Fall Semester 1999
Monday, September 27,1999
David
Bray, Professor, Department
of Environmental Studies, Florida
International University. "Adaptive Management
and Institutional Resilience in the Community-Managed Forests
of Quintana Roo, Mexico."
Abstract
Quintana Roo, Mexico has been the setting for a 15 year experience
in community management of dry tropical forests. The model
that launched this process, the Forest Pilot Plan, has now exhausted
its usefulness, and communities and forest policy-makers in
Quintana Roo are struggling to find a new path towards sustainability.
This paper will analyze the past 15 years from an adaptive management
perspective, and propose the general outlines of the next steps
for community forest management in Mexico.
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Monday, October 18, 1999
Marina Campos, Federal University of Acre,
Southwestern Amazonia. "Plant Virtues Are In The
Eyes Of Their Beholders: A Comparison Of Known Palm Uses Among
Indigenous And Folk Communities Of Southwestern Amazônia."
Abstract
Despite its central importance to tropical forest conservation,
our understanding of the broad patterns by which forest peoples
know and use their plant resources is in its infancy. To help
address this deficiency, we compared the knowledge of palm uses
among indigenous (Yawanawá and Kaxinawá) and folk
(rubber tapper and ribeirinho) communities, in the same region
of Southwestern Amazonia. We tested three hypotheses: 1) the
use of palms in the four communities differs according to the
cultural niches that these resources occupy; 2) indigenous communities
hold more knowledge about palm resources; and 3) a part of the
indigenous knowledge was acquired from folk Amazonian populations
during the last century. We surveyed the knowledge of palm uses
in each community through a total of 140 semi-structured interviews
of adult (>18 years old) men and women (nP Yawanawá,
n Kaxinawá, n5 rubber tapper, and n5 ribeirinhos).
To determine the known uses of each palm species, we used the
“checklist interview”. We compared each community's knowledge
of palm uses for the 17 palm species that occurred in all four
communities by testing for differences in the mean number of
uses cited per informant (Tukey Multiple Comparisons test).
Using the Jaccard index we calculated the similarity of known
uses of these 17 species among the four communities. Elders
in the Yawanawá and Kaxinawá communities classified
each palm use as “traditional” or “recently acquired”. As hypothesized,
we found that the same resources available to all are used in
distinct ways, fitting into cultural niches differently in the
four communities. We also found a larger number of known palm
uses in the indigenous communities than in the folk communities.
A large portion of this indigenous knowledge, however, was attributable
to palm uses that had been acquired through contact with other
Amazonian groups in recent history (<100 years). Hence, while
“indigenous” palm knowledge is, indeed, richer that of more
recent arrivals in Southwestern Amazonia, the relatively recent
acquisition of knowledge has contributed substantially to this
richness.
Therefore, current ‘indigenous’ plant knowledge must be viewed
as the fruit of two non-exclusive processes: (1) the accumulation
of knowledge across thousands of years through trial and error
experimentation and (2) the acquisition and loss of knowledge
during contact with other Amazonian groups.
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Monday, October 25, 1999
John Witte, Director of the La Follette Institute
and Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, The Robert
M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Outcomes of America's First Voucher Program."
Abstract
This chapter from Professor John Witte's soon to be released
book on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program includes an analysis
of the successes of targeting that program on poor students
in need of alternatives to traditional public schools. He concludes
that the program was successful in providing those opportunities
and did not cream off the best students. The chapter also includes
an analysis of the effects of the program on schools, parents,
and student outcomes. Those outcomes demonstrate both "positive"
and "negative" results.
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Monday, November 8, 1999
Brian Skyrms,
Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences,
School of Social Sciences,
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science,
University of California, Irvin. "Evolution of Inference."
Abstract
I apply evolutionary game theory to questions that have been
crucial in early 20th century philosophy: Where does meaning
come from? In what sense, if any, can we say that inference
gets its license from meaning? This approach puts these questions
in a new light and allows us to take a few steps toward providing
naturalistic answers.
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Monday, November 15, 1999
James Wilson,
Resource
Economist, University
of Maine; Bobbi Low,
Human Ecologist, School
of Natural Resources & Environment. University
of Michigan; and Carl
Simon, Director
of Complex Systems Group, University
of Michigan. "Ways to model multi-species ecological
systems combined with institutions and resulting human behavior."
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Monday, December 6, 1999
Matthias Ruth,
Center for Energy and Environmental Studies and Department
of Geography,
Boston University. "Dynamic Modeling for Consensus
Building in Complex Environmental and Investment Decision Making."
Abstract
Many environmental and investment decisions require interpretation
of disparate information, juggling of conflicting goals, and
anticipation of likely future system behavior. The longer are
the spatial and temporal lags between decisions, actions and
systems response, the more difficult it is to generate consensus
about preferred strategies. The problems of consensus building
are particularly pronounced when decisions need to be made about
complex environmental issues, when the stakes are high and when
investment requirements are large. In this presentation I assess
traditional and new approaches to decision making in complex
settings. Based on this assessment, I illustrate the use of
Dynamic Modeling to generate consensus for environmental and
investment decision making. The illustrations will come from
ongoing research projects funded by US EPA. These projects make
use of Dynamic Modeling to investigate industrial strategies,
technology choice, energy use and emissions in the light of
alternative climate change policies. The projects combine insights
from engineering and socio-economics, use similar tools for
analysis and modeling, bring together scientists, stakeholders,
and decision makers, and are geared towards informing environmental
and investment decision making. The insights generated by these
projects are widely applicable and will be discussed in the
presentation.
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Monday, December 15, 1999
Yoshifume Ueda, Professor of Faculty of Economics,
Hiroshima
University. "The Management of the Global Commons:
Problems of Property-Right Approach."
Abstract
The possibility of collective action for cooperative use of
the global commons is discussed, and problems with tradable-permits
regime are argued.
By pointing out the existence of political entrepreneurs and
the existence of selfish individualists with long run time-horizon,
it is proved, on the same behavioral hypothesis of the Olsonian
group theory, that the collective actions of large groups can
be organized. When each country-player is recognized as the
representative of the majority long run type of each country,
we can suppose that all country-players play an international
social contract game. But a part of them are the representative
of the long run members. So, international social contract for
preservation of the global commons is negotiated by that part
of all countries. Therefore, some incentive designs should be
strategically devised in order to give non-signatories proper
incentive to the participation in cooperative preservation.
From this viewpoint, tradable-permits regime is reexamined,
and it is proposed that afforestation effort of developing countries
should be allowed to be traded in the market. Furthermore, it
is insisted that the permits market should devise incentive
design to stimulate the development of innovative green technologies
in order to fulfill the purpose of tradable-permits regime.
It is proposed that some super advance market for the future
possibility of emission reduction should be designed.
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