because their traditional ‘slash and burn’ agriculture is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Farmers in these communities have to farm more intensively and this is causing a whole host of environmental and social problems. This challenge is not limited to this region, but is being...

Watershed development is a very important rural development programme in India. This paper studies 60 community groups in 12 micro-watersheds in South India to understand how villagers cooperate to manage watershed related tasks. The paper examines the factors that affect collective...

Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. We investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries. To...

This paper examines the possibility of using economic instruments, especially pollution taxes and bargaining approaches, as a means to encourage or improve people’s participation in environmental management in India. It provides an intuitive description of methods for designing economic...

In convening the third session of the World Urban Forum in Vancouver, the United Nations Human Settlements Program has asked us to focus our attention on the Sustainable City and consider critical challenges across three sub-themes: • Urban Growth And Environment• Partnership And...

The promotion of ‘inclusive citizenship’, through which the disadvantaged engage in collective struggles for justice and recognition, has been attracting growing attention as a solution to chronic poverty. This paper problematises this formulation by drawing on a case of landless...

This paper draws on the experiences of the Far East Economic Crisis in 1998 and argues that: (1) the poor depended heavily on bonding social capital during the Crisis, but the crunch-point beyond which they felt no longer able to rely on this is less certain; (2) bridging social capital could...

Modern epidemiology has, by and large, been based on a narrow model of biomedicine and behaviour modification. It fails to answer, for instance the following questions: Why certain populations are inflicted with certain kinds of disease, and why the access to its cure and prevention is so...

This paper shows that the realization of Singapore’s vision of “active citizenship†and “state-society partnershipâ€, to a significant extent, depends on how social capital is being created and renewed in Singapore’s evolving political landscape.[Working Paper 9]

The executive summary reports on major findings from a survey conducted among a random sample of 1,054 Singaporeans and Permanent Residents aged 18 to 65. Focus is on views of public policies in three areas, namely, political participation, social capital and trust and provision of public goods...