Based on in-depth field work and living with the nomads for a whole year, Asghar Tahmasebi provides a vivid insight into the Shahsevans' strategy to cope with both political impacts and changing environmental conditions of their traditional way of life.

At the start of the 21st century, fighting poverty and protecting the environment are two of the most urgent challenges facing the international community. Environmental changes will jeopardize people's survival to an even greater extent in the future, and will hit the poor hardest. To meet these challenges, it will be essential to breathe new life into the partnership between industrialized and developing countries. It will be equally essential to combine poverty reduction with environmental protection in an integrated policy structure spanning all levels from local to global. In this report, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) shows that global environmental policy is a prerequisite for global poverty reduction. WBGU analyses the relevant policy processes and delivers recommendations charting the way forward. 'With its interdisciplinary approach, providing a complex and systematic analysis of the poverty-environment nexus, WBGU's latest report breaks new ground. Indira Gandhi's old, convenient maxim was 'Poverty is the biggest polluter'. Put forward at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, it has been sorely misused ever since to override environmental precaution and prioritize economic development strategies instead. The new WBGU report maps out a way to shape a coherent environment and development policy. This report revitalizes the Rio spirit and gives it a robust scientific base'. Prof Dr Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Member of the German Bundestag (MdB)

Drought draws together contributions from over 75 leading international researchers in the field to present the most comprehensive body of research on the physical and social dimensions of drought to date. Including an extensive range of case-studies covering the most drought-prone and most affected countries, the contributors examine new technology, planning methodologies and mitigation actions from recent drought experiences worldwide. Following a discussion of the critical concepts of drought, the work is divided into the following additional parts: · causes and predictability · monitoring and early warning techniques · impacts and assessment methodologies · links between drought and other global issues · conclusions and future challenges

A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences. This volume by a prominent scholar of East African societies is a powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier theory and research tended to describe social and economic systems in some form of equilibrium. However recent thinking in human ecology, evolutionary biology, not to mention in economic and political theory has come to assign to "risk" a prominent role in predictive modeling of behavior. It turns out that risk minimalization is central to the understanding of individual strategies and numerous social institutions. It is not simply a peripheral and transient moment in a group’s history. Anthropologists interested in forager societies have emphasized risk management strategies as a major force shaping hunting and gathering routines and structuring institutions of food sharing and territorial behavior. This book builds on some of these developments but through the analysis of quite complex pastoral and farming peoples and in populations with substantial known histories. The method of analysis depends heavily on the controlled comparisons of different populations sharing some cultural characteristics but differing in exposure to certain risks or hazards. The central questions guiding this approach are: 1) How are hazards generated through environmental variation and degradation, through increasing internal stratification, violent conflicts and marginalization? 2) How do these hazards result in damages to single households or to individual actors and how do these costs vary within one society? 3) How are hazards perceived by the people affected? 4) How do actors of different wealth, social status, age and gender try to minimize risks by delimiting the effect of damages during an on-going crisis and what kind of institutionalized measures do they design to insure themselves against hazards, preventing their occurrence or limiting their effects? 5) How is risk minimization affected by cultural innovation and how can the importance of the quest for enhanced security as a driving force of cultural evolution be estimated?

In Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced. Philosophies that take vulnerability as a moral object contribute to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action, foreign to vulnerability and the notion of recognition offered by critical theory does not correct this deficit. Instead, Ferrarese argues that vulnerability, as susceptibility to a harmful event, is above all a breach of normative expectations. She demonstrates that these expectations are not mental phenomena but are situated between subjects and must even be conceived as institutions. On this basis she argues that the link between the political and vulnerability cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation of moral principles. Rather she seeks to rethink the political by taking vulnerability as the starting point and thereby understands the political as simultaneously referring to the advent of a world, the emergence of a relation, and the appearance of a political subject.

Global risk potentials and their interplay with economic, social and ecological processes of change have emerged as a challenge to the international community. By presenting this report, the Council hopes to contribute constructively to an effective, efficient and objective management of the risks of global change. The approach taken by the Council is first to classify globally relevant risks and then to assign to these classes of risk both established and innovative risk assessment strategies and risk management tools. On this basis, management priorities can be set. The Council further recommends a number of cross-cutting strategies for international policies. These include worldwide alignment of liability law, creation of environmental liability funds, establishment of a United Nations Risk Assessment Panel and implementation of strategies aimed at reducing vulnerability to risk.