Human Development in the Context of Socio-Political Crisis (on the Example of Modeling the Coordination Mechanism for Regulating Agricultural and Construction Policies)

The goal is to achieve human development through the printed media. Objectives - to study the socio-economic aspects of coordination of the activities of segmental components in the publishing industry;to find out and substantiate the strategic subjectivity of the state institutional regulation of the publishing industry of the national economy. Methodology. System-structural approach - in the study of theoretical and methodological aspects of ensuring the development strategy of the publishing industry of the national economy in transformational conditions;comparative analysis - for comparing objects and phenomena, identifying the general and special, for studying the causes of changes that have occurred, identifying development trends. For the implementation of the scientific topic: "Development of norms of consumption and norms of material waste in the production of textbooks and educational/teaching aids" 0122U002363. Results. The results of the latest pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus and the active phase of the military confrontation have a decisive impact on the national economy and human development of our country. The current focus on agricultural development provides partial stabilization of the situation by maintaining an adequate level of food security and increasing food exports. In the long term, it is envisaged to use the existing advantages and revise the agrarian and construction policies, by coordinating them to create conditions for improving the human development situation in the country. To form the necessary theoretical basis for such changes, the definition of the term "state agricultural policy" was clarified and the list of strategic goals of the state agricultural policy was expanded. The current direction of construction policy is critically characterized. The essence of three dominants (continuation of land reform;decentralization;transformational changes in the development of agriculture), which should be taken into account when harmonizing agricultural and construction policies, is considered. The model of the coordination mechanism of agricultural and construction policy regulation was developed in order to create conditions for sustainable development of rural areas, which, accordingly, should contribute to the progress of human development.

A Reflection on the Nexus between South African Land Reform Struggles and the Unresolved National Question

The post-apartheid South African government continues to struggle with its transformation posture, including the quest to redress the racially based land inequalities that have plagued the country since its colonial past. The Covid-19 pandemic, the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, and the July 2021 #FreeZuma violence have highlighted both the fragility and the resilience of South African political institutions. Since the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-leaning and militant political party, in 2013, the South African land question has become more vociferously contested within government purview and in the public domain. Unresolved land issues have exposed the failure of the state to resolve one of its most sensitive national questions. We interrogate the land conflict and locate it within the broader national questions that have continued to haunt post-apartheid South Africa. Indeed, the South African land question must be understood holistically, and not solely as an agrarian question. Although the ANC-led government has implemented a land reform scheme under four pillars—land restitution, land redistribution, tenure security, and land development—there are still compelling cases of land hunger and conflict, as well as widespread confusion about the proposed land expropriation without compensation. Despite the rhetoric by government officials, we hold that the land debacle is a manifestation of a failing national question, state fragility, and an incomplete decolonisation process wherein the so-called "political power" held by the majority has not transformed into economic power and the effective redistribution of land to meet the targets of successive administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of African Renaissance Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

COVID-19, Politico-Economic Crises and the Precarity of Actors in the Tourism Industry in Kariba Resort Town, C 2000–2021

The tourism industry sustains the economies of many nations across the globe through contributing to the Gross Domestic Products (GDP);creation of employment and infrastructure development. However, its sustainability is vulnerable to various temporal and spatial environmental, socio-economic and political events. In the Zimbabwe case, the politico-economic crises of the 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic have variedly impacted on the prevalence of tourism with the actors (such as employees, tourists and recreational facility owners) involved in this industry having been seriously impacted. Using the precarity conceptual framework, this article critically analyses the impact of the politico-economic crises induced by the Fast Track Land Reform Programme of the early 2000s and the COVID-19 pandemic on the actors involved in tourism. Information regarding the impact of the political crises and COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in Kariba town is missing in the literature, yet Kariba is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa. The article discusses the precarity of these tourism actors in the context of the politico-economic crises as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. We define ‘precarity’ as a condition of vulnerability and uncertainty. Our results indicate that for employees, these factors have resulted in uncertainty in the tourism business with some shutting down and others scaling down their operations resulting in redundancy and vulnerability of the workers. For tourists, the successive lockdowns and surge in COVID-19 cases in Zimbabwe resulted in (re)booking and (re)cancellation of bookings;the politico-economic crises resulted in fear among the potential clients and a drop in the number of international tourists. The recreational and accommodation service operators have had the challenge of making food (and other resources) orders for trips that are eventually cancelled due to the surge in the COVID-19 cases. The article draws from data gathered in 2021 through face-to-face interviews with different stakeholders in the tourism industry including employees, hotel and boat owners, Zimbabwe Tourism Authority officials and local politicians in Kariba resort town. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Asian & African Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

A Reflection on the Nexus between South African Land Reform Struggles and the Unresolved National Question

