Traditionally Protected Forests´ Role within Transforming Natural Resource Management Regimes in Taita Hills, Kenya

In Taita Hills, south-eastern Kenya, remnants of indigenous mountain rainforests play a crucial role as water towers and socio-cultural sites. They are pressurized due to poverty, shortage of cultivable land and the fading of traditional knowledge. This study examines the traditional ecological knowledge of Taitas and the ways it may be applied within transforming natural resource management regimes. I have analyzed some justifications for and hindrances to ethnodevelopment and participatory forest management in light of recently renewed Kenyan forest policies. Mixed methods were applied by combining an ethnographic approach with participatory GIS. I learned about traditionally protected forests and their ecological and cultural status through a seek out the expert method and with remote sensing data and tools. My informants were: 107 household interviewees, 257 focus group participants, 73 key informants and 87 common informants in participatory mapping. Religious leaders and state officials shared their knowledge for this study. I have gained a better understanding of the traditionally protected forests and sites through examining their ecological characteristics and relation to social dynamics, by evaluating their strengths and hindrances as sites for conservation of cultural and biological diversity. My results show that, these sites are important components of a complex socio-ecological system, which has symbolical status and sacred and mystical elements within it, that contributes to the connectivity of remnant forests in the agroforestry dominated landscape. Altogether, 255 plant species and 220 uses were recognized by the tradition experts, whereas 161 species with 108 beneficial uses were listed by farmers. Out of the traditionally protected forests studied 47 % were on private land and 23% on community land, leaving 9% within state forest reserves. A paradigm shift in conservation is needed; the conservation area approach is not functional for private lands or areas trusted upon communities. The role of traditionally protected forests in community-based forest management is, however, paradoxal, since communal approaches suggests equal participation of people, whereas management of these sites has traditionally been the duty of solely accredited experts in the village. As modernization has gathered pace such experts have become fewer. Sacredness clearly contributes but, it does not equal conservation. Various social, political and economic arrangements further affect the integrity of traditionally protected forests and sites, control of witchcraft being one of them. My results suggest that the Taita have a rich traditional ecological knowledge base, which should be more determinately integrated into the natural resource management planning processes.

Fishing capacity management

Excess fishing capacity has been identified as one of the most pernicious problems affecting long-term sustainability and biodiversity of fishery resources and economic viability of fishing operations. Significant economic gains could be achieved by eliminating excess capacity, in addition to attaining objectives of resource sustainability. In this paper, approaches to fishing capacity management are reviewed in the context of Indian fisheries. A rights based regulated access system under a co-management regime based on a strong inclusive cooperative movement of stakeholders with built-in transferable quota system and buy-back or rotational right of entry schemes seems to hold potential for capacity management in the shelf fisheries of Indian states, which need to be implemented in collaboration with the Union Government and the neighboring states with confluent ecosystems and shared fishing grounds. A key advantage of the use of rights based approaches for managing fishing capacity is that they provide a mechanism through which stakeholders can more easily and actively participate in the management process.

Research Data Management — Activities and Challenges Report on the Knowledge Exchange Workshop

Workshop Research Data Management – Activities and Challenges 14-15 November 2011, Bonn The Knowledge Exchange initiative organised a workshop to highlight current activities and challenges with respect to research data management in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries and beyond. The workshop brought together experts from data centres, libraries, computational centres, funding organisations, publishing services and other institutions in the field of research and higher education who are working to improve research data management and encourage effective reuse of research data. A considerable part of the programme was dedicated to sharing perspectives from these communities, leading to the development of a roadmap of practical actions for the Knowledge Exchange initiative, partner organisations and other stakeholders to progress over the next two years. On the first day, principal investigators and project managers from a great variety of recent projects shared their insights on objectives and methods for improving data management ranging from discipline-specific to more general approaches. A series of short presentations of selected projects was followed by an extensive poster session that functioned as a “trade fair” of current trends and activities in the field of research data management. Moreover, the poster session offered ample network opportunities for participants. The second day was dedicated to intensive group discussions looking at a number of data management challenges. First the most important findings from the "Surfboard for 'Riding the Wave'" report were presented. This included the state of the art on activities and challenges in the field of research data management. The subgroups will concentrate on the following key themes: funding, incentives, training and technical infrastructure. These discussions culminated in the identification of practical recommendations for future cooperation on practical as well as on strategic levels that should be taken forward by the KE partner organisations and beyond. These activities aim to improve the sustainability of services and infrastructures at both national and international levels.

