Peter Oosterveer

Conclusion and Discussion

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Chinese government started to introduce a series of policies explicitly aimed at farmers’ rural–urban migration. This research has sought to examine how migrant workers cope with problems under policy intervention. These different strategies are categorized into a typology of “coping” which includes administrative coping, political coping, and social coping, as well as the main corresponding coping resources: government policy, power of civil groups, and social networks, respectively. Empirical data show making a claim under migration policies is not commonly found among migrant workers, in other words, administrative coping is not widely adopted by migrant workers. Instead, social coping is the most adopted one by migrant workers; meanwhile, political coping is an emerging coping strategy in Chinese society. Therefore, there is still a long way to go and much to do in order to ensure migrant workers benefit from migration polices in China.

Certify Sustainable Aquaculture

Certifications limited contribution to sustainable aquaculture should complement public and private governance. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic organisms, provides close to 50% of the worlds supply of seafood, with a value of U.S.

Civil society participation in urban sanitation and solid waste management in Uganda

125 billion. It makes up 13% of the worlds animal-source protein (excluding eggs and dairy) and employs an estimated 24 million people (1). With capture (i.e., wild) fisheries production stagnating, aquaculture may help close the forecast global deficit in fish protein by 2020 (2). This so-called “blue revolution” requires addressing a range of environmental and social problems, including water pollution, degradation of ecosystems, and violation of labor standards.

Market governance for safe food in developing countries: The case of low-pesticide vegetables in Vietnam

The inability of local governments to provide basic environmental services in African urban centres often results in the involvement of other actors in urban sanitation and solid waste provisioning, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations (CBOs) and private companies. Although NGOs and CBOs are becoming increasingly engaged in urban service provisioning, little systematic knowledge exists on the kind of activities they take up and the results of these activities. This paper reviews the role of NGOs and CBOs in sanitation and solid waste management in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Against the background of a modernised mixtures perspective and the partnership paradigm, an assessment is made of NGOs and CBOs in provisioning these environmental services. Data were gathered through a survey, face-to-face interviews, and the use of scientific literature, official reports and informal documents. Over 40 NGOs and CBOs were found to be actively involved – often in partnership – in the implementation and development of sanitation and solid waste activities. Their results are, however, seriously hampered by financial, policy and political challenges in implementing successful sanitation and solid waste collection projects.

Reinventing risk politics: reflexive modernity and the European BSE crisis

In many developed countries private arrangements have emerged in food governance. Following limited successes of state regulation, market actors and mechanisms are increasingly included in the environmental and safety governance of domestic and global food chains and networks. But do such private governance arrangements also work in domestic markets in developing countries? Pesticide use in vegetable supply is taken as a case to explore the role of market actors and dynamics in food safety governance in Vietnam. The so-called safe vegetable production system in the Red River Delta, introduced 10 years ago as a domestic alternative to conventional vegetable production, is analyzed through detailed monitoring of farmers, surveys of retailers and consumers, and in-depth interviews with state officials and vegetable traders. The paper finds limited success of this low-pesticide vegetable production, distribution and consumption system. This private arrangement in food governance lacked trust from market actors (especially consumers), and was short of an active state that organized transparency and got market actors involved. As such, market governance in food safety needs to be strong.

Organising consumer involvement in the greening of global food flows: the role of environmental NGOs in the case of marine fish

The recent BSE crisis in Europe is an example of a new kind of risk in late-modern society. Conventional risk politics are no longer considered suitable for such new risks, leading to a new kind of risk politics. In answering the question whether a new kind of risk politics is developing and what this looks like, this contribution studies how several countries of Western Europe (the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany) as well as the EU dealt with the BSE crisis. Copyright

Meeting Social Challenges in Developing Sustainable Environmental Infrastructures in East African Cities

Consumers are increasingly concerned about the impacts of global food provision, but especially in the case of marine fish, their unease is complex, locally specific and still evolving. Responding to these apprehensions solely by promoting short local supply chains is restricted to niche markets and leaves other opportunities for increasing sustainability untouched. Additional, complementary strategies for the greening of food supply chains are examined. To analyse the interaction between local and global dynamics, the sociology of networks and flows is applied to the case of marine fish production and consumption in order to identify innovative governance arrangements that make global supply chains more sustainable. Certifying fisheries and the use of fish wallet cards by consumers are examples of new governance arrangements that connect sustainability concerns of consumers with production decisions made by distant actors. To improve the effectiveness of these arrangements, new roles are proposed for environmental NGOs as representatives of local actors and as managers of trust in certifying institutions.

Towards a global environmental sociology? Legacies, trends and future directions:

The slum population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow from 101 million in 1990 to 313 million in 2015. Modernizing sanitation therefore has to adapt to the context of cities with high densities of poor people under the conditions of absent or fragmented environmental infrastructures and services. Addressing this problem requires an integrated approach that deviates both from the Western large-scale, high-technological, and grid-based systems, as well as from the small-scale, low-tech, decentralized alternative options. A Modernized Mixtures approach should be developed that combines the strong elements from these opposing alternatives. This chapter presents the Modernized Mixtures approach and its contribution to sustainability. It discusses the contribution this approach can make to improving accessibility of urban infrastructures for the poor, while strengthening flexibility and resilience. It is argued that the successful introduction of a Modernized Mixtures approach to urban environmental infrastructures in East African cities requires the careful consideration of social and political factors next to technological innovation.

Social Perspectives on the Sanitation Challenge

A current debate on environmental sociology involves how the subdiscipline should conceptualise and investigate the environment and whether it should be prescriptive and deliver policy recommendations. Taking this debate as a point of departure this article discusses the current and future role of sociology in a globalised world. It discusses how environmental sociology in the US and Europe differ in their understandings of sociology’s contribution to the study of the environment. Particular stress is placed on how these two regions differ with respect to their use of the tradition of sociological thought, views on what constitutes the environment and ways of institutionalising environmental sociology as a sociological field. In conclusion, the question is raised of whether current versions of environmental sociology are appropriate for analysing a globalised world environment; or whether environmental sociology’s strong roots in European and US cultures make it less relevant when facing an increasingly globalised world. Finally, the article proposes some new rules for a global environmental sociology and describes some of their possible implications for the sociological study of climate change.

Pesticide use practices among smallholder vegetable farmers in Ethiopian Central Rift Valley

In developed countries the sanitation challenge is to initiate a transition from strongly centralized, water-based infrastructure regimes towards more sustainable, source-separation oriented, sanitation regimes. This calls for social scientific research and demonstration on different levels and scales, including concept development, institutional learning and governance building. In the developing world the sanitation challenge is to provide sanitation services to the poor and the very poor, without compromising on sustainability. New configurations employing the best practices of sanitation technology and management for rural and urban contexts are needed. The sanitation challenge in both worlds is to go beyond traditional dichotomies between ‘small, appropriate’ and ‘modern/advanced’ technologies and to develop rural and urban sanitation with a mix of scales, strategies, technologies, payment systems and decision-making structures, that better fit the physical and human systems for which they are designed.