Статті в журналах з теми "Land tenure Economic aspects Ecuador"

The question of the purpose of statehood hovers again to collect the pledges of the development actors. The goal to become a nation-state that provides a place and humane and proper way of life is still harassing residents of coastal areas and small islands as part of the natural resources bestowed by The One Almighty God to the Indonesian people. Coastal areas and outer small islands are national assets controlled by the state and need to be preserved and utilized as much as possible for the prosperity of the people, both for present and future generations and for the interests of defense and security. related to the threat of remote island tenure which by certain elements were transferred to the land tenure rights that should belong to the village customary land, but there was a process of transferring rights which were then held by foreigners with the argument related to economic issues that were less supportive in the area by nominee or by road rent that threatens the stability of national defense.

Introduction. The uniqueness of the processes of land tenure development in Ukraine is conditioned by the presence of an optimum combination of conditions and factors. The profitability of crop depends on these factors. Among them we can distinguish the favourable combinations of soil and climatic conditions. But the situation is burdened by many crisis situation of industrial and economic, social and economic, ecological and economic nature that prevents a balanced development of the land tenure. The increase in production of certain crops and the profitability of crop sector has been achieved by reducing the natural fertility of the land. Economic gains are paid by the unbalanced structure of territorial management and fertilization, the use of old extensive technology. Correction requires existing the state administrative decisions and rational use of limited financial resources. It will be possible to achieve by improving environmental and economic mechanisms of sustainable land tenure. Specifically, the system needs improving financial and economic instruments, which aim to serve as the infrastructure for the entire system properly. Purpose. The article aims to identify the aspects of improving the system of financial and economic instruments within the ecological and economic mechanism as the infrastructure for sustainable agricultural land tenure implementation. Method (methodology). The method of analysis and synthesis, abstract and logical method, method of statistical analysis, graphic methods have been used in this research. Results. The development of environmental and economic mechanism of implementation of the strategy to ensure an acceptable level of agro ecological safety in Ukraine needs to study the system of economic instruments simultaneously perform infrastructure functions to achieve a balanced level of land use. The paper presents the scheme of ecological and economic mechanism of implementation strategies of land market regulation in Ukraine. According to this scheme it is made an attempt to separate the financial and economic instruments for motivation and encouragement of groups that perform infrastructure functions to ensure a balanced level of agricultural land. An important aspect of improving the ecological and economic mechanism for achieving an acceptable level of agro ecological safety in regions of any taxonomic level is the development and implementation of risk insurance instrument of agricultural land. It requires the development of theoretical and methodological aspects and improvement of the legislative field. Specifically, it is necessary to adopt the law "On Environmental Insurance". It has to consider the problems of sustainable use of agricultural land.

The history of human existence and civilizations are intertwined with forests and trees. Forests are crucial for the goods and services they provide, which people all over the world depend on. Strategies to enhance the contributions of the world’s forests to social development, livelihoods and poverty eradication are vital at a time when unsustainable practices and economic crises continue to threaten healthy forests and the people who depend upon them. The survival of tribal communities critically depends on land and forest resources. For historical and ecological reasons, most tribal people inhabit the forest and highly inaccessible regions of the state. These communities practise various customary land tenure systems, which have often been modified by state policies and legislation. The clan-based land tenure system was based on customary rights over land, trees and forest. The land use and tenure systems vary from tribe to tribe, as reflected in the practice and terraced cultivation. The relationship between tribal people and forest resources has been symbiotic in nature. The life-way processes of Odisha’s tribal people are reflected in their economy, religion, polity and social institutions, which cannot be understood without understanding various aspects of the forest surrounding them.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v2i2.12423 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-2, issue-2: 143-147

Socio-economic aspects and impact of land use change on sediment production dynamics in the northeastern region of India The northeastern region of India, with an area of 255 090 km2, is predominantly hilly. Major socio-economic factors affecting sediment production in the region are; shifting cultivation, land tenure system, fast growing population, small land-holdings, deforestation and free range grazing. A multi-disciplinary long-term study showed that 92.9 to 99.1% of rainwater can be retained in-situ, compared to 66.3% in shifting cultivation. Mean annual soil loss varied from 11.2 to 97.2 t km-2 in new land use systems as against 3621.3 t km-2 in shifting cultivation. The sediment load per litre of runoff from watersheds varied from 1250-20,300 mg suspended sediment, 5.4 to 23.6 mg NO3 - N, 2.3 to 6.5 mg P-PO4, 17.2 to 35.8 mg K2O, 0.4 to 1.8 mg Zn, 0.9 to 2.7 mg Mn, 6.5 to 12.0 mg Mg, 7.1 to 18.4 mg Fe and 4.0 to 7.2 mg SO4. The sediment transport from the catchments showed spatial and temporal variations.

Land use change generally involves transformation in allocating land resources from one to another use. The purpose of this study is (1) to identify the problem of conversion of agricultural land, especially paddy fields (2) to analyze spatial patterns and influencing factors, and (3) to analyze policies related to conversion of agricultural land. This study uses a qualitative approach, data collection using interview techniques, observation, and documentation. The data analysis technique used is qualitative descriptive. The study was conducted in Brebes Regency, Central Java. The conclusion of this study is 1) the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural use is strongly influenced by the dynamics of very rapid urban growth, both seen from demographic, economic and physical aspects. 2) The spatial pattern of conversion of paddy fields is influenced by socio-economic factors, including urban population growth, growth and shifts in economic structure, growth of land-use agricultural households and changes in land tenure. 3) The policy related to controlling the conversion of agricultural land is the consistency of the implementation of the RTRW as a key to preventing the conversion of agricultural land to non-agriculture.

