Abdul-Wahab Tahiru, Silas Uwumborge Takal, Samuel Jerry Cobbina, Wilhemina Asare ¡ 5 authors
Northern Ghana faces acute climate vulnerabilities, yet adaptation pathways remain fragmented and poorly synthesized. This study systematically reviewed 15 peer-reviewed literature covering the Savannah, Upper East, Upper West, North East, and Northern regions to assess climate impacts on agro-pastoral communities, evaluate existing adaptation strategies, and explore policy implications. Findings reveal that erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, rising temperatures, and land degradation have undermined food security and livestock systems, while increasing pest outbreaks and intensifying farmerâpastoralist conflicts. Communities have responded through water harvesting, livelihood diversification (including agroforestry, shea processing, small livestock rearing, and seasonal migration), and reliance on indigenous knowledge systems. However, these strategies remain constrained by inadequate finance, weak infrastructure such as faulty hand pumps, gender inequalities, and limited integration with formal climate services. The review underscores the need for coherent policies that expand decentralized water infrastructure, scale climate-smart financing, institutionalize conflict-resolution platforms, and embed gender-responsive and indigenous approaches into national adaptation planning. Strengthening the interface between local innovation and formal governance is critical for building inclusive and scalable resilience across Northern Ghanaâs agro-pastoral systems.
Stefan Burkart, Solomon W. Mwendia, Peggy Karimi, Mary Atieno ¡ 6 authors
Abstract Southeast Asia faces a significant and growing ruminant feed deficit, constraining the development of sustainable livestock systems amidst rising demand for animalâsourced foods. This article analyzes the scale of the deficit and the role improved cultivated forage systems can play in closing it across five countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, TimorâLeste, Laos, and Thailand. The analysis estimates that closing the feed gap over a period of 10 years will require the establishment of more than 314,000 ha of cultivated forage and the participation of over 400,000 adopting farmers. This highlights the untapped potential of forage seed systems, with a projected regional seed market value of up to $163 million over 10 years, alongside $1.6 billion in forage crop value under a gradual adoption scenario. However, achieving this scale requires overcoming systemic barriers, including weak seed markets, limited private sector engagement, fragmented policy implementation, and poor farmer access to quality planting materials. Forage development is therefore both a technical and institutional challenge, calling for farmer training, improved extension services, access to finance, embedding forage seed systems into national strategies, decentralizing seed production, harmonizing regional seed regulations, and incentivizing private sector engagement. With the right investments and policy frameworks, improved forage systems can enhance livestock productivity, strengthen rural livelihoods, and contribute to food security and climate resilience across Southeast Asia.
INTRODUCTION: In recent years, the country of Mongolia (population 2.8 million) has experienced rapid social changes associated with economic growth, persisting socio-economic inequities and internal migration. In order to improve health access for the urban poor, the Ministry of Health developed a "Reaching Every District" strategy (RED strategy) to deliver an integrated package of key health and social services. The aim of this article is to present findings of an assessment of the implementation of the RED strategy, and, on the basis of this assessment, articulate lessons learned for equitable urban health planning. METHODS: Principal methods for data collection and analysis included literature review, barrier analysis of health access and in-depth interviews and group discussions with health managers and providers. FINDINGS: The main barriers to health access for the urban poor relate to interacting effects of poverty, unhealthy daily living environments, social vulnerability and isolation. Implementation of the RED strategy has resulted in increased health access for the urban poor, as demonstrated by health staff having reached new clients with immunization, family planning and ante-natal care services, and increased civil registrations which enable social service provision. Organizational effects have included improved partnerships for health and increased motivation of the health workforce. Important lessons learned from the early implementation of the RED strategy include the need to form strong partnerships among stakeholders at each level of the health system and in the community, as well as the need to develop a specific financing strategy to address the needs of the very poor. The diverse social context for health in an urban poor setting calls for a decentralized planning and partnership strategy, but with central level commitment towards policy guidance and financing of pro-poor urban health strategies. CONCLUSIONS: Lessons from Mongolia mirror other international studies which point to the need to measure and take action on the social determinants of health at the local area level in order to adequately reduce persistent inequities in health care access for the urban poor.
