Quentin Gausset

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Copenhagen

One of the most heartening developments in climate change mitigation in recent years has been the increasing attention paid to the principle of ‘thinking globally and acting locally’. The failure of the international community to reach significant global agreements on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has led local governments, environmenta...

This paper describes how the ecovillage model for sustainability is currently spreading in Denmark through two different avenues. The first avenue is the creation of new eco-communities inspired by the ecovillage movement but created through top-down municipal support or from the side by the involvement of professional community builders. The secon...

The Self-Sustaining Village is a Danish eco-community whose mission is to develop communal sustainable living. This paper evaluates its sustainable living through a questionnaire survey of residents that measures their carbon footprint based on self-reported consumption. The survey also measures their life satisfaction. Results show that residents...

This paper describes how the ecovillage model for sustainability is currently spreading in Denmark through two different avenues. The first avenue the creation of new eco-communities inspired by the ecovillage movement. While traditional ecovillages have been established through bottom-up grassroot engagement, eco-communities are usually created th...

December is here, the month of the year which my kids are looking most forward to, but which gives me ambiguous feelings. Why is that? What kind of stories and experiences do I remember and associate with Christmas? What do these stories say about Christmas’ meaning, for me as a person, as a Belgian living in Denmark, and as an anthropologist – and...

Politiske beslutningstagere i Danmark fremhæver missionsdrevne partnerskaber som en metode til at realisere den ambitiøse klimalov om at opnå en CO2-reduktion på 70 pct. i 2030. Missionerne baserer sig på et tværgående samarbejde mellem aktører fra industrien, universiteterne, civilsamfundet og offentlige institutioner. På trods af denne politiske...

This book argues that there is no way to make progress in building a sustainable future without extensive participation of non-state actors. The volume explores the contribution of non-state actors to a sustainable transition, starting with citizens and communities of different kinds and ending with cities and city-networks. The authors analyse so...

Building a sustainable future is one of the greatest and most urgent challenges of contemporary societies. However, how this goal can be realised is still very unclear. We know that past and present approaches to reduce global warming have only had limited success, and that policy makers, public and private organisations, as well as researchers are...

This chapter departs from classical theories viewing environmental behaviour as individual choices and focuses instead on how collective action in environmental communities impacts behaviour and societal changes. The chapter discusses four different ways through which Danish environmental communities (eco-villages, food cooperatives, and environmen...

I dette kapitel fortæller vi, hvordan Omstilling Nu blev til, om den gnist, der blev tændt i processen og senere blev til en ild. Ilden som metafor bruger vi til at indfange den begejstring, dedikation, fællesskabsånd og handlekraft, der kan opstå, når engagerede mennesker arbejder sammen om en fælles sag. Dog fortæller vi også om de udfordringer,...

Introduktion til vores bog som handler om grønne fællesskaber og alt det, vi kan lære af deres erfaringer. Ved at se på, hvad de gør og har gjort, kan vi skabe en ramme for at forstå og reflektere over, hvordan gode fællesskaber kan formes, understøttes og fremmes på en måde, der sætter dem i stand til at skabe større samfundsmæssig forandring. Ved...

Denne bog handler om grønne fællesskaber og alt det, vi kan lære af deres erfaringer. Ved at se på, hvad de gør og har gjort, kan vi skabe en ramme for at forstå og reflektere over, hvordan gode fællesskaber kan formes, understøttes og fremmes på en måde, der sætter dem i stand til at skabe større samfundsmæssig forandring. Ved at dele grønne fælle...

Anmeldes af Quentin Gausset

Private households constitute approximately 30% of the total energy consumption in Denmark. The greatest potential for reducing energy consumption in private households is through retrofits of existing houses. One of the most common ways to promote retrofits is the act of sending an energy advisor to visit homeowners in order to explain the technol...

Northern Uganda has been plagued by a long and violent civil war that lasted from 1996 to 2006, during which 2.5 million people were internally displaced and placed in camps. During the conflict, Uganda adopted a new constitution and a new land act that recognised customary land tenure and the role played by customary institutions in resolving land...

