William Derman

Although national governments and international agencies have committed vast sums of money to development, many projects have not only failed to improve the lives of the poor but in some cases have created additional social and economic problems. Such failures can often be traced to an inadequate understanding of the socio-cultural reality of the people most directly affected and to a lack of their participation in project planning, implementation, and evaluation. In this collection of essays, scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines examine many of the perplexing social issues of development planning from the perspective of social impact analysis. Drawing on national, regional, and local case studies, the authors demonstrate why sociocultural factors are seldom adequately understood and discuss how they can be effectively incorporated into the planning process.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

Although national governments and international agencies have committed vast sums of money to development, many projects have not only failed to improve the lives of the poor but in some cases have created additional social and economic problems. Such failures can often be traced to an inadequate understanding of the socio-cultural reality of the people most directly affected and to a lack of their participation in project planning, implementation, and evaluation. In this collection of essays, scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines examine many of the perplexing social issues of development planning from the perspective of social impact analysis. Drawing on national, regional, and local case studies, the authors demonstrate why sociocultural factors are seldom adequately understood and discuss how they can be effectively incorporated into the planning process.

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry. The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.