The post-apartheid South African government continues to struggle with its transformation posture, including the quest to redress the racially based land inequalities that have plagued the country since its colonial past. The Covid-19 pandemic, the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, and the July 2021 #FreeZuma violence have highlighted both the fragility and the resilience of South African political institutions. Since the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-leaning and militant political party, in 2013, the South African land question has become more vociferously contested within government purview and in the public domain. Unresolved land issues have exposed the failure of the state to resolve one of its most sensitive national questions. We interrogate the land conflict and locate it within the broader national questions that have continued to haunt post-apartheid South Africa. Indeed, the South African land question must be understood holistically, and not solely as an agrarian question. Although the ANC-led government has implemented a land reform scheme under four pillars—land restitution, land redistribution, tenure security, and land development—there are still compelling cases of land hunger and conflict, as well as widespread confusion about the proposed land expropriation without compensation. Despite the rhetoric by government officials, we hold that the land debacle is a manifestation of a failing national question, state fragility, and an incomplete decolonisation process wherein the so-called “political power” held by the majority has not transformed into economic power and the effective redistribution of land to meet the targets of successive administrations. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of African Renaissance Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Farmer-herder conflicts and food insecurity: Evidence from rural Nigeria

Food security in many developing countries has been threatened by several factors such as unequal land distribution, ineffective land reform policies, inefficient agricultural value chains, and an increasing number of climate disasters. In Nigeria, these threats are exacerbated by rapid population growth and extreme weather events, which have resulted in farmer-herder conflicts in most agrarian communities. This paper examines the differential impacts of the incidence and severity of farmer-herder resource use conflicts on food insecurity of rural households in Nigeria. We employ a two-stage predictor substitution model to estimate survey data collected from 401 rural households in Nigeria. The empirical results show that both the incidence and the severity of farmer-herder conflicts significantly increase food insecurity, and the severity of these conflicts has a larger impact than their incidence. The estimates of the conditional mixed process models confirm the robustness of our results. Additional analysis reveals that the incidence and severity of farmer-herder conflicts positively and significantly affect food insecurity, measured by the number of days with limited varieties of food eaten. Our findings highlight the importance of policy interventions that address ongoing farmer-herder conflicts in affected countries like Nigeria to enhance food security from a sustainable development perspective.

South African government palliative funds for agriculture amid COVID-19: challenges of implementation and suggestions for improvements

The novel Corona virus pandemic has been extremely overwhelming at all levels causing massive economic setbacks for many countries including South Africa. The country witnessed an unprecedented scaling-down of its national economic activities, which called for an emergency response from the government. Several Covid-19 relief schemes were instituted by the government to ensure that farms of all sizes would survive. A support fund of R1.2 billion was allocated to the agriculture and food sector through the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD). The fund was primarily meant to assist financially distressed small-scale farmers to ensure continued production and food security for the country. This study collated the conditions for financial Covid-19 stimulus support required from smallholders and analysed several factors that prevented some members of this vulnerable group from benefitting from the relief funds. These factors include complexities associated with satisfactorily categorizing smallholder producers, productivity, marketing and policy challenges, glitches in formalising smallholder producer operations, the farm-business record keeping pitfall, and the exclusion of subsistent producers. The paper suggests some possible corrective measures that could allow for more inclusive support to these categories of farmers;some of which includes a simple but robust financial traceability system for the farmers, and a need to continue to push for the completion of national registration process of smallholder producers.

Strategic perspectives on quitting or remaining in commercial agriculture in South Africa and why it matters. (Special Issue: Special collection of articles on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on South African agriculture.)

This paper explores reasons why some commercial producers in South Africa are expecting to quit and sell their farms, and others are not. Of 450 respondents to a voluntary survey, distinctly different groups of producers emerged concerning their longer-term strategic planning and how they experience and absorb current threats and challenges. Unsupervised learning on the dataset is imposed using a cluster analysis to explore the commonalities and the underlying factors why producers would expect to exit or not. Factors that the researchers hypothesised might play a role included a producer's age and financial position, rural safety concerns, labor problems, industry-related problems, and opportunities for off-farm earnings. The factors the potentially exiting producers had in common were financial difficulty, which was uncorrelated to turnover, problems with access to dependable labor, uncertainty regarding land reform policy, and rural safety concerns. Intention to retire also played a role, although to a lesser extent. It is more often a combination of factors, rather than a single factor, that makes a producer more likely to decide to quit and sell in the future. With the exclusion of farm safety concerns and labor problems, the identified factors in this study are in step with those found internationally.

