This book analyzes the social and economic situation of the Shahsevans - mountain nomads in the harsh ecological environment of northwestern Iran. Based on in-depth field work while living with the nomads for a year, the book's author succeeds in offering a vivid insight into the Shahsevans' strategy to cope with both political impacts and the changing environmental conditions of their traditional way of life. At the same time, the book reveals the intensity of climatic change and the nomads' adaptation measures to these ecological threats. It is a well-documented and comprehensive analysis...

This thesis examines the role of agricultural service organizations in the rural transformation processes in Uzbekistan, which has experienced a chain of agricultural reforms since 1991. These organizations, apart from providing services (i.e. provision of fertilizers, seeds, machinery), fulfill many other socio-political functions. They also act as a social security net for their personnel. The book's analysis reveals that agrarian transformation has produced three types of service organizations, which differ in their distance from and importance for the government and the state procurement...

Subduing nature and harnessing water resources rose to become the key paradigm of modernization in the Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Over the past 40 years, waterscape engineering turned Vietnam's largest river estuary into one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the world. This book traces water resources development from the time of the socialist-oriented hydraulic mission and Green Revolution, which began in the late 1970s under the economic rationale of central planning, to more recent trends responding to renovation policy, global environmental change, and Vietnam's capitalist...

"Pangasius" is a genus of shark catfishes native to Asia. The term is often used to refer to the commercially important Pangasius bocourti, or basa fish. In Vietnam, water pollution in Pangasius aquaculture endangers its economic success and meaning for rural development in the Mekong Delta. With the help of Bourdieu's theory of practice, this book considers the interplay of subjective and objective structures on the practices in Pangasius cultivation. It shows that economic dependencies in a global commodity production system have led to a transformation process that most aquaculturists...

This dissertation explains why there persists a divergence of academia-industry-government inter-linkage in the Indonesian science system. This divergence constrains the capacity of the science system in localizing knowledge from the supply chain linkage and demonstrates the centralized character of the Indonesian science system. Additionally, the book shows that the Jababeka Industrial Cluster is shaped by the supply chain linkage and, thus, lacks the capacity of a knowledge cluster. Therefore, horizontal collaboration between academia-industry is restricted and limited. Dissertation....

This dissertation examines the cultural, social, environmental, and political factors that shape the spread of diarrhea in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The case of the Mekong Delta shows why the spread of disease is not merely an epidemiological problem, but an institutional one as well. Social inequalities, the dominance of central-state led discourse, and the lack of participatory health education all contribute to a persistently high incidence of disease. This research calls for a re-politicization and contextualization of public health problems in order to better understand why they occur and...