This work addresses the global-local tension evident in much work on development issues, through the example of fresh food markets in Papua New Guinea. A key feature of the book is the author's interweaving of theoretical constructs with a detailed ethnography of marketing networks, at the rural village and the urban market-place, as well as in the spaces in between. It shows the rural community not as an isolated universe, but as consisting of dynamic linkages and networks which extend way beyond the locality. At the same time, local actors with their own agendas and interpretations of the meta-narrative of development are shown to be crucially important for shaping the outcome of the market integration process.
Are you a grant maker, manager or evaluator who must assess your work to improve as well as be accountable for the use of resources and results? Does the project, program or organization you fund, manage or evaluate contend with substantial uncertainty about what to do and what will be the results? Do you thus experience constant change and unexpected and unforeseeable actors and factors in your intervention? Do you need to know what you are achieving and how in real time? And therefore, do you seek an alternative to conventional monitoring and evaluation of social change results? If yes, then you are the audience for this book. Beginning in 2002, working closely with co-evaluators and commissioners of evaluations, the author developed Outcome Harvesting to enable evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of changes that interventions have influenced in a broad range of cutting–edge innovation and development projects and programs around the world. Over these years, he led Outcome Harvesting evaluative exercises involving almost 500 non-governmental organizations, networks, government agencies, funding agencies, community-based organizations, research institutes and university programs. In over fifty evaluations, with forty co-evaluators he has harvested thousands of outcomes on six continents. Outcome Harvesting has proven useful in evaluations of a great diversity of initiatives: human rights advocacy, political, economic and environmental advocacy, arts and culture, health systems, information and communication technology, conflict and peace, water and sanitation, taxonomy for development, violence against women, rural development, organic agriculture, participatory democracy, waste management, public sector reform, good governance, eLearning, social accountability, and business competition, amongst others. In this book, the author explains the steps of Outcome Harvesting and how to customize them according to the nine underlying principles. He shares his experience and gives practical advice on how to work with Outcome Harvesting and remain true to its essential features.
This book offers key resource materials developed for an international training course on Rainwater Harvesting and Utilization hosted annually by the Gansu Research Institute for Water Conservancy in Lanzhou, China since 2003. Topics cover the design, construction and management of rainwater harvesting systems for domestic water supply and supplementary irrigation, rainwater quality issues and runoff farming. It presents case studies from successful rainwater-harvesting projects both in China and around the globe, and provides readers with essential information and inspiration alike. It is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and students in the area of water management, agriculture and sustainable development. Qiang Zhu is a research professor at Gansu Research Institute for Water Conservancy, Lanzhou, China; John Gould is a rainwater harvesting consultant based in Christchurch, New Zealand; Yuanhong Li is a research professor at Gansu Research Institute for Water Conservancy, Lanzhou, China; Chengxiang Ma is an engineer at Gansu Research Institute for Water Conservancy, Lanzhou, China.
This book focuses on elementary concepts of both radio frequency energy harvesting (RFEH) and wireless power transfer (WPT), and highlights their fundamental requirements followed by recent advancements. It provides a systematic overview of the key components required for RFEH and WPT applications and also comprehensively introduces the pioneering research advancements achieved to date. The state-of-the-art circuit design topologies for the two different applications are presented mainly in terms of antenna operating frequencies, polarization characteristics, efficient matching network circuits, rectifier topologies, and overall rectenna systems. The book serves as a single point of reference for practicing engineers and researchers searching for potential sources and elements involved in the RFEH system as well as in the WPT system, and need rapid training and design guidelines in the following areas: • Different sensing elements used in RFEH and WPT • Inclusions of mathematical expressions and design problems • Illustration of some design examples and performance enhancement techniques
The harvesting of energy from ambient energy sources to power electronic devices has been recognized as a promising solution to the issue of powering the ever-growing number of mobile devices around us.Key technologies in the rapidly growing field of energy harvesting focus on developing solutions to capture ambient energy surrounding the mobile devices and convert it into usable electrical energy for the purpose of recharging said devices. Achieving a sustainable network lifetime via battery-aware designs brings forth a new frontier for energy optimization techniques. These techniques had, in their early stages, resulted in the development of low-power hardware designs. Today, they have evolved into power-aware designs and even battery-aware designs.This book covers recent results in the field of rechargeable sensor networks, including technologies and protocol designs to enable harvesting energy from alternative energy sources such as vibrations, temperature variations, wind, solar, and biochemical energy and passive human power.
The present book describes in detail all aspects of rainwater harvesting, including the basic concepts, procedures, opportunities and practice of rainwater harvesting mainly focusing its application in buildings of various occupancies and sizes. It provides a user-friendly methodology for the planning, design, construction and maintenance of rainwater harvesting infrastructure, in buildings and its premise, as a supplement to conventional water supplies. It highlights the application of plumbing technology, which is an important aspect of rainwater harvesting in buildings. It also includes global rainfall scenario and brief notes on all the elements of rainwater harvesting used in buildings. It is a valuable reference resource for policy and decision-makers, as well as for engineers, architects and students.
Dry areas suffer not only from limited rainfall but also ‘natural leakage’—90% of rainwater is lost directly or indirectly, and is unavailable for agriculture or domestic use. Water harvesting is a low-cost, easy-to-use, environmentally-friendly way to recover a large part of this lost water. How does water harvesting work? Which sites or areas are best suited and how can these areas be identified? How to design, build and maintain a water harvesting system tailored to local needs? How can water harvesting contribute to combating land degradation, enhancing food security and adapting to climate change? This book provides the answers. The book is based on many years of research, training and development by three of the world’s leading experts in water management and agriculture. It is authoritative, comprehensive, and easy to read, containing practical examples, many illustrations and little jargon. This volume will be of great interest to researchers, development workers, farmers, policymakers, students of the natural sciences—in fact, anyone interested in efficient, sustainable management of water resources and agriculture.
This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity growth, along with broad trends in partial factor productivity for land and labor, revisiting the question of scale economies in farming. Technology is central to growth in agricultural productivity, yet across many parts of the developing world, readily available technology is never taken up. We investigate demand-side constraints of the technology equation to analyze factors that might influence producers, particularly poor producers, to adopt modern technology. Agriculture and food systems are rapidly transforming, characterized by shifting food preferences, the rise and growing sophistication of value chains, the increasing globalization of agriculture, and the expanding role of the public and private sectors in bringing about efficient and more rapid productivity growth. In light of this transformation, the analysis focuses on the supply side of the technology equation, exploring how the enabling environment and regulations related to trade and intellectual property rights stimulate Research and Development to raise productivity. The book also discusses emerging developments in modern value chains that contribute to rising productivity. This book is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.