Rubber production in Bulukumba Regency continues to increase the amount of production every year, to be precise in Bulukumpa District, Batulohe Village. But in fact, the life of rubber farmers is still very far from prosperous. The novelty of this research is to try to capture the livelihoods of rubber farmers from sociological and economic aspects. The purpose of this study was to determine the structure of land tenure, wage levels, education levels, access to information, and trade value chains in Batulohe Village, Bulukumpa District. This research was conducted in Batulohe Village, Bulukumpa District, Bulukumba Regency. This type of research is qualitative ethnographic in nature, this model seeks to study cultural events, which present the subject's view of life as an object of study. The data source of this research comes from direct interviews with rubber farmers. Data processing and data validation techniques used were source triangulation techniques to test the validity of the information obtained from informants. The results showed that there was no imbalance in land tenure structure because in fact the community already owned land. The level of wages given to farm laborers is not proportional because it does not follow the prevailing rubber price trend. The education level of farmers is still relatively low. Meanwhile, existing access to information is not transparent and unequal because it is monopolized by traders at both the village and city levels. Finally, the trade chain that occurs involves several actors, starting from farmers, village traders, urban traders to the processing industry, which tends not to benefit farmers. A big push intervention policy from the government is needed so that there will be a redistribution of fiscal allocations to the poor and an improvement in livelihoods and income. Keywords: Rubber Farmers, Social Economic; Welfare.

Coastal areas are particularly sensitive because they are complex, and related land use conflicts are more intense than those in noncoastal areas. In addition to representing a unique encounter of natural and socioeconomic factors, coastal areas have become paradigms of progressive urbanisation and economic development. Our study of the infrastructural mega project of Patimban Seaport in Indonesia explores the factors driving land use changes and the subsequent land use conflicts emerging from large-scale land transformation in the course of seaport development and mega project governance. We utilised interviews and questionnaires to investigate institutional aspects and conflict drivers. Specifically, we retrace and investigate the mechanisms guiding how mega project governance, land use planning, and actual land use interact. Therefore, we observe and analyse where land use conflicts emerge and the roles that a lack of stakeholder interest involvement and tenure-responsive planning take in this process. Our findings reflect how mismanagement and inadequate planning processes lead to market failure, land abandonment and dereliction and how they overburden local communities with the costs of mega projects. Enforcing a stronger coherence between land use planning, participation and land tenure within the land governance process in coastal land use development at all levels and raising the capacity of stakeholders to interfere with governance and planning processes will reduce conflicts and lead to sustainable coastal development in Indonesia.

Purpose. The aim of the article is determining the conditions of rational use of agricultural land conditions and substantiation of measures to optimize the distribution and rational use of agricultural land. Methodology of research. General scientific and special methods are used to achieve this goal: the dialectical method of scientific knowledge – to consider the essence of the rational use of land and its protection; synthesis – to clarify the relationship between the subjects of land relations; analysis – to assess the constituent elements of agricultural land; graphic – for visual display of the obtained results; abstract and logical method – for the formation of conclusions and research proposals. Findings. The state and rational use of land in the region and the state are studied. The structure of agricultural lands in Ivano-Frankivsk region and Ukraine is analysed. The main ecological and economic aspects of land tenure and land use in agriculture are described, including changes in land relations. The main reasons that caused the negative trends of rational use and protection of land in agriculture are identified. Measures have been developed for the rational use of land in the economic activity of land and its protection. Originality. Approaches to the interpretation of the concept of “rational use of land” are systematized and generalized. Measures on rational use of agricultural lands in economic activity are offered, namely: creation and realization of innovative scientific and technical programs in the field of rational use of lands and their protection; improving the regulatory framework in the field of land relations; development of a mechanism for financing programs; introduction of environmentally friendly ways of agricultural production, etc. Practical value. The expediency of studying and forming the conditions of rational use of agricultural lands is proved. The results of the study can be used by agricultural enterprises in conducting business activities. Key words: agricultural lands, rational use of lands, land protection, land tenure, land use, land fund, agricultural enterprises.

This article, focused on the Persian Gobryas, the head of Patischorian tribe and a member of the mysterious circle bringing Darius I (the Great) to the throne called the “Seven” by Herodotus, aims to argue that the concept of seven families was originally derived from the tribal structure of the Achaemenid society rather than from traditions found in classical writers. Mainly based on the administrative Elamite texts from Persepolis, the paper attempts to add contextual and practical detail to the classical narrative about the status of the “Seven” in the Achaemenid imperial system. This data leads us to the Fahliyān region in southwestern Persia as the house of the Patischorians and shows how Gobryas and his house were involved in the political, economic and administrative structures of the Persian Achaemenid Empire especially during the reign of Darius. The case also provides a valuable context for the study of various aspects of social organization particularly the land tenure.

Opening ParagraphIn the literature and accumulated folk wisdom of development in rural Africa there are numerous instances of government projects which are expensive, ineffective and unpopular. These include now classic failures of the past, such as the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme (Wood, 1950; Frankel, 1953), which are still cited as cautionary tales demonstrating the need for proper project appraisal. There are also numerous more recent examples, for the phenomenon of failure has persisted and governments and international agencies continue to implement schemes ‘little better planned than their more spectacularly misbegotten predecessors’ (Hill, 1978: 25). Among recent initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa the large-scale irrigation projects developed in northern Nigeria during the 1970s have attracted particularly extensive adverse criticism. This has focused on the social and economic impact of the introduction of irrigation and particularly on questions of land tenure (inter alia Wallace, 1979, 1980, 1981; Oculi, 1981; Adams, 1982, 1984; Palmer-Jones, 1984; Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Beckman, 1986). A number of accounts discuss technical aspects of the land survey carried out at Bakolori {Bird, 1981, 1984, 1985; Griffith, 1984), while others focus on economic problems (e.g. Etuk and Abalu, 1982). However, although economic and technical aspects of these developments have been criticised, it is the social impacts of project development and more particularly the political responses to those impacts which are of greatest interest (Wallace, 1980; Adams, 1984; Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Beckman, 1986). This paper examines the bature of the response of farmers affected by one of these schemes, the Bakolori Project in Sokoto State.

Neglect of land in rural and urban areas, in addition to being unwise, uneconomic, andunjust, is also a violation of the obligations that must be carried out by right-holders or parties whohave obtained land tenure. Juridical efforts by the government to curb neglected land, in the sense thatit has not been utilized in accordance with the nature and purpose of granting its rights, the Governmentissued Government Regulation No. 11 of 2010 concerning Control and Utilization of Abandoned Landenacted on January 22, 2010. The issue in this journal is 1) What are the arrangements and criteria forregulating abandoned land in Indonesia? 2) What are the inhibiting factors in controlling neglectedland in Indonesia and how to resolve them? The inhibiting factors for the demolition of neglected landare 1) Internal factors, namely the unclear working unit in charge and responsible for theimplementation of control and utilization of neglected land, the limited number of implementing staffand unclear funding for the implementation of these activities. 2) External include: 1) Juridical aspects,among others, the absence of legal provisions and legislation relating to the identification andassessment of neglected in various Central and Regional Government technical agencies and followupefforts with regulations for implementing control and utilization of negatively coordinated land. 2)Sociological aspects, including efforts to confirm the presence of abandoned land through theidentification and evaluation of the field in a coordinated manner involving the relevant agencies, theRegional Government and the local community. 3) Economic aspects, including the coordinated use ofabandoned land for those who need business development facilities in the form of technical assistance,business cooperation and financing.

