Many countries around the world are engaged in decentralization processes, and most African countries face serious problems with forest governance, from benefits sharing to illegality and sustainable forest management. This book summarizes experiences to date on the extent and nature of decentralization and its outcomes - most of which suggest an underperformance of governance reforms - and explores the viability of different governance instruments in the context of weak governance and expanding commercial pressures over forests. Findings are grouped into two thematic areas: decentralization, livelihoods and sustainable forest management; and international trade, finance and forest sector governance reforms. The authors examine diverse forces shaping the forest sector, including the theory and practice of decentralization, usurpation of authority, corruption and illegality, inequitable patterns of benefits capture and expansion of international trade in timber and carbon credits, and discuss related outcomes on livelihoods, forest condition and equity. The book builds on earlier volumes exploring different dimensions of decentralization and perspectives from other world regions, and distills dimensions of forest governance that are both unique to Africa and representative of broader global patterns. The authors ground their analysis in relevant theory while drawing out implications of their findings for policy and practice.

The Great Lakes region of Africa has seen dramatic changes. After a decade of war, repression, and genocide, loosely allied regimes have replaced old-style dictatorships. The Path of a Genocide examines the decade (1986-97) that brackets the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This collection of essays is both a narrative of that event and a deep reexamination of the international role in addressing humanitarian issues and complex emergencies.Nineteen donor countries and seventeen multilateral organizations, international agencies, and international nongovernmental organizations pooled their efforts for an in-depth evaluation of the international response to the conflict in Rwanda. Original studies were commissioned from scholars from Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Ethiopia, Norway, Great Britain, France, Canada, and the United States. While each chapter in this volume focuses on one dimension of the Rwanda conflict, together they tell the story of this unfolding genocide and the world's response.The Path of a Genocide offers readers a perspective in sharp contrast to the tendency to treat a peace agreement as the end to conflict. This is a detailed effort to make sense of the political crisis and genocide in Rwanda and the effects it had on its neighbors.

Le terme promotion de la santé en Afrique, près de 30 ans après l'adoption de la Charte d'Ottawa, continue d'avoir des connotations complètement hors du sens que lui confère cette charte. Cela n'est pas étonnant quand on sait que la notion de santé dans ce contexte africain équivaut à la lutte contre la maladie à travers les soins de santé dispensés par des professionnels de la santé dans des formations sanitaires et les hôpitaux. L'évolution que connait le continent depuis quelques décennies est de donner un peu plus de place à la communauté à travers les relais communautaires dans une participation communautaire vidée de son contenu, car le pouvoir n'est jamais passé entre les mains des communautés.C'est au vu de tout ceci que le présent ouvrage à sa raison d'être pour expliquer les fondements de l'autonomisation communautaire et de la promotion de la santé avec leur importance pour la région africaine en proie aux mauvais indicateurs de santé comparativement aux autres régions du monde.

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated. Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

"Until the 1960s, it was widely assumed that in Western Europe the 'New Monarchy' propelled kingdoms and principalities onto a modern nation-state trajectory. John I of Portugal (1358-1433), Charles VII (1403-1461) and Louis XI (1423-1483) of France, Henry VII and Henry VIII of England (1457-1509, 1509-1553), Isabella of Castile (1474-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (1479-1516) were, by improving royal administration, by bringing more continuity to communication with their estates and by introducing more regular taxation, all seen to have served that goal. In this view, princes were assigned to the role of developing and implementing the sinews of state as a sovereign entity characterized by the coherence of its territorial borders and its central administration and government. They shed medieval traditions of counsel and instead enforced relations of obedience toward the emerging 'state'."--Provided by publisher.

This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequences in colonial and postcolonial moments. Since the late nineteenth century, the “educability” of the native was the subject of several debates and experiments: numerous voices, arguments, and agendas emerged, involving multiple institutions and experts, governmental and non-governmental, religious and laic, operating from the corridors of international organizations to the towns and rural villages of Africa. This plurality of expressions of political, social, cultural, and economic imagination of education and development is at the core of this collective work.