An assessment of co-management potentials in the Lake Victoria fisheries of Kenya

Co-management is a system or a process in which responsibility and authority for the management of common resources is shared between the state, local users of the resources as well as other stakeholders, and where they have the legal authority to administer the resource jointly. Co-management has received increasing attention in recent years as a potential strategy for managing fisheries. This paper presents and discusses results of a survey undertaken in the Kenyan part of Lake Victoria to assess the conditions - behaviour, attitude and characteristics of resource users, as well as community institutions - that can support co-management. It analyses the results of this survey with respect to a series of parameters, identified by Pinkerton (1989), as necessary preconditions for the successful inclusion of communities involvement in resource management. The survey was implemented through a two-stage stratified random sampling technique based on district and beach size strata. A total of 405 fishers, drawn from 25 fish landing beaches, were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. The paper concludes that while Kenya's lake Victoria fishery would appear to qualify for a number of these preconditions, it would appear that it fails to qualify in others. Preconditions in this latter category include the definition of boundaries in fishing grounds, community members' rights to the resource, delegation and legislation of local responsibility and authority. Additional work is required to further elaborate and understand these shortcomings

The politics of participation: Evaluating stakeholder equity in co-management regimes

Within natural resource management, there is increasing criticism of the traditional model of top-down management as a method of governance, as researchers and managers alike have recognized that resources can frequently be better managed when stakeholders are directly involved in management. As a result, in recent years the concept of co-management of natural resources, in which management responsibilities are shared between the government and stakeholders, has become increasingly popular, both in the academic literature and in practice. However, while co-management has significant potential as a successful management tool, the issue of equity in co-management has rarely been addressed. It is necessary to understand the differential impacts on stakeholders of co-management processes and the degree to which diverse stakeholders are represented within co-management. Understanding the interests of various stakeholders can be a way to more effectively address the distributional and social impacts of coastal policies, which can in turn increase compliance with management measures and lead to more sustainable resource management regimes. This research seeks to take a closer look at the concepts of co-management and participation through a number of case studies of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Caribbean. (PDF contains 4 pages)

Mangrove rehabilitation and coastal resource management: a case study of Cogtong Bay, Philippines

The Cogtong Bay experience represents a bold attempt to pursue a shared responsibility between the government and local residents for rehabilitating coastal resources. Some of the factors that provided the impetus to co-management arrangements were the recognition of resource management problems, dependence on coastal resources for livelihood and the desire for more sustainable resource use. This paper draws attention to the importance of legitimate user/property rights, vigilant law enforcement efforts, common commitment among stakeholders and continuing support from local leadership in viable co-management arrangements.

Climate change, sea level rise and integrated coastal zone management: An IPCC approach

Expansion of economic activities, urbanisation, increased resource use and population growth are continuously increasing the vulnerability of the coastal zone. This vulnerability is now further raised by the threat of climate change and accelerated sea level rise. The potentially severe impacts force policy-makers to also consider long-term planning for climate change and sea level rise. For reasons of efficiency and effectiveness this long-term planning should be integrated with existing short-term plans, thus creating an Integrated Coastal Zone Management programme. As a starting point for coastal zone management, the assessment of a country's or region's vulnerability to accelerated sea level rise is of utmost importance. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has developed a common methodology for this purpose. Studies carried out according to this Common Methodology have been compared and combined, from which general conclusions on local, regional and global vulnerability have been drawn, the latter in the form of a Global Vulnerability Assessment. In order to address the challenge of coping with climate change and accelerated sea level rise, it is essential to foresee the possible impacts, and to take precautionary action. Because of the long lead times needed for creating the required technical and institutional infrastructures, such action should be taken in the short term. Furthermore, it should be part of a broader coastal zone management and planning context. This will require a holistic view, shared by the different institutional levels that exist, along which different needs and interests should be balanced.

