Global Forces (global + force)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature-based Conflicts in R7iacute;o San Juan, Nicaragua

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2000
Anja Nygren
This article focuses on local processes and global forces in the struggle over the fate of forests and over the contested claims of protection and production in a protected area buffer zone of Río San Juan, Nicaragua. The struggle over control of local natural resources is seen as a multifaceted process of development and power involving diverse social actors, from agrarian politicians and development agents to a heterogeneous group of local settlers, absentee cattle raisers, timber dealers, transnational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. The initial interest is in the local resource-related discourses and actions; the analysis then broadens to include the larger political-economic processes and environment-development discourses that affect the local systems of production and systems of signification. The article underlines environmental resource conflicts as one of the major challenges in subjecting structures of social power to critical analysis. [source]


Development Discourses and Peasant,Forest Relations: Natural Resource Utilization as Social Process

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2000
Anja Nygren
This article analyses the changing role of forests and the practices of peasants toward them in a Costa Rican rural community, drawing on an analytical perspective of political ecology, combined with cultural interpretations. The study underlines the complex articulation of local processes and global forces in tropical forest struggles. Deforestation is seen as a process of development and power involving multiple social actors, from politicians and development experts to a heterogeneous group of local peasants. The local people are not passive victims of global challenges, but are instead directly involved in the changes concerning their production systems and livelihood strategies. In the light of historical changes in natural resource utilization, the article underlines the multiplicity of the causes of tropical deforestation, and the intricate links between global discourses on environment and development and local forest relations. [source]


Meat Products as Functional Foods: A Review

JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE, Issue 2 2005
Jose M. Fernández-Ginés
ABSTRACT: Numerous studies have sought to demonstrate the possibility of changing the image of meat and meat products from the traditionally accepted image to one of healthy living thanks to the addition (vegetables, extracts, fibers, and so forth), elimination (fats), and reduction (additives) of different ingredients. This article presents a revision of studies published in recent years on the topic and looks at possible future trends in the sector, analyzing the changes that have occurred in the traditional meat industry as global forces in the agro food industry direct it more and more to the design and production of functional foods. [source]


Negotiating Globalization: Global Scripts and Intermediation in the Construction of Asian Insolvency Regimes

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2006
Bruce G. Carruthers
This article draws from a larger research project on the globalization of bankruptcy law that includes (1) a time-series analysis of all bankruptcy reforms worldwide from 1973 to 1998; (2) participation observation, several hundred interviews and documentary analysis of international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), international professional associations (International Bar Association, International Federation of Insolvency Practitioners), and world governance organizations (OECD, U.N. Commission on International Trade Law); and (3) case studies of Indonesia, Korea, and China. The globalization of law is a negotiated process. Our research on international organizations and case studies of China, Indonesia, and South Korea indicates that negotiation of the global/local relationship varies by the vulnerability of a country to global forces. Nation-states vary (1) in their balance of power vis-à-vis global actors; and (2) in their social and cultural distance from the global. Yet even where the global/local gap is wide and the asymmetry of power is pronounced, local responses to global pressures are negotiated as much as imposed. Negotiating globalization relies on direct and mediated interactions by several types of intermediaries who translate global scripts into four kinds of outcomes. The impact of intermediaries in this process varies by the phase of the reform in which they participate. Finally, globalizing law proceeds through recursive cycles of lawmaking and law implementation. [source]


Local and Translocal in the Study of Theravada Buddhism and Modernity

RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2009
Erik Braun
This essay traces the development of scholarly thinking about the relationship between local and translocal forms of Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia, particularly in regard to modernity. The first part of the article shows that scholars have moved well away from a view of the canonical Buddhist texts as the original and most authentic core of Theravada, emphasizing instead local settings as the sites for the production of Buddhist values, practices, and texts. The article then considers how this turn to the local is affecting understandings of Buddhist modernity in Southeast Asia. It suggests that recent work on modern Theravada Buddhism at the local level is pushing scholars toward a more atomized view of Buddhist modernities. In this view, local Buddhisms play a part at least as important as that of the global forces of modernization (usually seen as originating in the West). [source]


Introduction: That most remarkable of outside men , Harold Brookfield's intellectual legacy

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2005
John Connell
Abstract:,Harold Brookfield's academic career spans more than half a century, traversing small tropical and subtropical islands and mountainous uplands, focusing on people,environment relations and linking to a diversity of institutions and disciplines. His unwavering commitment to fieldwork at the local level and to comparative study is paralleled by a healthy scepticism with respect to academic trends and orthodoxy of any kind, whether intellectual or physical. It is the farmers of the developing world who are the source of much of his inspiration. His theoretical contributions are based essentially on his observations of their practices and his learning from their experiences. His academic insights into the processes of change in rural areas of Melanesia, East and South-East Asia, Africa and South America, where small-scale ecological studies are linked to global forces, are of lasting significance. [source]


History of the Care of Displaced Children in Korea

ASIAN SOCIAL WORK AND POLICY REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Jung-Woo Kim
The present article explores the current nature and history of welfare provision for displaced children in Korea. It examines the early examples of care and the perspectives on the issue from scholars, lawmakers, religion and society as a whole. This provides an understanding of the background and, especially, the cultural roots of existing care. A history of what may be considered the first modern displaced child welfare provision is also given with analysis of how Christian and local approaches and perceptions integrated. This was to form the basis for present-day transitional displaced child welfare in Korea. For this reason, the article examines the provision in a paradigm which looks at the provision as responses to Western influences. Features of congregate care, domestic/international adoptions, foster care and youth-headed households are examined. The authors conclude that global forces will continue to be influential and recommends that religious institutions which have thus far provided crucial contributions to the foundation of care should continue to play key roles with the government's facilitation. The need for wide participation from society and coordination from the government to manage systems, develop strategies and build consensus is highlighted. [source]


Australian Federalism Confronts Globalisation: A New Challenge at the Centenary

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 3 2002
John M Kline
Globalisation poses a special challenge for federal systems of government. Despite administrative reforms, Australia has not fully confronted crucial questions regarding the role of states and territories when international issues overlap areas of subnational government authority. This challenge emerged with controversies over environmental regulations, import quarantines and Aboriginal policies. Initial reforms focused mainly on treaty approval processes, leaving broader policy questions largely unexamined. Subnational governments sometimes react protectively when facing dislocation threats from global forces; conversely, they can carry out constituency representation and education functions in ways that promote Australia's competitiveness and counter public distrust of globalisation. Federalism's new challenge is to devise political processes that foster positive state and territorial participation in Australia's response to globalisation. [source]