IntroductionIn many parts of the world, local communities with long histories of occupancy developed local systems of land tenure, ecological knowledge and resource use that continue to the present (Berkes 1989; Bromley 1992; Freeman and Carbyn 1988; McCay and Acheson 1987). For many such communities, however, interactions with state structures for resource control are increasingly unavoidable.1 With the rise of the global economy, centralized governments have asserted control over previously ignored hinterland areas. Through the assertion of state claims to land and resources, previously autonomous communities have become encapsulated within the political economy of modern nation states (Feit 1988). As a result, pure communal resource management is no longer possible in many places (Berkes 1989; McCay and Acheson 1987; Ostrom 1990).In Arctic North America, as well as in many parts of the developing world, co-management has emerged as the dominant strategy for resolving resource conflicts and building partnerships in conservation and management between local communities and government agencies. Co-management (also called co-operative management) has been highly effective in some cases where neither local management nor exclusive government control provides for sustainable and equitable common property management. Co-management has thus become one of the principle means by which formerly isolated or autonomous communities are linked, or manage their linkages, to nation states.Co-management refers to decentralized institutional arrangements involving the sharing of management responsibilities between community-level and state-level actors (Osherenko 1988; Pinkerton 1989). Pinkerton (1992: 331) defines it as sharing in the exercise of resource management between a government agency and a community or organization of stakeholders, while Osherenko's (1988) definition focusses on the formal dimensions of this approach, stating that co-operative agreements between government agencies and user groups apply to a specific species and/or a geographic region and include:1. A system of rights and obligations for those interested in the resource;2. A collection of rules indicating actions that subjects are expected to take under various circumstances;3. Procedures for making collective decisions affecting the interest of government actors, use organizations and individual users (ibid: 94).Since regulators and resource users at both local and national levels must frequently interact, co-management agreements can be viewed as a process of institutionalizing the de facto interdependence which exists between local users and authorities and state-level authorities and the users they authorize (McCay and Acheson 1987). Over the past decade a growing body of literature has analyzed successful examples of the co-management or cooperative management of common property resources (Lloyd 1986; Marks 1991; Pinkerton 1989; Richard and Pike 1993; Usher 1991). These studies have shown that in some cases, local users are able to increase their influence over the management of resources upon which they depend, while government agencies realize the benefits of reduced social conflict and greater user compliance with regime rules (Pinkerton 1989).This paper examines the evolution, structure and operation of co-operative management systems for caribou and brown bear in Alaska through the lens of political ecology. After a brief overview of political ecology and the social and ecological contexts of Western Alaska, I examine first the origins of resource conflicts which precede co-management, and secondly how the emergence of new institutional arrangements alters existing power relationships and property regimes in both formal and informal arenas. I argue that these joint management institutions can be best understood within the context of a history of competing claims to wildlands and wildlife, local repertoires of resistance and divergent perceptions of animals and their ecology. âŚ
The project would be national in scope, with intensive pilot-testing of certain institutional innovations in eight selected aimags. In parallel with the pilot-testing of new approaches, selected NPAP activities would continue to be implemented nation-wide, with the aim of facilitating convergence between the new approaches and existing anti-poverty interventions over the medium term. The outputs that in combination will contibute to achieving the project development objective are: a) Pastoral Risk Management: an integrated strategy developed, piloted, and adopted in eight selected aimags for managing covariant risk in pastoral livestock production, with a primary emphasis on risk preparedness. In combination with other project components, this component would aim to assist in addressing the underlying causes of rising vulnerability to drought and dzud ('winter disasters'); b) Micro-Finance Outreach: the outreach of financially and institutionally sustainable micro-finance services (including savings, credit, and micro-insurance) to targeted poor and vulnerable non-poor households and individuals in rural areas of selected aimags achieved; c) Local Initiative Fund: efficient, socially inclusive, and transparent community-driven mechanisms identified and established to facilitate community prioritization, selection, co-financing, and execution of investments in basic infrastructure and social services provision in rural areas, combining local resource mobilization with matching government grants based on clear and transparent criteria for inter-governmental transfers; and
Abstract Mongolia is the second oldest communist regime after Russia, and its reforms have been under way since 1986. It is a landâlocked state and is characterized by its large physical size relative to a small population, an almost total historical dependence on the formerâUSSR and a limited range of agricultural and mineral resources. Despite the profound effects that the collapse of the USSR and Comecon have caused, Mongolia has adopted a âshock therapyâ approach to reform, embarking simultaneously on a bold programme of both political and economic change. This article traces the genesis of the reform strategy, highlighting the interplay between external events and internal debate and sometimes outlining the major areas of the reform programme: the introduction of macroeconomic management to replace central planning, the improvement of incentives and an ambitious programme of privatization. The undertaking of such a programme in the Mongolia points to the importance of a social safety net and popular support for the reforms. The article then describes the complementary reforms of public administration that have been more recently introduced in the wake of a new constitution, with their emphasis on professionalization of government administration, transfer of responsibilities to provincial and local government and improved policies and institutions for national training. International technical assistance has and continues to play a significant role in supporting the above. A number of lessons are drawn with regard to strategy, particularly the need at programme level for an integrated or systems approach that can ensure linkages between different elements and at the level of training the need for imaginative approaches to design and delivery. The article draws conclusions on the prospects for success in each area of the reform programme. Critical for public administration restructuring and professionalization is the issue of institutional capacity for implementation. While the legal framework has now been laid down for decentralized government, for example, there is little prior experience in local government of many areas of functional management, finance and budgeting, investment planning and social services administration. On the economic front, the shock therapy stragegy has been adopted despite some earlier advice on the preconditions for successful privatizationâwith regard for example to market structure, the development of the financial sector and most crucially the continued role of the state in fostering entrepreâneurship in a society devoid of any recent history of such.