of ‘right’, ‘need’ and ‘want’ with referenceto water as a natural resource. The World Bank and the InternationalMonetary Fund, under the influence of neo-liberalism and structuraladjustment programme, seem to have accepted the ‘Washington Consensus’that treats water as want to be available in the market. The national waterpolicy in India looks like being guided by the neo-liberal philosophy ofaccepting water as want. However, such a market-driven policy has its ownlimitations. Even if the ‘market’ is considered to be a rational and efficientinstitution, when it comes to management of natural resources like water, itis grossly inadequate to meet basic human needs. Cases of privatisation ofthe Sheonath river in Chhattisgarh and the anti-coke protest at Plachimadain Kerala illustrate the disastrous consequences of placing water as want under the forces of marke
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
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