Hans-Georg Bohle

• University of Bonn

1984, Seydlitz Weltatlas. (Schroedel). Berlin. p. 123

Seydlitz Weltatlas. (Schroedel). Berlin. p. 115

Atlas Unsere Welt. Ausgabe für Nordrhein-Westfalen. Berlin. p. 65

IGU Commission on Vulnerable Food Systems News: 4-5

Food security is a central issue in the megacities of the global south. However, basic knowledge lacks about how food supply and distribution currently work in these agglomerations. Drawing on recent research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in this contribution, the supply and distribution channels of rice are outlined. It is clarified how rice is produced,...

Building on arguments from New Economic Geography the World Bank's 2009 World Development Report "Reshaping Economic Geography" reconsidered the predominant policy debates on agglomeration processes. The Report argues that on a global scale, production will have to be concentrated in a few mega-urban core regions. Sriperumbudur - "India's Shenzhen"...

The article investigates underlying social mechanisms that contribute to the remarkable resilience of Dhaka's food system with a special focus on wholesalers and their informal business networks. A relational approach to the subject matter is elaborated that understands informality as a specific governance mode of business relations that is coined...

The article investigates underlying social mechanisms that contribute to the remarkable resilience of Dhaka’s food system with a special focus on wholesalers and their informal business networks. A relational approach to the subject matter is elaborated that understands informality as a specific governance mode of business relations that is coined...

This paper examines access to health care by poorer residents in Chennai, India. It reveals constraining and enabling conditions for impoverished users seeking treatment. We explore patterns of health-seeking behaviour through the reasoning of residents themselves as well as stakeholders involved in providing care for these users. Particular attent...

Amartya Sen, in his seminal work on food entitlements and deprivation (1981), has effectively demonstrated that food security is first and foremost a question of access to food rather than of general availability. Furthermore, research has shown that not only the rural populations are vulnerable to food insecurity, but that it is a significant chal...

El autor ofrece una visión general sobre la Geografía del desarrollo alemana, el nuevo paradigma que surgió de la Geografía de los países en desarrollo. Él muestra sus teorías principales y sus dimensiones económicas, sociales, políticas y culturales. Su abordaje de la vulnerabilidad comprende conceptos/teorías de livelihoods y de derechos de propi...

My main message to you today is simple; in order to cope with soaring food prices, supply must adjust to demand. For this to happen, trade will help. Easier, more open trade can strengthen the production capacity of developing countries, rendering them less vulnerable. At a time when chronic hunger, dispossession of food providers and workers, comm...

Experts discuss the risks global environmental change poses for the human security, including disaster and disease, violence, and increasing inequity. In recent years, scholars in international relations and other fields have begun to conceive of security more broadly, moving away from a state-centered concept of national security toward the idea o...

Recent research on the informal economy no longer distinguishes ‘the formal’ and ‘the informal’ as distinct antipodes, but looks at a continuum of interwoven and intertwined socio-economic processes with different degrees of (in)formality. Using empirical evidence from research on the food system of the megacity of Dhaka (Bangladesh) it is argued i...

The chapter reviews the concept of sustainable livelihood security against the background of the current discourse on human security.

Food systems are increasingly "double exposed" to a variable and unpredictable physical environment, particularly in the context of climate change, and to the vagaries of market instability and volatility that inevitably come with globalization. These double exposures threaten all aspects of food security, including the availability, accessibility...

This article re-frames resilience as a people-centred approach and highlights the importance of agency-based perspectives, taking the food system of Dhaka, Bangladesh as a case.

Slum dwellers in India's megacities are exposed to a multitude of risks which threaten their livelihods every day. In addition hazards such as natural disasters, water shortages or looming expulsion by authorities put their lives at risk. This essay uses an expulsion of slum dwellers in Chennai, ordered by the Indian National Highway Authority, to...

Wenn es beim Umgang mit Risiko um Destabi-lisierungsprozesse geht, so stellt sich zunächst die Frage, um welche Art von Destabilisierung es gehen soll, was eigentlich destabilisiert wird. In diesem Keynote-Vortrag soll speziell über die Destabilisierung von sozialökologischen Systemen als einem geographischen Integrati-onsthema gesprochen werden. D...

Nach Schätzung der Vereinten Nationen (UN 2006: 188) lebt knapp zwei Drittel der Stadtbevölkerung Südasiens unter Bedingungen von Armut und Verelendung, von sozialem Ausschluss und hochgradiger Verwundbarkeit. So sind auch die Slumbewohner in den Megacities Indiens vielfältigen Lebensrisiken ausgesetzt, die ihre (Über-)Lebenssicherung bedrohen. Neb...

Food security is a central issue in the numerous megacities of the global south. However, basic knowledge lacks about how food supply and distribution currently work in these agglomerations. Drawing on recent research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in this article we outline the supply and distribution channels of rice and clarify how goods pass “from ploug...

The concept of "vulnerability" is en vogue. Since its emergence in the environmental and social sciences in the 1980s (Chambers 1989) and in geography since the beginning of the 1990s (Watts and Bohle 1993) three areas - ecology, society and technology - have been carved out which are investigated in terms of their vulnerability. It owns its popula...

