In Mali, the situation of cotton growing households has traditionally been considered as more favorable than that of food crop producers. However, official statistics on poverty suggest that the cotton growing region of Sikasso is among the poorest regions of the country and that cotton...

This paper surveys alternative approaches to the emergence and evolution of institutions. The challenge is to develop frameworks capable of capturing both stability and change. We follow a “descaling” approach to show how founding assumptions about economics—namely, alternative assumptions...

The paper addresses the issue of rethinking the welfare state as a part of a broader national system of social protection (NSSP) and a mode of societal regulation. In order to overcome the theoretical limits of bottom-up comparative analysis of welfare states, one builds a structural model of...

This article questions the importance of agricultural press for the majoritarian farmers’union, the FNSEA, dealing with the question of its representativeness. At first, the authors highlight a phased trend towards press concentration to the benefit of majority union. During challenging times,...

Theoretical and methodological difficulties explain the low level of knowledge on rural employment, but political and theoretical reasons are impulsing new research. The author examines the three main logics governing present research : development, spatial distribution of employment, historical...