Distributed Parallel Computing in Mermera: Mixing Noncoherent Shared Memories

Programmers of parallel processes that communicate through shared globally distributed data structures (DDS) face a difficult choice. Either they must explicitly program DDS management, by partitioning or replicating it over multiple distributed memory modules, or be content with a high latency coherent (sequentially consistent) memory abstraction that hides the DDS' distribution. We present Mermera, a new formalism and system that enable a smooth spectrum of noncoherent shared memory behaviors to coexist between the above two extremes. Our approach allows us to define known noncoherent memories in a new simple way, to identify new memory behaviors, and to characterize generic mixed-behavior computations. The latter are useful for programming using multiple behaviors that complement each others' advantages. On the practical side, we show that the large class of programs that use asynchronous iterative methods (AIM) can run correctly on slow memory, one of the weakest, and hence most efficient and fault-tolerant, noncoherence conditions. An example AIM program to solve linear equations, is developed to illustrate: (1) the need for concurrently mixing memory behaviors, and, (2) the performance gains attainable via noncoherence. Other program classes tolerate weak memory consistency by synchronizing in such a way as to yield executions indistinguishable from coherent ones. AIM computations on noncoherent memory yield noncoherent, yet correct, computations. We report performance data that exemplifies the potential benefits of noncoherence, in terms of raw memory performance, as well as application speed.

Client-based Logging: A New Paradigm of Distributed Transaction Management

The proliferation of inexpensive workstations and networks has created a new era in distributed computing. At the same time, non-traditional applications such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided software engineering (CASE), geographic-information systems (GIS), and office-information systems (OIS) have placed increased demands for high-performance transaction processing on database systems. The combination of these factors gives rise to significant challenges in the design of modern database systems. In this thesis, we propose novel techniques whose aim is to improve the performance and scalability of these new database systems. These techniques exploit client resources through client-based transaction management. Client-based transaction management is realized by providing logging facilities locally even when data is shared in a global environment. This thesis presents several recovery algorithms which utilize client disks for storing recovery related information (i.e., log records). Our algorithms work with both coarse and fine-granularity locking and they do not require the merging of client logs at any time. Moreover, our algorithms support fine-granularity locking with multiple clients permitted to concurrently update different portions of the same database page. The database state is recovered correctly when there is a complex crash as well as when the updates performed by different clients on a page are not present on the disk version of the page, even though some of the updating transactions have committed. This thesis also presents the implementation of the proposed algorithms in a memory-mapped storage manager as well as a detailed performance study of these algorithms using the OO1 database benchmark. The performance results show that client-based logging is superior to traditional server-based logging. This is because client-based logging is an effective way to reduce dependencies on server CPU and disk resources and, thus, prevents the server from becoming a performance bottleneck as quickly when the number of clients accessing the database increases.

The ways in which new public management ideas impact upon the administrative culture of 'street-level' bureaucrats and professionals working within Irish social policy

The conventional meaning of culture is ‘widely shared and strongly held values’ of a particular group or society (Bradley and Parker, 2006: 89). Culture is not a rigid concept; it can be influenced or altered by new ideas or forces. This research examines the ways in which one set of ideas in particular, that is, those associated with New Public Management, have impacted upon the administrative culture of 'street-level' bureaucrats and professionals within Irish social policy. Lipsky (1980: 3) defined 'street-level' bureaucrats as ‘public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work’. Utilising the Competing Values Framework (CVF) in the analysis of eighty three semi-structured interviews with 'street-level' bureaucrats and professionals, an evaluation is made as to the impact of NPM ideas on both visible and invisible aspects of administrative culture. Overall, the influence of NPM is confined to superficial aspects of administrative culture such as; increased flexibility in working hours and to some degree job contracts; increased time commitment; and a customer service focus. However, the extent of these changes varies depending on policy sector and occupational group. Aspects of consensual and hierarchical cultures remain firmly in place. These coincide with features of developmental and market cultures. Contrary to the view that members of hierarchical and consensual culture would pose resistance to change, this research clearly illustrates that a very large appetite for change exists in the attitudes of 'street-level' bureaucrats and professionals within Irish social policy, with many of them suggesting changes that correspond to NPM ideas. This study demonstrates the relevance of employing the CVF model as it is clear that administrative culture is very much a dynamic system of competing and co-existing cultures.

