Yiheyis Maru

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO

While there is much theoretical study of the evolution of border disparities, there is little empirical analysis of development asymmetries across border regions, and their causes or solutions. Often disparities among countries hinder the ability of transboundary agreements and other development initiatives to generate sustainable development. This...

Food insecurity persists in many parts of Africa and Asia, despite ongoing agricultural research for development (AR4D) interventions. This is resulting in a growing demand for alternative approaches to designing and evaluating interventions in complex systems. Theory of Change (ToC) is an approach which may be useful because it enables stakeholder...

Gender equity has been recognized as a guiding principle for conservation management globally. Yet little attention is paid to gender in the design and implementation of many conservation programs including those in the vibrant and expanding arena of Australian Indigenous conservation partnerships. We examined the impact of gender in management of...

The global changes that we face are rapid, novel, interacting and cumulative – we are operating in uncharted territory and that means that there are no ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions. There is an urgent need to understand, design and effectively implement interventions to guide social-ecological systems along sustainable paths into the future. The magni...

We applied social network analysis to pig trader networks on the Kenya-Uganda border. Social network analysis is a recently developed tool, which is useful for understanding value chains and improving disease control policies. We interviewed a sample of 33 traders about their experiences with trade and African swine fever (ASF), analyzed the networ...

• Stakeholders thought the IPs effective but their outcomes and impacts were modest. • Increased social capital was the prime mediator of change. • Producer technical knowledge and capacity for collective action were enhanced. • Producer-centric approaches and delayed market engagement limited IP impact. • R&D actors with orchestration capability a...

In developing countries, change in environmental and socioeconomic systems is occurring at unprecedented rates, driven by rapid globalisation, technological advances, mod-ernisation and increasingly unpredictable economic and environmental shocks (Leach 2008). As a consequence, there are growing concerns that conventional international development...

This article reflects critically on the use of a wiki as a data repository for knowledge transfer and as a mediating technical platform for social learning in the context of a multi-country programme of agricultural research for development. The wiki was designed to foster sustainable social learning and an emergent community of practice among biop...

It is now more than a decade since integrated agricultural research for development (IAR4D) was proposed as a "new approach" or "set of good practices" for organising research to address complex problems of agricultural development, food security and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.Since then, there have been efforts to investigate its impact in comp...

Pig movements play a significant role in the spread of economically important infectious diseases such as the African swine fever. Characterization of movement networks between pig farms and through other types of farm and household enterprises that are involved in pig value chains can provide useful information on the role that different participa...

Highlights • Pig movements play a role in the spread of economically important infectious diseases such as the African swine fever. • Pig movement and trade networks were localized and based on close social networks involving family ties, friendships and neighborhoods’. • The networks exhibited good community structure implying close relationships...

RAPTA is a unique tool to help project designers and planners build the ideas of resilience, adaptation and transformation into their projects from the start, to ensure outcomes that are practicable, valuable and sustainable through time and change. This report offers practical advice to planners, project managers, policy makers, donors, farmers, r...

The aim of this inquiry is to undertake a holistic analysis of the constraints to the wider adoption of climate‐resilient farming systems and potential entry points for intervention, with a particular focus on conservation agriculture, with appropriate links to the insights from the Ganges water basin programs in Ganges basin.

We develop a systems framework for exploring adaptation pathways to climate change among people in remote and marginalized regions. The framework builds on two common and seemingly paradoxical narratives about people in remote regions. The first is recognition that people in remote regions demonstrate significant resilience to climate and resource...

This paper explores innovation processes and institutional change within research for development (R4D). It draws on learning by Australian participants associated with the implementation of a three-year Australian-funded food security R4D programme in Africa, and in particular a sub-component designed to support and elicit this learning. The autho...

This chapter describes the development and testing of a model of human well-being and hence is referred to as a 'well-being barometer' (WBB). As an example the perturbations that might arise from climate change and commodity price change in the north-west region of Queensland (NWQ), Australia were explored. The chapter starts by describing what Bay...