In political ecology, violence is usually associated with conflicts over the control of natural resources. Up to now, political ecology has lacked a sound conceptual approach for analysing how violence that has its origin in political conflict induces environmental and social change. This article examines how the environment serves as an arena for...

The present paper views violence and vulnerability as social practice where human needs and human securities are constantly contested and fought over. It conceives the geographies of violence and vulnerability as arenas where human freedoms and rights are struggled for, negotiated, lost and won. In these struggles, however, the vulnerable are not m...

Vulnerabilität • • Verwundbarkeit • • globale Risikogesellschaft • • Hungerkrisen • • Schadens-wirkung • • Empfindlichkeit von Risikoelementen In den Sozial-und Naturwissenschaften wird die Vulnerabilität ganz unterschiedlich bear-beitet. Während in den Sozialwissenschaften die Vulnerabilität oder Verwundbarkeit auf rein gesellschaftliche Bedingung...

Bioenergy produced from biomass is increasingly used to substitute fossil energy sources. Trade of biomass is expected to increase in the following years due to disparities in production costs and potentials in countries and regions. In this paper the possibility of a certification scheme for minimizing negative socio-ecological impacts and for inc...

This Forum examines the research assessment systems (RASs) that affect professional human geography, and offers perspectives on the whole idea of formal research assessment. The Forum aims to assist professional geographers in their reflections on present and future research assessment in their own countries. It comprises two parts. The first offer...

Der Diskurs zur menschlichen Sicherheit: Folgerungen und Relevanz für die Forschung zum Klimawandel. Ein Literaturbericht Summary: The Discourse on Human Security: Implications and Relevance for Climate Change Research. A Review Article Climate change presents new and unprecedented challenges to human security, particularly for those who are vulner...

The paper analyses the concept of social capital in terms of its relevance for development geography in general, and geographical vulnerability research in particular. Social capital is conceptualised in ways that are highly heterogeneous, contradictory and controversial. This paper aims to disentangle the various strands of the debate while paying...

The paper analyses the concept of social capital in terms of its relevance for development geography in general, and geographical vulnerability research in particular. Social capital is conceptualised in ways that are highly heterogeneous, contradictory and controversial. This paper aims to disentangle the various strands of the debate while paying...

The conflict around the water of the Cauvery river between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu has resulted in a dramatic decline of agricultural productivity in the delta region. This granary of South India has not received any water during the past three years, which has also lead to decline of the ground water table and a water crises. A village study comp...

The discursive interconnections between culture, territoriality and power as well as the links between religion, identity and ethnicity have become powerful driving forces for social transformations and, more specifically, for widespread forms of social exclusion and territorial conflicts. In a world after the end of the Cold War, they constitute a...

Compared to rural populations, poor urban households are particularly vulnerable to food crises and food insecurity because they are highly immersed in the urban cash economy. Within the urban labour market, they are usually dependent on erratic and unreliable informal jobs with low payments. Moreover, poor urban households are the first to be affl...

The new 'sustainable livelihood framework' that was recently presented by the British development agency DFID provides the background for a general discussion of geographical risk research, particularly on questions of vulnerability and coping strategies in the context of poverty and crisis. An empirical survey on Nepal, one of the poorest countrie...

The problematic relationship between population and resources, particularly food, has been a focus of concern for hundreds of years. The deficate balance between population numbers, food supplies, and access to food has again been highlighted in recent years by influential books such as "The Limits to Growth" (1972) or "Beyond the Limits" (1992). T...

Exactly ten years ago, the author concluded in a mid-term review on the state of the Green Revolution in India (Bohle 1989, pp. 91-98) a remarkably antagonistic discussion between proponents of the Green Revolution and its critics. However, those critics, who had doubted the world wide relevance of it, had pointed out the social and regional polari...

Since the early 1990s, Nepal has changed from a net exporter to a net importer of food. Nearly half of Nepal's districts have become deficient in food. The situation is most serious for peripheral mountain regions of the Middle Hills. The paper concentrates on food deficient village communities in fragile mountain tracts of Nepal. It is based on ho...

The paper presents case studies on social vulnerability in Nepal, Sri Lanka and India.

The century-old discussion on "The Wealth of Nations" (Adam Smith 1776) has entered a new stage. The World Bank recently started a project that not only seeks to evaluate the national income or living standard of populations, but also to calculate the natural wealth and the human capital of the nations. This paper traces the development of these ef...

Global climate change presents a serious challenge to future livelihood strategies of third world peoples, especially for those social groups which are currently poor and vulnerable. Relatively modest adverse changes in community resource availability and/or economic output imply critical shifts in food security. Feasible strategies for coping with...

Coping with climatic variations or future climate change must be rooted in a full understanding of the complex structures and causes of present vulnerability, and how it may evolve over the coming decades. A theory of the social vulnerability of food insecurity draws upon explanations in human ecology, expanded entitlements and political economy to...