AbstractEconomic recession often exacerbates the effects of poverty on agrarian communities in Nigeria. This paper examined the effects of economic recession on female farmers and coping strategies they employed. It explored the effects of the crisis on their income, farm size, livelihood and welfare aspects such as feeding, schooling of their children and health care. The study was conducted in Ondo State, Nigeria. Primary data were used. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to administer 100 copies of the questionnaires on females in rural agrarian households in the study area. The obtained data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Chi-square and Likert scale analysis. The findings showed that the economic recession resulted in poor health care, inadequate feeding, poor income and school dropouts. Major factors that helped the women to cope were land ownership security/access to land, introduction of new crops, marital status and educational status. These factors are crucial as their Chi-square values and Likelihood Ratios were significant at one percent probability level (P < 0.01). The research concludes that educated females as well as married women and women possessing secured land tenure coped better in times of economic crisis. The paper thus recommends increased investments by governments in the agricultural sector to help curtail the inflation in food prices and increasing women access to land and education.

This article investigates the political participation of urban poor through the People's Network of Urban Poor (Jaringan Rakyat Miskin Kota, JRMK) in Jakarta's 2017 gubernatorial election. It also traces the material aspects of this movement, particularly the issues emphasised by the movement: settlement rights, tenure rights, and livelihood rights. Settlement rights reflect a complex system of agrarian laws in Indonesia, and urban development plans in Jakarta, all of which have been shaped by the contestation of economic and political interests. Tenure and livelihood rights for the urban poor, are heavily steeped in history, with constant threat of forced eviction, As a result the three rights became increasingly tangible and movement became ever more urgent. This article argues that the materiality of social movements influences the urban poor movement political strategies. In this case, the movement created a "political contract" with the candidate who ultimately emerged victorious in the election; owing to the complexity of land and settlement issues, electoral politics offered the most promising strategy. However, movements with different types of 'materiality' could employ other approaches.

The relevance of our study is due to the recent trends of comprehensive consideration of issues related to the financial, economic and economic activities of Orthodox monasteries. In the conditions of the revival of monastic life in modern Russia these aspects of monastic work are of particular interest to researchers and allow us to draw some historical parallels, as well as to comprehend many related issues in this direction. The study was tasked with presenting a genera-lized summary analysis of the economic status of Orthodox male monasteries of the eparchy dur-ing the synodal period, as well as reviewing the main articles of income and expenditure of mone-tary amounts. The facts collected and systematized in this study are intended to reveal the specifics and peculiarities of ownership of the male monasteries with their lands. Land tenure and various economic objects were a powerful economic help in the conditions of the established division of monasteries into regular and non-standard types after the 1764 reform. As a result, from the second half of the 18th century, most of the cloisters were forced to seek new non-state sources of income. In the process of the gradual accumulation of the land fund over the next century, the role of economic possessions, which, as a rule, were leased and provided a solid and stable extrabudgetary income, both in regular and non-standard monasteries, increased.

Agrarian reform or Agrarian Reform as an issue, is complex and multidimensional which is a major program of the Indonesian state in realizing the welfare of the Indonesian people, especially in terms of increasing access of poor peasants to land tenure in Indonesia, but implementing agararial reform is not an easy thing, with many obstacles, both from the legal, land administration, social, political, cultural and security aspects. Agrarian Reform (Agrarian Reform) or land reform is one of the effective tools or ways to achieve successful development, because access to land is fundamental for socio-economic development, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability, apart from being a factor of production, land is also a factor of wealth, prestige and strength or power. In this perspective, land redistribution not only results in an increase in economic assets owned by poor farmers, but also an increase in political power and social participation, thus, the implementation of agrarian reform is not only aimed at reducing poverty and unemployment, but also in order to eliminate inequality, especially in political and social fields. The Land Redistribution Program in Papua Province itself, as the author sees its implementation, does not pay attention to regulations higher than Presidential Decree Number 86 of 2018.This is also reinforced by Article 18B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution which states that the state recognizes and respects customary law community units. along with their traditional rights as long as they are still alive and in accordance with the development of society and the principles of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. In addition, Article 3 of the UUPA does contain the term "ulayat rights and rights similar to that". Keywords: Inconsistency, Ulayat Land, Land Redistribution

The article covers the preconditions and features of the agrarian reform in Western Ukraine. The land question is characterized since it demanded quick actions of the government in the legislative field because of the war with Poland. In the article, the regulatory framework is investigated, which regulated the powers of the authority and administration in the agricultural sphere. Legislative resolution of the land issue for farmers would help to rebuild the destroyed farms, which would be extremely important for the future state. The purpose of the study is to justify the preconditions for land reform, its significance for the Galician peasantry, and the adoption of a legislative framework. The agrarian reform was in charge of the State Secretariat of Land Affairs, and its responsibilities included the preparation and control of land tenure reform. He was subordinated to the district referendums at the state county commissariats, who gradually grew into the land division. The methodological basis for scientific research is the principles of scientific cognition, historicism, and objectivity; both general scientific and special methods of cognition were used to study the main methodological principles and aspects of this theme. It is shown the content of the agrarian reform and its ethnopolitical direction, highlighted the role of the land management system in the economic development of the village, considered the policy of the leading Ukrainian parties concerning the agrarian question. Keywords West Ukrainian People’s Republic, agrarian reform, Ukrainian National Council, agricultural legislation.

