Creating Local Institutional Arrangements for Sustainable Wetland Socio-ecological Systems: Lessons from the ‘Striking a Balance’ Project in Malawi

Wetland socio-ecological systems provide livelihood benefits for many poor people throughout the developing world, yet their sustainable development requires local utilisation strategies that balance both environmental and development outcomes. Community-based local institutional arrangements that mediate peoples’ relationships with their environment and facilitate adaptive co-management offer one means of achieving this, and increasingly many NGOs and development practitioners have sought to integrate local institutional capacity-building into development projects. In the context of wider academic debates surrounding the long-term sustainability of externally-facilitated local institutions, this paper draws on the experiences of the three-year Striking a Balance (SAB) project in Malawi which sought to embed sustainable wetland management practices within community-based local institutional arrangements. Drawing on field data collected through participatory methods at three project sites some five years after the cessation of project activities, we examine the extent to which SAB’s local institutional capacity-building has been successful, and from this draw some lessons for externally-driven project interventions which seek win-win outcomes for people and the environment. With reference to Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for long-enduring common property resource institutions, we suggest that the observed declining effectiveness of SAB’s local institutions can be attributed to issues of stakeholder inclusiveness and representations; their sustainability was arguably compromised from their inception on account of them being nested within pre-existing, externally-driven village ‘clubs’ whose membership and decision-making was not congruent with all the wetland stakeholders within the community.

Involvement of the Electrophilic Isothiocyanate Sulforaphane in Arabidopsis Local Defense Responses

Plants defend themselves against microbial pathogens through a range of highly sophisticated and integrated molecular systems. Recognition of pathogen-secreted effector proteins often triggers the hypersensitive response (HR), a complex multicellular defense reaction where programmed cell death (PCD) of cells surrounding the primary site of infection is a prominent feature. Even though the HR was described almost a century ago, cell to cell factors acting at the local level generating the full defense reaction has remained obscure. In this study, we sought to identify diffusible molecules produced during the HR that could induce cell death in naïve tissue. We found that 4-methylsulfinylbutyl isothiocyanate (sulforaphane) is released by Arabidopsis thaliana leaf tissue undergoing HR, and that this compound induces cell death as well as prime defense in naïve tissue. Two different mutants impaired in the pathogen-induced accumulation of sulforaphane displayed attenuated PCD upon bacterial and oomycete effector recognition as well as decreased resistance to several isolates of the plant pathogen Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis. Treatment with sulforaphane provided protection against a virulent H. arabidopsidis isolate. Glucosinolate breakdown products are recognized as antifeeding compounds towards insects and recently also as intracellular signaling and bacteriostatic molecules in Arabidopsis. The data presented herein indicate that these compounds also trigger local defense responses in Arabidopsis tissue.