Assessment of Critical Diffusion Factors of Public–Private Partnership and Social Policy: Evidence from Mainland Prefecture-Level Cities in China

Cooperation between government and social capital is an important starting point in the supply-side reform of public services. It is also an effective practice in public governance innovation. Based on policy diffusion theory and event history analysis (EHA), this study analyzes panel data from 282 mainland prefecture-level cities in China from 2004–2020 to explore public–private partnerships’ critical diffusion factors. The study reveals that motivation factors, resource/obstacle factors, and external factors affect government and social capital cooperation policies to different extents. The main driving forces for local governments to adopt these policies are population size, level of economic development, government financial resources, the learning mechanism, and the imitation mechanism. This study proposes the following arguments: firstly, that the ultimate goal of policy innovation is to solve social contradictions and meet public demand;secondly, that economic resources can help to adopt policy innovation and proper diffusion;thirdly, that the public–private partnership (PPP) model has been continuously developed by using experience from other projects or cities through a learning mechanism;and finally, that policy publicity and public opinion expressed via the mainstream media are not only an inducement for policy innovation and diffusion, but also a powerful guarantee. The experience of local governments in China can help to verify whether the “positive factors” that are traditionally considered to be conducive to the cooperation between the government and social capital are effective, and to reveal the internal logic of the innovation diffusion of public policies of local governments in China from a more multidimensional perspective.

Informing Equitable Water and Food Policies through Accurate Spatial Information on Irrigated Areas in Smallholder Farming Systems

Accurate information on irrigated areas’ spatial distribution and extent are crucial in enhancing agricultural water productivity, water resources management, and formulating strategic policies that enhance water and food security and ecologically sustainable development. However, data are typically limited for smallholder irrigated areas, which is key to achieving social equity and equal distribution of financial resources. This study addressed this gap by delineating disaggregated smallholder and commercial irrigated areas through the random forest algorithm, a non-parametric machine learning classifier. Location within or outside former apartheid “homelands” was taken as a proxy for smallholder, and commercial irrigation. Being in a medium rainfall area, the huge irrigation potential of the Inkomati-Usuthu Water Management Area (UWMA) is already well developed for commercial crop production outside former homelands. However, information about the spatial distribution and extent of irrigated areas within former homelands, which is largely informal, was missing. Therefore, we first classified cultivated lands in 2019 and 2020 as a baseline, from where the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to distinguish irrigated from rainfed, focusing on the dry winter period when crops are predominately irrigated. The mapping accuracy of 84.9% improved the efficacy in defining the actual spatial extent of current irrigated areas at both smallholder and commercial spatial scales. The proportion of irrigated areas was high for both commercial (92.5%) and smallholder (96.2%) irrigation. Moreover, smallholder irrigation increased by over 19% between 2019 and 2020, compared to slightly over 7% in the commercial sector. Such information is critical for policy formulation regarding equitable and inclusive water allocation, irrigation expansion, land reform, and food and water security in smallholder farming systems.

Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: a pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal

Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of a poaching and antipoaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural residents affected by the externalities of coal mining. A range of struggles are waged against these challenges, but a hegemonic 'Biodiversity Economy' intervention has arisen, attended by projects aimed at territorializing conservation space and multiple-win scenarios. Based on four years of intermittent research in the area, this article critiques the territorialization of conservation, project outcomes, and commercialization efforts within the Umfozi Biodiversity Economy Node (UBEN). I contend that a biodiversity economy nodal approach extends neoliberal conservation strategies, and functions as a spatial aggregator to reterritorialize conservation land use over space and time. However, the findings suggest that, despite years of energy and investment there have only been limited individual successes in the UBEN, and a range of frustrations, compounded by COVID-19 complications. The analysis also highlights further costs and externalities of the initiative: as the UBEN exacerbates underlying tensions in Kwazulu-Natal's uneven conservation geography, and it aligns with problematic and often unrepresentative traditional authority structures and related accumulation networks. It is also complicit with the production of sacrificial spaces at the conservation-extraction nexus. In this context, I argue the UBEN is pyrrhic;that is, an outcome or goal strived for/achieved at too little reward and too high a cost. The article extends political-ecological critique of neoliberal conservation and the green economy to incorporate the framing and implementation of biodiversity economy nodal approaches - and their uneven and pyrrhic effects - in contested, crisis-ridden conservation contexts.

Agrarian reform, agroecology and the challenges for building new forms of society- nature relationship during and post-pandemic

The following article proposes to debate the countryside-city interections correlacting questions related to the begining of Covid-19 dissemination and the food system based on agribusiness against the role and chalenges of land reform, of settlements and agroecology in face of sanitary and socialeconomic crise. Its elaboration came trhough reflections instigated by soliday actions and articulation between peasents and urban workers promoted by social moviments during the pandemy, and field work performed in the doctorship research scope developed in geography post-degree program of Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia da Universidade Estadual Paulista "Julio de Mesquita Filho" - FCT/UNESP, about the experience of commercialization shorts circuit in settlement areas on Sao Paulo state, as a dialog tool and articulation with the urban environment and the accumulation of forces to promote the processes of espacialization and territorialization of popular land reform and agroecology.