The author revealed the injustices in the territories formation of the united territorial communities (UTC) under the local self-government reform, which are manifested in different, uneven volumes of their land use and the resource basis in general for local socio-economic development. The methodological approach used by the authorities in determining the capacity of united communities in their formation (in terms of compliance with the criteria – the area and the population density), led to the fact that in rural areas with low population density they had to form large UTCs to reach specific parameters by population. The hypothesis that territorially large UTCs are capable is ambiguous: on the one hand, land tenure and land use is a resource for socio-economic development of communities, on the other – in a large area the cost of providing essential services to the population in remote villages increases together with the administrative and other costs. Paper proves that large-scale rural UTCs should become objects of the state support as the “rural areas in unfavourable conditions” under the State Strategy for Regional Development for 2021–2027. The author justifies injustices in the centralization of powers on disposal of land resources. The land decentralization as a transfer of relevant powers to UTC local governments will be finally completed, according to the Decree of the President of Ukraine “On some measures to accelerate reforms in the field of land relations” № 449 from 15.10.2020, which will contribute to orderliness in this area and filling local budgets. It is also advisable within the UTCs to give internal communities the right to dispose of their economic territory’s land resources in these communities’ interests. The paper shows discriminatory aspects of administrative reformatting of 120 voluntarily formed and functioning UTCs, according to the Government’s long-term plans for 2020: by recognizing them as insufficiently capable, they should join other communities or unite into larger UTCs.

The ecological migration project in the Xihaigu Area of Ningxia, the first of such projects to be initiated with the longest history, is a typical example of China&#39;s ecological migration projects. Through the methods of field investigation, in-depth interviews, and examination of typical cases, the paper aims to evaluate Xihaigu&#39;s ecological migration project in the aspects of ecological restoration, poverty alleviation, income increase and social development. The conclusion is that China&#39;s ecological immigrants represented by Xihaigu&#39;s example have reached ecological improvement goals and economic and social development. At the same time, due to the government&#39;s vigorous promotion of this process, the fairness of the distribution of benefits for migrants in the earlier and later stages is slightly unbalanced, and the ecological protection awareness of the immigrants was always insufficient. The later process of immigration was relatively too fast, and ecological migration still faces further challenges.

This paper reviews Ethiopia’s experience and research progress in past soil and water conservation (SWC) efforts and suggests possible solutions for improvement. Although indigenous SWC techniques date back to 400 BC, institutionalized SWC activity in Ethiopia became significant only after the 1970s. At least six national SWC-related programs have been initiated since the 1970s and their focus over time has shifted from food relief to land conservation and then to livelihoods. The overall current soil erosion rates are highly variable and large by international standards, and sheet, rill, and gully erosion are the dominant processes. The influence of human activities on the landscape has traditionally been deleterious, but this trend seems to have recently reversed in some parts of the country following the engagement of the communities in land management. The efficiency of SWC measures show mixed results that are influenced by the type of measures and the agro-ecology under which they were implemented; in general, the relative performance of the interventions is better in the drylands as compared with humid areas. Methodological limitations also occur when addressing the economic aspects related to benefits of ecosystem services and other externalities. Although farmers have shown an increased understanding of the soil erosion problem, SWC efforts face a host of barriers related to limited access to capital, limited benefits, land tenure insecurity, limited technology choices and technical support, and poor community participation. In general SWC research in Ethiopia is fragmented and not comprehensive, mainly because of a lack of participatory research, field observations, and adoptable methods to evaluate impacts. A potentially feasible approach to expand and sustain SWC programs is to attract benefits from global carbon markets. Moreover, a dedicated institution responsible for overseeing the research–extension linkage of SWC interventions of the country should be established.

The pattern of residential mobility varies throughout the world. Slum populations consistently report higher rates of residential mobility than other populations. However, the pattern and the consequences of residential mobility of the slum dwellers are not well studied. Dhaka, the Capital of Bangladesh, has a large population, more than 14 million of which about 1.06 million live in slums with an increase of 60.73 percent in the last 17 years. The objectives of this study are: (1) to identify the significant factors of residential mobility of slum dwellers; and (2) to examine the patterns of residential mobility of slum dwellers in three slums area located in Dhaka. This study further analyzed the impacts of residential mobility on the socio-economic aspect of the slum dwellers. For this research purpose, 267 households from three slums of Dhaka namely Kallyanpur slum, Agargaon slum, and Karwan Bazar railgate slum were selected through non-probability convenience sampling and interviewed. This study found that residential mobility was influenced by factors which are related to life cycle; employment, income and distress; land tenure and homeownership; neighbourhood condition and grouping issues. Among all the studied variables the most five significant factors influencing residential mobility are slum eviction, unavailability of utility services, marriage, changing job and getting homeownership status. It is revealed that the nature of the residential mobility for the surveyed slum dwellers is mainly negative and it poses a significant impact on the socio-economic aspects of life. The findings of the study pave the way to recommend specific measures for the slum dwellers to improve their condition by lessening the negative impacts of residential mobility.

The term, Working Knowledge, is introduced to describe the content of a local cross-cultural knowledge recovery and integration project focussed on the indigenous-owned Oriners pastoral lease near Kowanyama on the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. Social and biophysical scientific researchers collaborated with indigenous people, non-indigenous pastoralists, and an indigenous natural resource management (NRM) agency to record key ecological, hydrological and geomorphological features of this intermittently occupied and environmentally valuable ‘flooded forest’ country. Working Knowledge was developed in preference to ‘local’ and/or ‘indigenous’ knowledge because it collectively describes the contexts in which the knowledge was obtained (through pastoral, indigenous, NRM, and scientific labour), the diverse backgrounds of the project participants, the provisional and utilitarian quality of the collated knowledge, and the focus on aiding adaptive management. Key examples and epistemological themes emerging from the knowledge recovery research, as well as preliminary integrative models of important hydro-ecological processes, are presented. Changing land tenure and economic regimes on surrounding cattle stations make this study regionally significant but the Working Knowledge concept is also useful in analysing the knowledge base used by the wider contemporary indigenous land management sector. Employees in this expanding, largely externally funded, and increasingly formalised sector draw on a range of knowledge in making operational decisions – indigenous, scientific, NRM, bureaucratic and knowledge learned in pastoral and other enterprises. Although this shared base is often a source of strength, important aspects or precepts of particular component knowledges must necessarily be deprioritised, compromised, or even elided in everyday NRM operations constrained by particular management logics, priorities and funding sources. Working Knowledge accurately characterised a local case study, but also invites further analysis of the contemporary indigenous NRM knowledge base and its relationship to the individual precepts and requirements of the indigenous, scientific, local and other knowledges which respectively inform it.

