What makes large, multi-ethnic states hang together? At a time when ethnic and religious conflict has gained global prominence, the territorial organization of states is a critical area of study.
...Exploring how multi-ethnic and geographically dispersed states grapple with questions of territorial administration and change, this book argues that territorial change is a result of ongoing negotiations between states and societies where mutual and overlapping interests can often emerge. It focuses on the changing dynamics of central-local relations in Indonesia. Since the fall of Suharto's New Order government, new provinces have been sprouting up throughout the Indonesian archipelago. After decades of stability, this sudden change in Indonesia's territorial structure is puzzling. The author analyses this "provincial proliferation", which is driven by multilevel alliances across different territorial administrative levels, or territorial coalitions. He demonstrates that national level institutional changes including decentralization and democratization explain the timing of the phenomenon. Variations also occur based on historical, cultural, and political contexts at the regional level. The concept of territorial coalitions challenges the dichotomy between centre and periphery that is common in other studies of central-local relations.
This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of comparative politics, political geography, history and Asian and Southeast Asian politics.
This volume delves into a key part of the comprehensive Russian administrative and territorial reform of the 2000s—the merger of six previously separate ethno-national regions into larger constituent ...entities of the Russian Federation. It deals with the accession of the Komi-Permyak, Taymyr Dolgano-Nenets, Evenk, Agin-Buryat, and Koryak Autonomous Okrugs to the Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Zabaykalsky, and Kamchatka Krais, and of the Ust-Orda Buryat Autonomous Okrug to the Irkutsk Oblast. In both management practice and mass media, the largely similar unifications were treated as unrelated initiatives emerging from inside the regions. The center did initially not offer a common institutional model of integration. The regions had to come up with individual formulas dealing with the merged districts. After the reform had slowed down, it turned out that the annexed territories had only in name obtained special statuses which are not backed by administrative or financial resources. The book addresses specialists in the fields of Russian studies, comparative federalism, and ethnic politics. It makes an especially important reading because it describes and thoroughly analyzes the unique deautonomization case in an ethnic federation. Additional contributors to this volume are Maria Tislenko, Emma Bibina, and Rostislav Shilovsky (all MGIMO University).
The Birth of Italy Carlà-Uhink, Filippo
2017, 2017-09-25, Letnik:
28
eBook
Scholarship has widely debated the question about the existence of an 'Italian identity' in the time of the Roman Republic, basing on the few sources available and on the outcomes of the Augustan and ...imperial age. In this sense, this debate has for a long time been conducted without sufficient imput from social sciences, and particularly from social geography, which has developed methodologies and models for the investigation of identities. This book starts therefore from the consideration that Italy came to be, by the end of the Republic, a region within the Roman imperium, and investigates the ways this happened and its consequences on the local populations and their identity structures. It shows that Italy gained a territorial and symbolic shape, and own institutions defining it as a territorial region, and that a regional identity developed as a consequence by the 2nd century BCE. The original, interdisciplinary approach to the matter allows a consistent revision of the ancient sources and sheds now light on the topic, providing important reflections for future studies on the subject.
Every nation prioritizes the inclusive economic growth and development of all regions. However, we observe that economic activities are clustered in space, which results in a disparity in per-capita ...income among different regions. A complexity-based method was proposed by Hidalgo and Hausmann PNAS 106, 10570-10575 (2009) to explain the large gaps in per-capita income across countries. Although there have been extensive studies on countries' economic complexity using international export data, studies on economic complexity at the regional level are relatively less studied. Here, we study the industrial sector complexity of prefectures in Japan based on the basic information of more than one million firms. We aggregate the data as a bipartite network of prefectures and industrial sectors. We decompose the bipartite network as a prefecture-prefecture network and sector-sector network, which reveals the relationships among them. Similarities among the prefectures and among the sectors are measured using a metric. From these similarity matrices, we cluster the prefectures and sectors using the minimal spanning tree technique. The computed economic complexity index from the structure of the bipartite network shows a high correlation with macroeconomic indicators, such as per-capita gross prefectural product and prefectural income per person. We argue that this index reflects the present economic performance and hidden potential of the prefectures for future growth.
Abstract
Background
Undernutrition is the main cause of child death in developing countries. This paper aimed to explore the efficacy of machine learning (ML) approaches in predicting under-five ...undernutrition in Ethiopian administrative zones and to identify the most important predictors.
Method
The study employed ML techniques using retrospective cross-sectional survey data from Ethiopia, a national-representative data collected in the year (2000, 2005, 2011, and 2016). We explored six commonly used ML algorithms; Logistic regression, Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (L-1 regularization logistic regression), L-2 regularization (Ridge), Elastic net, neural network, and random forest (RF). Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the curve were used to evaluate the performance of those models.
Results
Based on different performance evaluations, the RF algorithm was selected as the best ML model. In the order of importance; urban–rural settlement, literacy rate of parents, and place of residence were the major determinants of disparities of nutritional status for under-five children among Ethiopian administrative zones.
Conclusion
Our results showed that the considered machine learning classification algorithms can effectively predict the under-five undernutrition status in Ethiopian administrative zones. Persistent under-five undernutrition status was found in the northern part of Ethiopia. The identification of such high-risk zones could provide useful information to decision-makers trying to reduce child undernutrition.