Opportunistic Control Over Shared Wireless Channels

© 2015 IEEE.We consider a wireless control architecture with multiple control loops over a shared wireless medium. A scheduler observes the random channel conditions that each control system experiences over the shared medium and opportunistically selects systems to transmit at a set of non-overlapping frequencies. The transmit power of each system also adapts to channel conditions and determines the probability of successfully receiving and closing the loop. We formulate the optimal design of channel-aware scheduling and power allocation that minimize the total power consumption while meeting control performance requirements for all systems. In particular, it is required that for each control system a given Lyapunov function decreases at a specified rate in expectation over the random channel conditions. We develop an offline algorithm to find the optimal communication design, as well as an online protocol which selects scheduling and power variables based on a random observed channel sequence and converges almost surely to the optimal operating point. Simulations illustrate the power savings of our approach compared to other non-channel-aware schemes.

Making modelling count - increasing the contribution of shelf-seas community and ecosystem models to policy development and management

Marine legislation is becoming more complex and marine ecosystem-based management is specified in national and regional legislative frameworks. Shelf-seas community and ecosystem models (hereafter termed ecosystem models) are central to the delivery of ecosystem-based management, but there is limited uptake and use of model products by decision makers in Europe and the UK in comparison with other countries. In this study, the challenges to the uptake and use of ecosystem models in support of marine environmental management are assessed using the UK capability as an example. The UK has a broad capability in marine ecosystem modelling, with at least 14 different models that support management, but few examples exist of ecosystem modelling that underpin policy or management decisions. To improve understanding of policy and management issues that can be addressed using ecosystem models, a workshop was convened that brought together advisors, assessors, biologists, social scientists, economists, modellers, statisticians, policy makers, and funders. Some policy requirements were identified that can be addressed without further model development including: attribution of environmental change to underlying drivers, integration of models and observations to develop more efficient monitoring programmes, assessment of indicator performance for different management goals, and the costs and benefit of legislation. Multi-model ensembles are being developed in cases where many models exist, but model structures are very diverse making a standardised approach of combining outputs a significant challenge, and there is a need for new methodologies for describing, analysing, and visualising uncertainties. A stronger link to social and economic systems is needed to increase the range of policy-related questions that can be addressed. It is also important to improve communication between policy and modelling communities so that there is a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of ecosystem models.

Dynamic Knowledge Creation Through Value Management Teams

With the intention of introducing unique and value-added products to the market, organizations have become more conscious of how to best create knowledge as reported by Ganesh Bhatt in 2000 in 'Information dynamics, learning and knowledge creation in organizations'. Knowledge creation is recognized as having an important role in generating and sustaining a competitive advantage as well as in meeting organizational goals, as reported by Aleda Roth and her colleagues in 1994 in 'The knowledge factory for accelerated learning practices.' One of the successful ingredients of value management (VM) is its utilization of diverse knowledge resources, drawing upon different organizational functions, professional disciplines, and stakeholders, in a facilitated team process. Multidisciplinary VM study teams are viewed as having high potential to innovate due to their heterogeneous nature. This paper looks at one of the VM workshop's major benefits, namely, knowledge creation. A case study approach was used to explore the nature, processes, and issues associated with fostering a dynamic knowledge creation capability within VM teams. The results indicate that the dynamic knowledge creating process is embedded in and influenced by managing team constellation, creating shared awareness, developing shared understanding, and producing aligned action. The catalysts that can speed up the processes are open dialogue and discussion among participants. This process is enhanced by the use of facilitators, skilled at extracting knowledge.

Strategies for Energy-Efficient Resource Management of Hybrid Programming Models

Many scientific applications are programmed using hybrid programming models that use both message passing and shared memory, due to the increasing prevalence of large-scale systems with multicore, multisocket nodes. Previous work has shown that energy efficiency can be improved using software-controlled execution schemes that consider both the programming model and the power-aware execution capabilities of the system. However, such approaches have focused on identifying optimal resource utilization for one programming model, either shared memory or message passing, in isolation. The potential solution space, thus the challenge, increases substantially when optimizing hybrid models since the possible resource configurations increase exponentially. Nonetheless, with the accelerating adoption of hybrid programming models, we increasingly need improved energy efficiency in hybrid parallel applications on large-scale systems. In this work, we present new software-controlled execution schemes that consider the effects of dynamic concurrency throttling (DCT) and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) in the context of hybrid programming models. Specifically, we present predictive models and novel algorithms based on statistical analysis that anticipate application power and time requirements under different concurrency and frequency configurations. We apply our models and methods to the NPB MZ benchmarks and selected applications from the ASC Sequoia codes. Overall, we achieve substantial energy savings (8.74 percent on average and up to 13.8 percent) with some performance gain (up to 7.5 percent) or negligible performance loss.