rural communities

This study examines the extent to which electrification relates to improvement of quality of life in Indonesia. In this respect, the study addresses two objectives. First, it examines the extent to which electrification accounts for differences in quality of life in Indonesia. S…

Introduction of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) technology in Bangladesh creates an interesting case to show the complicated interplay between cultural norms, women's role, and structural transformation of agriculture. By taking Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research…

In this dissertation I evaluate the family support for the elderly in the aging developing countries. I argue that well-being of the elderly cannot be ensured by the family alone for two reasons: the burden will increase in the future and elderly are not necessarily taken of wel…

The ultimate objective of this thesis is to provide an alternative way of estimating the poverty line in Indonesia. There are at least two objections of the official method. First, it is not consistent from the perspective of welfare economics. Second, it does not take account e…

Estimates of total fecundability and total fetal loss are confounded by an inability to detect pregnancies very early in gestation. A cycle in which no pregnancy is observed results from either no conception or a conception followed by an unrecognized fetal loss. This research e…

Since the early twentieth century, Mexican migrants and immigrants have been an integral segment of the agricultural laborer force. As part of the traditional agrarian class model, Mexican farm laborers were physically, socially, and politically apart from rural communities. Mor…

This is a theoretical and empirical study of the changing structure and operation of the market for rural finance in San Clemente county, an agricultural region in southern Chile. Several variants on a model of financial intermediation provide a framework for explaining the obse…

The widely accepted portrait of antebellum female moral reform, as a middle-class campaign against the sexual double standard and the rise of commercialized sex, is based on research into the movement in urban settings and does not explain its appeal to the vast majority of acti…

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary and mixed method approach to measuring and identifying the demographic significance of women's empowerment in rural Bangladesh. I argue that demographic research on women's empowerment provides a unique opportunity to integrate femini…

This dissertation analyzes why political power in Diamou, a small town in Western Mali, is unable to support local development. A historical description of successive configurations of political power, based on oral history research in the area, shows that local power is always …

This dissertation explores the implications of political and economic reform for local scale governance, defined primarily in terms of conflict management. A decade of neoliberal reform in Africa has revealed a fundamental dilemma; regime threatening conflict is associated with,…

The debate on rural transformation dates back to the school of neo-classical political economy. Its modern version has focused on the role of agriculture in economic development in the 1960s and 1970s, and has then moved on to local livelihoods and micro-economics in the 1980s. …

South Asia has the largest concentration of the world’s poor, with over half a billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day. One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) aims to halve the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and th…

The present thesis is an investigation of sustainable rural community development in the face of the global economy. It aims to develop a framework for capacity building, leading to the empowerment of rural communities in developing countries in response to restructuring and adj…

This thesis examines female power and autonomy in the Roodsar region of the Iranian province of Gillan. It begins with a critical examination of the "Indian debate", which discusses the phenomenon of women's subordination and their relative welfare in relation to "material" cond…

This paper is the result of anthropological research carried out in a rural Malay society where two distinct traditions of gender norms co-exist: adat and Islam. The Malay term adat refers to the 'custom' or 'culture' sanctioning egalitarian gender practices as observed in many …

Whatever way it is defined, power is a factor that influences the lives of all people. In studying power and powerlessness in Appalachia, John Gaventa observed that the feeling of powerlessness comes about as a response to the perceived experience of defeat. He found that belief…

This dissertation examines the role of urbanism as a pervasive cultural ideology of place in rural Malay kampung (villages). The ethnographic portrait drawn here is based on over two years of fieldwork in the mid-1990s, the majority of which was conducted in the kampung of Sunga…

This thesis examines landlord politics in the rural Pakistani Punjab and contributes to the literature on the state and criminalised politics in South Asia as well as to broader debates on factionalism and violence, class formation, proletarianization and bonded labour. The thes…