Massive biological databases of species occurrences, or georeferenced locations where a species has been observed, are essential inputs for modeling present and future species distributions. Location ...accuracy is often assessed by determining whether the observation geocoordinates fall within the boundaries of the declared political divisions. This otherwise simple validation is complicated by the difficulty of matching political division names to the correct geospatial object. Spelling errors, abbreviations, alternative codes, and synonyms in multiple languages present daunting name disambiguation challenges. The inability to resolve political division names reduces usable data, and analysis of erroneous observations can lead to flawed results. Here, we present the Geographic Name Resolution Service (GNRS), an application for correcting, standardizing, and indexing world political division names. The GNRS resolves political division names against a reference database that combines names and codes from GeoNames with geospatial object identifiers from the Global Administrative Areas Database (GADM). In a trial resolution of political division names extracted from >270 million species occurrences, only 1.9%, representing just 6% of occurrences, matched exactly to GADM political divisions in their original form. The GNRS was able to resolve, completely or in part, 92% of the remaining 378,568 political division names, or 86% of the full biodiversity occurrence dataset. In assessing geocoordinate accuracy for >239 million species occurrences, resolution of political divisions by the GNRS enabled the detection of an order of magnitude more errors and an order of magnitude more error-free occurrences. By providing a novel solution to a significant data quality impediment, the GNRS liberates a tremendous amount of biodiversity data for quantitative biodiversity research. The GNRS runs as a web service and is accessible via an API, an R package, and a web-based graphical user interface. Its modular architecture is easily integrated into existing data validation workflows.
In Chad, 1990s decentralization reforms increased the number and importance of customary authorities. The official purpose of these reforms was to decentralize power, but among customary authorities ...and local elites they triggered political competitions that ended up reasserting the role and legitimacy of the central state. Examining the renaming of a canton in central Chad, this article analyzes the reasons that make state recognition important for customary authorities and the people they represent. It shows how customary authorities need constantly to reassert their legitimacy to secure access to rights and resources for their inhabitants; this need creates a local political arena where customary actors mainly compete among themselves for recognition, rather than critically challenging the authoritarian modalities of state governance.
Water conservation is an important service function of ecosystems. A timely understanding of dynamic changes in the water conservation function is important for the protection and reconstruction of ...water resources. Based on remote sensing data, meteorological data, land cover data, and the "Technical Criterion for Ecosystem Status Evaluation" issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China, a comprehensive evaluation system was designed to assess the water conservation function of the Xiongan New Area from 2005 to 2015. The system created from four aspects, including ecological structure, ecological stress, water balance and landscape ecology. The results showed that from 2005 to 2015, the water conservation function of the Xiongan New Area first decreased and then increased, and the overall trend was upward. The increasing areas were mainly concentrated around Baiyangdian and near the grassland. Among all evaluated indicators, the precipitation compliance rate index fluctuated the most from -16.62 in 2010 to 6.70 in 2015. The evapotranspiration index was the largest in 2010 (6.47) and the smallest in 2005 (3.52). The Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) showed that the drought was the severest in 2010 and the least severe in 2015. However, the other indicators remain relatively stable. From the perspective of the spatial distribution, the water conservation function of the Xiongan New Area was gradually enhanced from north to south.
Can people use new participatory spaces to reclaim their rights as citizens and challenge structures of political power? This book carefully examines the constraints and possibilities for ...participatory governance under capitalism. To understand what is at stake in the politics of participation, we need to look beyond the values commonly associated with it. Citizens face a dilemma: should they participate, even if this helps to sustain an unjust system, or not participate, thereby turning down rare opportunities to make a difference? By examining the rationale behind democratic innovation and the reasons people have for getting involved, this book provides a theory of how citizens can use new democratic spaces to challenge political boundaries. Connecting numerous international case studies and presenting original research from Rosario, Argentina, this book offers a crucial corrective to previous research. What matters most is not the design of new models of participation nor is it the supposed radical imagination of political leaders. It is whether people use new spaces for participation to renegotiate what democracy means in practice. Bridging critical urban studies and democratic theory, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of democratic innovations, political economy and urban planning. It will also provide activists and practitioners of participatory democracy with important tools to expand spaces of grassroots democracy.
This study was conducted from July 2018 to December 2019 to determine gender role differentiation among elected Barangay (smallest administrative division in the Philippines) officials in the 1st ...district of Cavite in the Philippines. We used a purposive incidental technique, focusing on 137 samples of male and female Barangay officials. The first district of Cavite Province, consisting of the city of Cavite and municipalities of Noveleta, Kawit, and Rosario, has 134 Barangays with 1,072 elected Barangay seats; of these seats, women occupied 298 (27.8%). In reproductive, productive, community managing, and leisure-related activities, both the female and male elected officials were dominant when it came to choices and decisions within their respective households. Most legislated gender policies addressed the protection and welfare of children, curbing delinquent gangs, and substance dependence and abuse. (The male elected officials dominate access, control of, and benefits from the reproductive, productive, community managing, and leisure activities in their respective household.) Men have access to and control of vehicles and house repairs while women manage finances, and care for sick children. Other household problems, needs, and constraints included waste management, noise nuisances, and teenagers' behaviors - also, (lack of proper knowledge on gender and development) also the difficulty in recalling new terminologies used during gender-related seminars. We suggest that the Barangay council attend orientation and training on the Harmonized Gender and Development Guide (HGDG) and be given materials (to) that would educate them on gender terminologies. Responsible parenting seminars would help families guide their youths; mothers would be given an important role in this program, and fathers, through all-male advocacy groups in the country like KATROPA, which would in turn strengthen family bonding.
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