Apart from having a socio-economic dimension, agrarian conflicts in Bongkoran, Banyuwangi Regency, East Java Province, Indonesia, also have a legal dimension. There is a dualism of law that is conflictual in terms of land tenure and use claims. One party, the government, and corporations rely on legalistic-positivistic state laws, while local people rely on folk law, namely informal laws that have existed, lived, and developed in communal society for generations. This research focuses on how the sociological perspective of law analyzes the legal conflicts that occur in Bongkoran agrarian conflict, particularly between state law and folk law. This research used a qualitative method with a legal sociology perspective. The research subjects were farmers/people of Bongkoran, Community Legal Advisors (CLA), Government (Local Government, National Land Agency, and Police), and corporate elements (PT Wongsorejo). Informants were selected using a purposive sampling technique, based on certain considerations that can be recognized beforehand, namely recognizing and understanding the problem under this research. Data collection was conducted through observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation. The collected data were analyzed qualitatively by referring to the perspectives that have been presented. The results indicated that the resolution of agrarian conflicts in Bongkoran requires the implementation of laws that are more just for local communities. The implementation of the laws is not only based on rigid articles in the law, but it needs attention to the socio-cultural and historical context of the community. The dominance of state law over folk law in agrarian conflicts results in the practice of subjugation of state law to folk law, both persuasively and repressively. Therefore, to minimize the tension and conflict between state law and folk law in agrarian conflicts, it is necessary to have a new understanding of the relationship between the two laws. The existence and enforcement of folk law are used as a complementary element in normative aspects that have not been regulated in state law.

PurposeThe Government of South Africa, in 1997, embarked on the land redistribution programme in some communities to address the land ownership injustices suffered by indigenous during the apartheid regime. The objective of this study is to assess the socio-economic experiences of communities that have benefitted from the government's land redistribution programme in the Greater Kokstad Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a qualitative research methodology. The population of interest comprised two communities (Franklin and Makhoba) located within the Greater Kokstad Municipality. A purposefully selected sampling technique was used to select the relevant land beneficiaries to form part of the study's sample. An interview guide made up of both closed-ended and open-ended questions was used to solicit information from the participants.FindingsThe findings revealed that the key social-economic variables, such as the living standards of the beneficiaries, have not yet experienced much improvement. Moreover, it became evident that some socio-economic aspects such as food security, low-cost housing, basic services, wealth (land), transport, infrastructure and training had improved somewhat; although other similar aspects such as total household incomes, unemployment, general community safety and corruption had not improved.Practical implicationsIt can, therefore, be concluded that all socio-economic aspects of beneficiaries' lives had not improved/changed entirely; thus, the experiences of the land redistribution beneficiaries of the Greater Kokstad Municipality represent a mixed bag of major failures and minor successes. The study recommends some policy improvement on the land redistribution programme such as an increase in the combined budgets of the land redistribution and tenure reform programmes and the revision of the proceeds paid to landowners from market value to production value, which if adopted by the government, will help address the deficiencies in socio-economic benefit of the programme to the beneficiaries in the communities.Originality/valueThe findings give an insight into the effectiveness of the government's land redistribution programme to the beneficiaries' socio-economic lives and areas where the government needs to improve to make the project a success. The paper also adds to the literature in terms of knowledge and may serve as a reference for future studies in this area.

Sociedades del conocimiento como motor generador de tecnología e innovación agrícola en el Ecuador Knowledge societies as generator of agricultural technology and innovation in Ecuador Carmen Mayorga Villamar1 y Rogelio Suarez Mella2 1 Universidad Autónoma de Los Andes extensión Babahoyo, Babahoyo: Av. Jorge Villegas y tercera transversal 2 Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial, Quito: Campus Matriz- Quito.Bourgeois N34-102 y Rumipamba DOI: https://doi.org/10.33017/RevECIPeru2015.0016/ Resumen El presente estudio, tiene como propósito, el análisis del aporte que producen las sociedades del conocimiento como motor generador de tecnologías e innovaciones en el sector agrícola en la República del Ecuador. Este aporte origina evoluciones en red, en el marco agrícola empresarial e individual, a través del diseño de nuevos procesos productivos y de gestión en la calidad de sus procesos, así como el rediseño de los procesos ya utilizados, que se involucran de carácter social y económico en el contexto de la agricultura ecuatoriana. Basándose en proposiciones, que las sociedades de conocimiento de alto impacto científico agrícola, contribuyen en la mejora del sector agrícola a través de la creación de nuevas tecnologías e innovaciones con características propias del sistema agrario ecuatoriano, dando el despliegue a un marco de crecimiento económico social y cultural del país ecuatoriano. Hay que determinar el término de “sociedades del conocimiento”, en uso de esta investigación, considerándolo como factor del cambio social en la expansión de la educación, y de las competencias específicas de los empleados, que se proyecta con una visión de esfuerzos educativos y formativos. Anteriormente en el Ecuador, quienes invertían en sociedades de conocimiento como fuente de investigación científica, para el proceso agrícola, eran las empresas privadas, mientras que el sector público realizaba mejoras para el sector agrícola, pero de bajo impacto, debido al alto gasto que genera los programas de desarrollo agrícola para un país, con eficiencia, control y seguimiento de los mismos. Y de los cuales pocos eran los beneficiarios, ya que los programas llegan a los grandes y medianos productores que son los propietarios de la mayor cantidad de tierra productiva en el país, dejando vulnerable a los pequeños agricultores. Esto ha provocado que durante estos últimos años, los resultados obtenidos como contribución del desarrollo rural no hayan sido suficientes, evidenciando alto índice de pobreza y un decreciente desarrollo endógenos en los sectores agrícolas, ya que los efectos generados no han sido útiles para el campesino, productores empresariales, procesadores, comercializadores y exportadores agrícolas. Los métodos y técnicas empleadas en el presente trabajo científico, son de nivel teórico del conocimiento, tales como : histórico-lógico, inductivo-deductivo, análisis-síntesis para realizar un análisis de las sociedades del conocimiento generadoras de tecnologías e innovación en el sector agrícola ecuatoriano; entre los métodos del nivel empírico del conocimiento: la observación científica para estudiar las características fundamentales del sector agrícola y la contribución de las sociedades de conocimiento. Las técnicas a utilizar son técnicas documentales informativas y argumentativa de campo. Se puede concluir que esta investigación servirá para que las sociedades de conocimiento a través de la creación de tecnologías e innovación agrícola eleven el grado de desarrollo en las producciones, sino que contribuyan en el desarrollo industrial, para que Ecuador se introduzca en la competencia del mercado interno y externo, apuntalándose a un creciente desarrollo económico y social. Descriptores: sociedades del conocimiento, tecnología, innovación, I+D Abstract The present study aims to analyze the contribution that produces knowledge societies as generator of technologies and innovations in the agricultural sector of the Republic of Ecuador. This contribution originates network evolutions in corporate and individual agricultural framework, through the design of new production processes and quality management processes and redesigning processes already used, which involve social and economic aspects in the context of ecuadorian agriculture. Based on propositions that knowledge societies of high scientific agricultural impact, contribute to improve the agricultural sector through the creation of new technologies and innovations directed to the ecuadorian agricultural system characteristics allowing a social, economic and growth in Ecuador. We must determine the term of "knowledge societies", in used in this research, considering it as a factor of social change in the expansion of education, and specific skills of employees, projecting a vision of educational efforts and training. Earlier in Ecuador, institutions that invested in knowledge societies as a source of scientific research to the agricultural process were private companies, while the public sector performing agricultural improvement, but low impact, due to the high cost that generates agricultural development programs for a country with efficiency, control and monitor. The beneficiaries of those programs reach the large and medium producers who are the owners of the most productive land in the country, leaving you vulnerable to small farmers. This has meant that in recent years , the results as a contribution to rural development have not been sufficient , showing high levels of poverty and decreasing endogenous development in the agricultural sectors , because the generated effects have not been useful for the farmer , corporate producers , processors, traders and agricultural exporters. The methods and techniques used in this scientific work are of theoretical knowledge, such as historical and logical, inductive-deductive, analysis-synthesis for analysis of knowledge societies generating technologies and innovation in the agricultural sector Ecuador, between the empirical methods of knowledge: scientific observation to study the fundamental characteristics of the agricultural sector and the contribution of knowledge societies. The techniques used are informative and argumentative documentary techniques of field. We conclude that this research will serve to knowledge societies through the creation of agricultural innovation technologies and raise the level of development in the productions, but contribute to industrial development, that Ecuador is introduced in market competition internal and external bracing a growing economic and social development. Keywords: knowledge societies, technology, innovation, R&D.

Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Authority. “Noel Pearson Discusses the Issues Faced by Indigenous Communities.” Lateline 26 June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1962844.htm>. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Altman, Jon. “The ‘National Emergency’ and Land Rights Reform: Separating Fact from Fiction.” A Briefing Paper for Oxfam Australia, 2007. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.oxfam.org.au/resources/filestore/originals/OAus-EmergencyLandRights-0807.pdf>. Altman, Jon. “The Howard Government’s Northern Territory Intervention: Are Neo-Paternalism and Indigenous Development Compatible?” Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Topical Issue 16 (2007). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://caepr.anu.edu.au/system/files/Publications/topical/Altman_AIATSIS.pdf>. Brown, Bob. “Senator Bob Brown National Pre-Election Press Club Address.” 2010. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://greens.org.au/content/senator-bob-brown-pre-election-national-press-club-address>. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Ed. J. James, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Dodson, Patrick. “An Entire Culture Is at Stake.” Opinion. The Age, 14 July 2007: 4. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002.———. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Neoliberalism. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2008. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1709-1795. Keane, John. “Maralinga’s Afterlife.” Feature Article. The Age, 11 May 2003. 24 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/11/1052280486255.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Nuclear Dawn.” The Monthly 56 (May 2010). Lambert, Anthony. “Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia.” M/C Journal 13.6 (2010). Langton, Marcia. “It’s Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable Lives.” Opinion. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Nov. 2007: 2. McAllan, Fiona. “Customary Appropriations.” borderlands ejournal 6.3 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/mcallan_appropriations.htm>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004). 1 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 75-89. Norberry, J., and J. Gardiner-Garden. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006. Australian Parliamentary Library Bills Digest 158 (19 June 2006). Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 75-97.Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Rio Tinto. "Rio Tinto Aboriginal Policy and Programme Briefing Note." June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.aboriginalfund.riotinto.com/common/pdf/Aboriginal%20Policy%20and%20Programs%20-%20June%202007.pdf>. Roberts, David J., and Mielle Mahtami. “Neoliberalising Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing 'Race' in Neoliberal Discourses.” Antipode 42.2 (2010): 248-257. Stringer, Rebecca. “A Nightmare of the Neocolonial Kind: Politics of Suffering in Howard's Northern Territory Intervention.” borderlands ejournal 6.2 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention.htm>.Stokes, Dianne. "Muckaty." n.d. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.timbonham.com/slideshows/Muckaty/>. Terrill, Leon. “Indigenous Land Reform: What Is the Real Aim of Land Reform?” Edited version of a presentation provided at the 2010 National Native Title Conference, 2010. 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Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. 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Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. 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Image 1: View from Geodha Sgoilt towards the sea stacks, Uig, Isle of Lewis. Image credit: George Jaramillo.IntroductionOver the cliffs of Mangerstadh on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, is a small plot of land called Geodha Sgoilt that overlooks the North Atlantic Ocean (Image 1). On the site is a small dirt gravel road and the remnants of a World War II listening station. Below, sea stacks rise from the waters, orange and green cliff sides stand in defiance to the crashing waves. An older gentleman began to tell me of what he believed could be located here on the site. A place where visitors could learn of the wonders of St Kilda that contained all types of new storytelling technologies to inspire them. He pointed above the ruined buildings, mentioning that a new road for the visitors’ vehicles and coaches would be built. With his explanations, you could almost imagine such a place on these cliffs. Yet, before that new idea could even be built, this gentleman and his group of locals and incomers had to convince themselves and others that this new heritage centre was something desired, necessary and inevitable in the development of the Western Isles.This article explores the developing relationships that come about through design innovation with community organisations. This was done through a partnership between an academic institution and a non-profit heritage community group as part of growing study in how higher education design research can play an active partner in community group development. It argues for the use of design thinking and innovation in improving strategy and organisational processes within non-profit organisations. In this case, it looks at what role it can play in building and enabling organisational confidence in its mission, as well as, building “beyond the museum”. The new approach to this unique relationship casts new light towards working with complexities and strategies rather than trying to resolve issues from the outset of a project. These enabling relationships are divided into three sections of this paper: First it explores the context of the island community group and “building” heritage, followed by a brief history of St Kilda and its current status, and designation as a World Heritage site. Second, it seeks the value of developing strategy and the introduction of the Institute of Design Innovation (INDI). This is followed by a discussion of the six-month relationship and work that was done that elucidates various methods used and ending with its outcomes. The third section reflects upon the impacts at the relationship building between the two groups with some final thoughts on the partnership, where it can lead, and how this can represent new ways of working together within community groups. Building HeritageCurrent community research in Scotland has shown struggles in understanding issues within community capability and development (Barker 11; Cave 20; Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 23) though most focus on the land tenure and energy (McMorran 21) and not heritage groups. The need to maintain “resilient” (Steiner 17) communities has shown that economic resilience is of primary importance for these rural communities. Heritage as economic regenerator has had a long history in the United Kingdom. Some of these like the regeneration of Wirksworth in the Peak District (Gordon 20) have had great economic results with populations growing, as well as, development in the arts and design. These changes, though positive, have also adversely impacted the local community by estranging and forcing lower income townspeople to move away due to higher property values and lack of work. Furthermore, current trends in heritage tourism have managed to turn many rural regions into places of historic consumption (Ronström 7) termed “heritagisation” (Edensor 35). There is thus a need for critical reflection within a variety of heritage organisations with the increase in heritage tourism.In particular, existing island heritage organisations face a variety of issues that they focus too much on the artefactual or are too focused to strive for anything beyond the remit of their particular heritage (Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 33; Ronström 4). Though many factors including funding, space, volunteerism and community capability affect the way these groups function they have commonalities that include organisational methods, volunteer fatigue, and limited interest from community groups. It is within this context that the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Currently, projects within the Highlands and islands focus on particular “grassroots” development (Cave 26; Robertson 994) searching for innovative ways to attract, maintain, and sustain healthy levels of heritage and development—one such group is Ionad Hiort. Ionad Hiort Ionad Hiort is a community non-profit organisation founded in 2010 to assist in the development of a new type of heritage centre in the community of Uig on the Isle of Lewis (“Proposal-Ionad Hiort”). As stated in their website, the group strives to develop a centre on the history and contemporary views of St Kilda, as well as, encouraging a much-needed year-round economic impetus for the region. The development of the group and the idea of a heritage centre came about through the creation of the St Kilda Opera, a £1.5 million, five-country project held in 2007, led by Scotland’s Gaelic Arts agency, Proiseact nan Ealan (Mckenzie). This opera, inspired by the cliffs, people, and history of St Kilda used creative techniques to unite five countries in a live performance with cliff aerobatics and Gaelic singing to present the island narrative. From this initial interest, a commission from the Western Isles council (2010), developed by suggestions and commentary from earlier reports (Jura Report 2009; Rebanks 2009) encouraged a fiercely contentious competition, which saw Ionad Hiort receive the right to develop a remote-access heritage centre about the St Kilda archipelago (Maclean). In 2013, the group received a plot of land from the local laird for the establishment of the centre (Urquhart) thereby bringing it closer to its goal of a heritage centre, but before moving onto this notion of remote-heritage, a brief history is needed on the archipelago. Image 2: Location map of Mangerstadh on the Isle of Lewis and St Kilda to the west, with inset of Scotland. Image credit: © Crown Copyright and Database Right (2017). Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).St KildaSt Kilda is an archipelago about 80 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic (Image 2). Over 2000 years of habitation show an entanglement between humans and nature including harsh weather, limited resources, but a tenacity and growth to develop a way of living upon a small section of land in the middle of the Atlantic. St Kilda has maintained a tenuous relationship between the sea, the cliffs and the people who have lived within its territory (Geddes, and Gannon 18). Over a period of three centuries beginning in the eighteenth century an outside influence on the island begin to play a major role, with the loss of a large portion of its small (180) population. This population would later decrease to 100 and finally to 34 in 1930, when it was decided to evacuate the final members of the village in what could best be called a forced eviction.Since the evacuation, the island has maintained an important military presence as a listening station during the Second World War and in its modern form a radar station as part of the Hebridean Artillery (Rocket) Range (Geddes 14). The islands in the last thirty years have seen an increase in tourism with the ownership of the island by the National Trust of Scotland. The UNESCO World Heritage Organisation (UNESCO), who designated St Kilda in 1986 and 2004 as having outstanding universal value, has seen its role evolve from not just protecting (or conserving) world heritage sites, but to strategically understand sustainable tourism of its sites (“St Kilda”). In 2012, UNESCO selected St Kilda as a case study for remote access heritage conservation and interpretation (Hebrides News Today; UNESCO 15). This was partly due to the efforts of 3D laser scanning of the islands by a collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland called the Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation (CDDV) in 2009.The idea of a remote access heritage is an important aspect as to what Ionad Hiort could do with creating a centre at their site away from St Kilda. Remote access heritage is useful in allowing for sites and monuments to be conserved and monitored “from afar”. It allows for 3D visualisations of sites and provides new creative engagements with a variety of different places (Remondino, and Rizzi 86), however, Ionad Hiort was not yet at a point to even imagine how to use the remote access technology. They first needed a strategy and direction, as after many years of moving towards recognition of proposing the centre at their site in Uig, they had lost a bit of that initial drive. This is where INDI was asked to assist by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the regional development organisation for most of rural Scotland. Building ConfidenceINDI is a research institute at The Glasgow School of Art. It is a distributed, creative collective of researchers, lecturers and students specialising in design innovation, where design innovation means enabling creative capabilities within communities, groups and individuals. Together, they address complex issues through new design practices and bespoke community engagement to co-produce “preferable futures” (Henchley 25). Preferable futures are a type of future casting that seeks to strive not just for the probable or possible future of a place or idea, but for the most preferred and collectively reached option for a society (McAra-McWilliam 9). INDI researches the design processes that are needed to co-create contexts in which people can flourish: at work, in organisations and businesses, as well as, in public services and government. The task of innovation as an interactive process is an example of the design process. Innovation is defined as “a co-creation process within social and technological networks in which actors integrate their resources to create mutual value” (Russo‐Spena, and Mele 528). Therefore, innovation works outside of standard consultancy practices; rather it engenders a sense of mutual co-created practices that strive to resolve particular problems. Examples include the work that has looked at creating cultures of innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (Lockwood 4) where the design process was used to alter organisational support (Image 3). These enterprises tend to emulate larger firms and corporations and though useful in places where economies of scale are present, smaller business need adaptable, resilient and integrated networks of innovation within their organisational models. In this way, innovation functioned as a catalyst for altering the existing organisational methods. These innovations are thus a useful alternative to existing means of approaching problems and building resilience within any organisation. Therefore, these ideas of innovation could be transferred and play a role in enabling new ways of approaching non-profit organisational structures, particularly those