Southeast Asia is a laboratory showing current worldwide ecological issues. Environmental change, natural resource exploitation as well as global climate change increasingly threaten people's livelihoods. Environmentally-based uncertainties foster a high level of knowledge uncertainty. This poses a constantly growing threat to agricultural production. Vulnerable communities with a low degree of resilience are most severely affected. But local communities have abilities to innovate and develop locally embedded coping strategies. The contributors of this volume are most interested in environmental change that fosters knowledge uncertainties. Regions discussed include the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, Moluccas, Central Kalimantan, West Sumatra and South Sulawesi in Indonesia and Tangail Region in Bangladesh.

While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too. This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers. It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.

Understanding the 'lost decade' of the 1990s is central to explaining Japan today. Following a period of record high growth, the chronic downturn after 1990 raised fundamental questions about the course of the world's third largest economy. This crisis also presented Japan with the opportunity for transformative change. Changes have followed, some of them less than might be expected, and some of them far more sweeping than is generally realized. This volume presents a wide range of international perspectives on post-bubble Japan, exploring the effects of the long downturn on the views of the Japanese business community, management practices, and national policies. To what degree has Japan's traumatic experience prompted basic reforms in terms of legal changes, corporate governance, business strategy, and the longterm national vision for the economy? This book was originally published as a special issue of Asia Pacific Business Review.

This book presents conceptual and empirical discussions of adaptation to climate change/variability in West Africa. Highlighting different countries’ experiences in adaptation by different socio-economic groups and efforts at building their adaptive capacity, it offers readers a holistic understanding of adaptation on the basis of contextual and generic sources of adaptive capacity. Focusing on adaptation to climate change/variability is critical because the developmental challenges West Africa faces are increasingly intertwined with its climate history. Today, climate change is a major developmental issue for agrarian rural communities with high percentages of the population earning a living directly or indirectly from the natural environment. This makes them highly vulnerable to climate-driven ecological change, in addition to threats in the broader political economic context. It is imperative that rural people adapt to climate change, but their ability to successfully do so may be limited by competing risks and vulnerabilities. As such, elucidating those vulnerabilities and sources of strength with regard to the adaptive capacities needed to support successful adaptation and avoid maladaptation is critical for future policy formulation. Though the empirical discussion is geographically based on West Africa, its applicability in terms of the processes, structures, needs, strategies, and recommendations for policy transcends the region and provides useful lessons for understanding adaptation broadly in the developing world.

Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.

This book offers a unique perspective on rural development, by discussing the most influential perspectives and rendering their risks and benefits visible. The authors do not present a silver bullet. Rather, they give students, researchers, community leaders, politicians, concerned citizens and development organizations the conceptual tools to understand how things are organized now, which development path has already been taken, and how things could possibly move in a different direction. Van Assche and Hornidge pay special attention to the different roles of knowledge in rural development, both expert knowledge in various guises and local knowledge. Crafting development strategies requires understanding how new knowledge can fit in and work out in governance. Drawing on experiences in five continents, the authors develop a theoretical framework which elucidates how modes of governance and rural development are inextricably tied. A community is much better placed to choose direction, when it understands these ties.

This book explores the planning knowledge that can be gleaned from the experiences of the urban poor, a group frequently affected by floods. Further, it examines the relationship between lifeworld analysis and adaptation planning through the sociology of knowledge, which plays a significant part in determining the adaptation pathway of the urban poor. The book brings together empirical data to translate self-reflective planning theory into the practical context, examines community planning, and enriches the discourse on urban adaptation. Lastly, it provides an adaptation-planning model that can benefit academics, practitioners and policymakers who wish to provide more socially accepted plans.

The second volume of this series, Integrating Ecology into Global Poverty Reduction Efforts: Opportunities and solutions, builds upon the first volume, Integrating Ecology into Global Poverty Reduction Efforts: The ecological dimensions to poverty, by exploring the way in which ecological science and tools can be applied to address major development challenges associated with rural poverty. In volume 2, we explore how ecological principles and practices can be integrated, conceptually and practically, into social, economic, and political norms and processes to positively influence poverty and the environment upon which humans depend. Specifically, these chapters explore how ecological science, approaches and considerations can be leveraged to enhance the positive impacts of education, gender relations, demographics, markets and governance on poverty reduction. As the final chapter on “The future and evolving role of ecological science” points out, sustainable development must be build upon an ecological foundation if it is to be realized. The chapters in this volume illustrate how traditional paradigms and forces guiding development can be steered along more sustainable trajectories by utilizing ecological science to inform project planning, policy development, market development and decision making.

This UNESCO report looks into the damaging effects of climate change on Indigenous cultures. When considering climate change, indigenous peoples and marginalized populations warrant particular attention. Impacts on their territories and communities are anticipated to be both early and severe due to their location in vulnerable environments, including small islands, high-altitude zones, desert margins and the circumpolar Arctic. Indeed, climate change poses a direct threat to many indigenous societies due to their continuing reliance upon resource-based livelihoods. Heightened exposure to negative impacts, however, is not the only reason for specific attention and concern. As many indigenous societies are socially and culturally distinct from mainstream society, decisions, policies and actions undertaken by the majority, even if well-intended, may prove inadequate, ill-adapted, and even inappropriate. There is therefore a need to understand the specific vulnerabilities, concerns, adaptation capacities and longer-term aspirations of indigenous peoples and marginalized communities throughout the world. Indigenous and traditional knowledge contribute to this broader understanding.

The numerous and varied indicators of environmental risks point toward the likelihood of a systemic and catastrophic ecological failure at some point during this century. Political inaction and cultural resistance, meanwhile, are even preventing the implementation of already available technical solutions, which has led many experts to conclude that averting a global environmental catastrophe is, foremost, a socio-political, rather than a technical, challenge. The World Science Union (ICSU) has recognized that knowledge of the social sciences is indispensable for facilitating the major socio-cultural transformations now required, and, together with the International Social Science Council (ISSC), called for a mainstreaming of environmental research in the social sciences at the Rio+20 Earth Summit. The two major international organizations in anthropology, IUAES and WCAA, responded to this call by co-sponsoring a symposium on environmental change at the Manchester World Anthropology Congress, and by creating a scientific Commission for Anthropology and Environment, which then hosted a second symposium in Chiba City, Tokyo, in May 2014. This volume is a selection of the many papers presented by a truly international group of experts at the two symposia. It identifies and provides case study examples in six major research areas where anthropology and local and indigenous people’s knowledge can make a significant contribution: Environmental Vulnerability and Risk Perceptions; Sustainable Urban Environments; Sustainable Rural Environments and Food Security; Indigenous People and Nature Conservation; Environmental Justice and Corporate Social Responsibility; and Sustainable Resource Management. Contributors represent nine different national anthropologies across all continents. The volume thus also enacts a new ‘world anthropologies’ paradigm, first proposed by the World Anthropologies Network (WAN), which aspires to unify and globalize the discipline in a spirit of equality and mutual respect among scholars across all national traditions and language barriers. Furthermore, the volume will also support teaching and promote further research in the anthropology of the environment.