Indigenous disadvantage and poverty have persisted and are set to continue into the future. Although a large amount of work describes the extent and nature of indigenous disadvantage and poverty, there is little evidence-based systems understanding of the mechanisms that keep many indigenous people in their current dire state. In such a vacuum, pol...

Despite the increasing trend worldwide of integrating indigenous and scientific knowledge in natural resource management, there has been little stock-taking of literature on lessons learned from bringing indigenous knowledge and science together and the implications for maintaining and building social-ecological system resilience. In this paper we...

This paper is a review of current assessment frameworks, time series features and an analysis of the causes of Indigenous poverty and disadvantage. Current frameworks used to assess the chronic nature of Indigenous poverty and disadvantage are mainly descriptive in nature and inadequate in terms of considering Indigenous perspectives and concerns a...

Employment is generally considered as essential for improving individual and social livelihoods and wellbeing in Australia. Typically, employment rates are low among Aboriginal people living in remote regions of Australia. Often this is attributed to a lack of mainstream labour markets. However, Aboriginal employment participation is low even in re...

... Scientists who engage with IK need to understand the international law and policy contexts in ... (2000) suggest that indigenous knowledge is essentially scientific because it ... through methods that are empirical, experimental, and systematic, whereas Western science , by contrast ...

Dealing with perturbations such as economic crises, pandemics and climate change requires an understanding of the resilience and vulnerability of regions. However, in the literature the concepts of a region and regional resilience lack clarity and are understood differently by different people. The approaches to resilience measurement also differ,...

Over the last three decades participatory research processes have informed much international development and conservation work in developing countries. Public participation is also a growing legislative requirement in natural resource and environmental management in developed countries. So far, multiple participatory approaches have been formulate...

People need real opportunities to live the kind of life to which they aspire -to undertake livelihood activities they have reason to value, to achieve good health and well being outcomes, and to have resilience to shocks and stresses. A range of stakeholders consider that economic development is constrained by lack of engagement between Aboriginal...

"The Australian outback is a unique ecological and social landscape. The people who live here cope with harsh and variable environmental conditions, particularly in terms of rainfall and the availability of surface water. The human population density is very low and the dominant land use is grazing, while other land uses include agriculture, mining...

,The sustainable livelihoods approach,is widely,used in rural development,internationally but has been little applied in Australia. It is a framework,for thinking and communicating,about factors that impact,on the livelihoods of individualsandfamiliesincludingtheirhealth,wellbeingandincomeandthemaintenanceofnaturalresourcecondition.The approach,aim...

The Australian rangelands are divided into regions for statistical reporting, cultural identification or administrative and bioregional management purposes. However, many of these divisions do not reflect the characteristics of inland towns. In this study we used the Urban Centre/Locality (UCL) structure (for settlements with at least 200 people) a...

Arid systems are markedly different from non-arid systems. This distinctiveness extends to arid-social networks, by which we mean social networks which are influenced by the suite of factors driving arid and semi-arid regions. Neither the process of how aridity interacts with social structure, nor what happens as a result of this interaction, is ad...

Tension between dominant urban political and economic centres and associated rural communities continues despite various programs to decentralisation. This phenomenon is often explained in terms of a core-periphery political economy. To generate complementary explanatory hypotheses from a social perspective, we examine the impacts of rural–urban co...

The Resources and Shaping Forces1 (RSF) model is developed from a case study in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, using modified grounded theory. It provides a conceptual framework for identifying, describing and analysing livelihood and natural systems at the community level, and helps link the principles of sustainable livelihoods to those of community...

Our interest lies in applying the principles of critical systems thinking to human activity systems in developing countries in situations where issues of natural resource sustainability constrain the feasible set of long-term strategies. The concept of sustainable development provides an expanded domain for critical systems thinking. The fundamenta...