within heritage. Image 3: Design Council Double Diamond model of the design process. Image credit: Lockwood.Developing the WorkIonad Hiort with INDI’s assistance has worked together to develop a heritage centre that tries to towards a new definition of heritage and identity through this island centre. Much of this work has been done through local community investigations revolving around workshops and one-on-one talks where narratives and ideas are held in “negative capability” (McAra-McWilliam 2) to seek many alternatives that would be able to work for the community. The initial aims of the partnership were to assist the Uig community realise the potential of the St Kilda Centre. Primarily, it would assist in enabling the capabilities of two themes. The first would be, strategy, for Ionad Hiort’s existing multi-page mission brief. The second would be storytelling the narrative of St Kilda as a complex and entangled, however, its common views are limited to the ‘fall from grace’ or ‘noble savage’ story (Macdonald 168). Over the course of six months, the relationship involved two workshops and three site visits of varying degrees of interaction. An initial gathering had InDI staff meet members of Ionad Hiort to introduce members to each other. Afterwards, INDI ran two workshops over two months in Uig to understand, reflect and challenge Ionad Hiort’s focus on what the group desired. The first workshop focused on the group’s strategy statement. In a relaxed and facilitated space in the Uig Community Hall, the groups used pens, markers, and self-adhesive notes to engage in an open dialogue about the group’s desires. This session included reflecting on what their heritage centre could look like, as well as what their strategy needed to get there. These resulted in a series of drawings of their ‘preferred’ centre, with some ideas showing a centre sitting over the edge of the cliffs or one that had the centre be an integral component of the community. In discussing that session, one of members of the group recalled:I remember his [one of INDI’s staff] interrogation of the project was actually pretty – initially – fairly brutal, right? The first formal session we had talking about strategy and so on. To the extent that I think it would be fair to say he pissed everybody off, right? So much so that he actually prompted us to come back with some fairly hard hitting ripostes, which, after a moment’s silence he then said, ‘That’s it, you’ve convinced me’, and at that point we kind of realised that that’s what he’d been trying to do; he’d been trying to really push us to go further in our articulation of what we were doing and … why we were doing it in this particular way than we had done before. (Participant A, 2016).The group through this session found out that their strategy could be refined into a short mission statement giving a clear focus as to what they wanted and how they wanted to go about doing it. In the end, drawings, charts, stories (Image 4) were drawn to reflect on what the community had discussed. These artefacts became a key role-player in the following months of the development of the group. Image 4: View of group working through their strategy workshop session. Image credit: Fergus Fullarton-Pegg (2014). The second set of workshops and visits involved informal discussion with individual members of the group and community. This included a visit to St Kilda with members from INDI, Ionad Hiort and the Digital Design Studio, which allowed for everyone to understand the immensity of the project and its significance to World Heritage values. The initial aims thus evolved into understanding the context of self-governance for distributed communities and how to develop the infrastructure of development. As discussed earlier, existing development processes are useful, though limited to only particular types of projects, and as exemplified in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Western Isles Council commission, it tends to put communities against each other for limited pots of money. This existing system can be innovated upon by becoming creative liaisons, sharing and co-creating from existing studies to help develop more effective processes for the future of Ionad Hiort and their ‘preferable future’. Building RelationshipsWhat the relationship with GSA has done, as a dialogue with the team of people that have been involved, has been to consolidate and clarify our own thinking and to get us to question our own thinking across several different aspects of the whole project. (Participant A, 2016)As the quote states, the main notion of using design thinking has allowed Ionad Hiort to question their thinking and challenge preconceptions of what a “heritage centre” is, by being a critical sounding board that is different from what is provided by consultants and other stakeholders. Prior to meeting INDI, Ionad Hiort may have been able to reach their goal of a strategy, however, it would have taken a few more years. The work, which involved structured and unstructured workshops, meetings, planning events, and gatherings, gave them a structured focus to move ahead with their prospectus planning and bidding. INDI enabled the compression and focus of their strategy making and mission strategy statement over the course of six months into a one-page statement that gave direction to the group and provided the impetus for the development of the prospectus briefs. Furthermore, INDI contributed a sense of contemporary content to the historic story, as well as, enable the community to see that this centre would not just become another gallery with café. The most important outcome has been an effective measure in building relationships in the Outer Hebrides, which shows the changing roles between academic and third sector partnerships. Two key points can be deemed from these developing relationships: The first has been to build a research infrastructure in and across the region that engages with local communities about working with the GSA, including groups in North Uist, Barra and South Uist. Of note is a comment made by one of the participants saying: “It’s exciting now, there’s a buzz about it and getting you [INDI] involved, adding a dimension—we’ve got people who have got an artistic bent here but I think your enthusiasm, your skills, very much complement what we’ve got here.” (Participant B, 2016). Second, the academic/non-profit partnership has encouraged younger people to work and study in the area through a developing programme of student research activity. This includes placing taught masters students with local community members on the South Uist, as well as, PhD research being done on Stornoway. These two outcomes then have given rise to interest in not only how heritage is re-developed in a community, but also, encourages future interest, by staff and students to continue the debate and fashion further developments in the region (GSAmediacentre). Today, the cliffs of Mangerstadh continue to receive the pounding of waves, the blowing wind and the ever-present rain on its rocky granite surface. The iterative stages of work that the two groups have done showcase the way that simple actions can carve, change and evolve into innovative outcomes. The research outcomes show that through this new approach to working with communities we move beyond the consultant and towards an ability of generating a preferable future for the community. In this way, the work that has been created together showcases a case study for further island community development. 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