Unlabelled: Delayed care-seeking occurs when a person who received a positive HIV serology test result does not immediately seek medical treatment for this HIV infection. It has serious consequences for patient survival. This study aims to analyze the factors leading to delayed care-seeking in this circumstance. Methodology: Applying a qualitati...

Indigenous people in Panama do not enjoy full autonomy within their comarcas (traditional land reserves): they only control surface resources, while the state retains control of underground resources. This article analyses direct action by the Ngäbe-Buglé, who successfully defeated the latest attempt by the government to exploit underground resourc...

Environmental behaviour change is one of the keys to address global warming. This paper presents ten Danish case studies which attempt to promote environmentally friendly behaviour. They were implemented in four different municipalities and studied within the Citizen Driven Environmental Action (CIDEA) research project. The paper discusses how thes...

'The greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration', stated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. Since then there has been considerable concern about the large-scale population movements that might take place because of climate change. This book examines emerging patterns of human mobility in relation...

The term indigenous tends to be used for people who are already marginalised, while autochthonous is generally reserved for people who are dominant in a given area but fear future marginalisation. Anthropologists often sympathise with the former, while being highly critical of the latter, although a bitter debate opposes opponents and proponents of...

This article describes different gambling patterns found among students at a business school and at a faculty of social sciences in Copenhagen, Denmark. On the one hand, it was found that students who play games of skill (such as poker or betting on football or horses, etc.) tended to be male, studying business, investing in stock options and votin...

The land issue in conflicts of autochthony in Southwestern Burkina Faso In Southwestern Burkina Faso, the coexistence of a customary law giving the upper hand in land tenure to the autochthonous population and of a national law giving the usufruct of land to those who cultivate it creates a big insecurity. Autochthonous people fear to lose the cont...

Conventional research approaches have lost considerable momentum after their astonishing achievements during the green revolution. The negative side of focusing rigorously on production improvement was eminent around 1980 and led to considerations of environmental, gender and equity aspects making agricultural development much more complex than pre...

In the French-speaking countries of Africa, strategies of conservation, inherited from the colonial time, exclude the bordering people in the management of the national parks plant resources. Today, policies and legislation try to reconcile forest conservation and development by associating local people. As a consequence, approaches of participator...

Abstract In the French-speaking countries of Africa, strategies of conservation, inherited from thecolonial time, exclude the bordering people in the management of the national parks plant resources. Today, policies and legislation try to reconcile forest conservation and development by associating local people. As a consequence, approaches of part...

-

454 BOOK REVIEWS geography (labelled urban planning), court inhabitants (minute descriptions of their location, attire, regalia and interlinkages) and court practices, the book represents an idealization that may never have been realized, unless briefly in the time of Ciam a Ciband (c. 1830?50) or Kabw Muzemb (c. 1880?93). Fourth, the vibrant and n...

This article describes and explains the different interests and strategies that men and women have in tree management in Péni, southwestern Burkina Faso. It argues that men and women have different household responsibilities. While the responsibility of the men is to procure staple food, housing, clothes, medicines and administration fees, women ar...

The number of birds' nests harvested in the Niah cave today is only a fraction of what it used to be. This article focuses on the socioeconomic causes of the decline. It argues that the present situation is not directly linked to the tragedy of the commons, since the ownership of cave and nests is private. The tragic aspect is, rather, linked to an...

Th ere is today a consensus around the fact that local development should address the needs and priorities of local actors in order to be successful. However, the identifi cation of local needs, understood in their context, is far from easy. Th is article reviews diff erent ranking methods used within PETREA, an action-research programme aimed at i...

In 1998 three Danish universities developed an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented curriculum in order to strengthen capacity-building capabilities in the area of environmental education, training and research at universities and research organisations in Malaysia and Thailand earmarked for environment and development assistance by the Danish gover...

The present article discusses the opportunities and constraints relating to agroforestry in SouthWestern Burkina-Faso. Two agroforestry systems are studied. The first is a traditional system found in parklands, in which indigenous trees such as néré and karité trees are intercropped with cereals. The second is a new system based on large-scale plan...

