Community Interests (community + interest)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Translocations: Providing Outcomes for Wildlife, Resource Managers, Scientists, and the Human Community

RESTORATION ECOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Kevin A. Parker
Abstract The World Conservation Union (1987) defines a translocation as a release of animals with the intention of establishing, reestablishing, or augmenting an existing population. Despite frequent use as a tool for the management of threatened and endangered wildlife, the full benefits of translocations often go unrealized. In this article, I demonstrate how translocations can achieve outputs for conservation management, conservation science, and the wider human community, using North Island (NI) Saddleback or Tieke (Philesturnus rufusater) as an illustrative example. From a conservation management perspective, NI Saddleback have been salvaged from a relic population of less than 500 birds on 484-ha Hen Island to a metapopulation of approximately 6,000 birds on 13 offshore islands and at two mainland New Zealand sites. These translocations have reduced the risk of global extinction for this species and helped restore the ecosystems involved. All these translocations have occurred in the past 42 years from known source populations and with known numbers of birds released. The resulting replicated serial population bottlenecks provide numerous scientific opportunities for conservation and biological research. Although the first Saddleback translocations were to reserves closed to the public, subsequent translocations have been to open reserves, providing the wider human community with an opportunity to see and be actively involved in the management of a threatened endemic species. This has raised the profile of both NI Saddleback and other species and has provided wider community conservation benefits. These three outputs illustrate the value of translocations for resource management and conservation science and for increasing community interest, participation, and investment in biological conservation. [source]


Global constraints on rural fishing communities: whose resilience is it anyway?

FISH AND FISHERIES, Issue 1 2007
Martin D Robards
Abstract Sustaining natural resources is regarded as an important component of ecological resilience and commonly assumed to be of similar importance to social and economic vitality for resource-dependent communities. However, communities may be prevented from benefiting from healthy local resources due to constrained economic or political opportunities. In the case of Alaskan wild salmon, the fisheries are in crisis due to declining economic revenues driven by the proliferation of reliable and increasingly high-quality products from fish farms around the world. This stands in contrast with many of the world's wild-capture fisheries where diminished biological abundance has led to fishery collapse. Furthermore, increasing efficiency of salmon farm production, globalization, and dynamic consumer preferences, suggests that the wild salmon industry will continue to be challenged by the adaptability, price and quality of farmed salmon. Conventional responses to reduced revenues by the wild-capture industry have been to increase economic efficiency through implementing a range of entry entitlement and quota allocation schemes. However, while these mechanisms may improve economic efficiency at a broad scale, they may not benefit local community interests, and in Alaska have precipitated declines in local ownership of the fishery. To be viable, economic efficiency remains a relevant consideration, but in a directionally changing environment (biological, social or economic), communities unable to procure livelihoods from their local resources (through access or value) are likely to seek alternative economic opportunities. The adopted strategies, although logical for communities seeking viability through transformation in a changing world, may not be conducive to resilience of a ,fishing community' or the sustainability of their wild fish resources. We use a theoretically grounded systems approach and data from Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon fishery to demonstrate feedbacks between global preferences towards salmon and the trade-offs inherent when managing for the resilience of wild salmon populations and human communities at different scales. [source]


Testing Community Empowerment Strategies in Zimbabwe: Examples from Nutrition Supplementation, and Water Supply and Sanitation Programmes

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 1 2000
Mungai Lenneiye
Summary This article provides a brief overview and examples of how communities were involved in feeding programmes during years of drought in Zimbabwe, and in the management of rural water supply and sanitation programmes throughout the 1980s. The balance between political and technical demands in the implementation of these programmes indicates that they started off with community interests at the centre, but gradually gave way to the needs of the bureaucracy (both political and administrative). The main lessons to be learnt from these programmes is that information on entitlements and obligations (on the part of communities and external agencies) is a prerequisite for successful community development projects. Furthermore, the extent of accountability to communities is directly proportional to progress made towards the devolution of power to democratic development structures, be they directly or indirectly elected. [source]


Community colleges and their communities: Collaboration for workforce development

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES, Issue 115 2001
Margaret Terry Orr
Community colleges are forging a wide range of partnerships and collaborations with other community interests and resources to create a variety of vocational education opportunities. Examples are provided to illustrate new directions and innovative practices. Limitations of collaborations are also discussed. [source]


Friendship, Identity, and Solidarity.

RATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2003
An Approach to Rights in Plant Closing Cases
My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well-known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance-based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of the paper, I point to the way in which "tacit obligation" emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants,and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain,to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests. [source]


Transformative Knowledge Transfer Through Empowering and Paying Community Researchers

BIOTROPICA, Issue 5 2009
Stephen T. Garnett
ABSTRACT Environmental research is often conducted independently of the community in which the environment is situated, with transfer of results into policy and on-ground action occurring independently of the community's interests or aspirations. Increasingly the need for greater community involvement in the research process has been recognized. For community members, however, such engagement usually involves trade-offs. While it is often assumed that community members should participate voluntarily because they will gain from the research, any benefits from knowledge, understanding and a capacity to influence the research have to be offset against time and potential loss of unremunerated intellectual property. We argue, using case studies from tropical Australia and Africa, that a more effective means of engagement and knowledge transfer is training and remuneration of community members as coresearchers. This engagement is much more than payment for labor,it is investment in local intellectual property and requires researcher humility, power-sharing and recognition that access to research funding provides no moral or intellectual authority. Further, we argue that, for effective adoption of research results, community members need to be part of negotiated agreements on the initial nature of the research to ensure it answers questions of genuine local relevance and that local researchers have the capacity to place locally conducted research into a wider context. We argue that immediate rewards for involvement not only secure engagement but, where appropriate, are likely to lead to effective implementation of research results, enhanced local capacity and greater equity in intellectual power-sharing. [source]