Anmeldes af Quentin Gausset

All over sub-saharan Africa, menstruating women, pregnant women and sexual relations are seen as incompatible with productive activities (hunting, blacksmithing, cattle herding, agriculture, pottery, beer brewing, etc.). The article argues that there is a certain rationality or logic behind the prohibitions which is independent of the social contin...

The fight against AIDS in Africa is often presented as a fight against "cultural barriers" that are seen as promoting the spread of the HIV virus. This attitude is based on a long history of Western prejudices about sexuality in Africa, which focus on its exotic aspects only (polygamy, adultery, wife-exchange, circumcision, dry sex, levirate, sexua...

This article examines the use of forest products in Kuyongon, Sabah, Malaysia. An interdisciplinary approach of this study has enable scientific identification of the forest products and a mean ingful assessment of the importance of these products in terms of subsistence and income generation. The article discusses the importance of the nearby Croc...

Issues on Plant Nutrition and Soil Fertility were integrated in an ongoing interdisciplinary post-graduate programme on sustainable land use and natural resource management. The programme is cooperating with similar educational activities in Southeast Asia and southern Africa. An interdisciplinary basic course is compulsory for all participants. Th...

Anmeldes af Quentin Gausset

The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-century West Africa Anmeldes af Quentin Gausset

This article addresses two questions. First, it seeks to explain why the Wawa and the Kwanja (two neighbouring groups of Cameroon) converted to Islam and Christianity in the 1960s, and argues that they did so in order to adopt a respected identity which was seen as ‘modern’ and was associated with national citizenship. Secondly, it analyses the rea...

It is traditional to classify kinship terminologies into certain types. However, this is not possible with the Kwanja terminology since it contains a Hawaiian equivalence between cognates as well as both a Crow and an Omaha skewing rule. This article describes how these competing terminological rules coexist and how the use of kinship terms is cons...

Traditional accounts of the nineteenth-century Fulbe conquest in northern Cameroon tell roughly the same story: following the example of Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, the Fulbe of Cameroon organized in the beginning of the nineteenth century a “jihad” or a “holy war” against the local pagan populations to convert them to Islam and create an Islamic s...

This article analyses the changing meaning of disease among the Tonga of Zambia, resulting from the meeting between traditional and modern medical systems. It discuss the impact of "modernity" on the traditional medical system, and analyses how elements of Christianity and the western medical system were adopted, transformed, and redefined in terms...

Résumé Les Tonga de Zambie associent le sida à une maladie traditionnelle, le kahungo, dont sont en général victimes les hommes qui ont des relations sexuelles avec une femme ayant avorté. Le kahungo fait partie d'un complexe de maladies traditionnelles qui trouvent leur origine dans les « pollutions sexuelles » et dans les mélanges de catégories....

The Tonga of Zambia associate AIDS with a traditional disease called kahungo that is generally caught through sexual relations with a woman who has had an abortion. Kahungo is part of a set of traditional diseases that originate in 'sexual pollutions' and boundary crossings. In the case of AIDS, an unhealthy blood is considered to be the origin of...

L'A. decrit les differentes transformations des structures politiques chez les Wawa du Cameroun. L'analyse des mythes et des rites lies a la position singuliere du « chef » (« jaoro »), permet de penser que les Wawa l'ont investi de tous les aspects negatifs du pouvoir sacre en reaction a sa nomination imposee par les Foulbe, afin de controler ce n...

This article is concerned with the hypothesis that devolution, understood as entrusting local government with significant domains of autonomous discretionary power, will lead to the equitable and efficient management of natural resources. The paper focuses on the three domains of power conceived by some theorists as critical in the manage-ment of n...

The establishment of a National Park often caused conflicts between national administrations and local populations when access to forest products and land becomes restricted. These conflicts stemmed from the different definitions of land tenure. What was seen as a legitimate and traditional use for some was seen as an encroachment of property by ot...

Despite the focus on the importance of trees in Africa and the many projects that try to improve their management, there is very little research and few development projects which address tree related problems in a holistic manner. With respect to forest management arrangements, focus tends to be either exclusively on community forestry, or on priv...