This is a study of property relations and collective action. It explores how agropastoralists in Kangchenjunga, a set of Himalayan villages in northeast Nepal, understand, use, and collectively manage land-based resources. The study is broken into five sections. The first part, I explore the ecological, historical, and social settings in which Kangchenjunga's commons regime operates. Part two looks at production and exchange and shows that most Kangchenjunga households are able to eke out a surprisingly stable and flexible livelihood, despite the risks of living at high altitude. The third section is an examination of property relations in Kangchenjunga. Institutions regulate the use of forests, pastures, and cropland: they determine access to resources, rotate and rest pastures, close areas near agricultural land to grazing, appoint cattle watchers to monitor and enforce cattle bans, and set days after which fodder on both private and communal lands can be harvested, and designate areas of forest from which green wood cannot be cut. These institutions have a long history, but they are nonetheless dynamic and flexible. Power is the subject of the fourth part of the dissertation. In Kangchenjunga, power and authority are exercised in a diffuse and diverse manner. Formal institutions and informal practices, structures, and processes govern the public sphere. Moreover, authority and power are also manifested in social relations, norms of proper conduct, and religious and secular beliefs. Part five weaves together the themes of production, property, and power by exploring recent pressures affecting property relations and collective action in Kangchenjunga. In the past several decades, economic, political, and demographic changes have increased competition for fodder and grazing, heightened insecurity of ownership and management rights, challenged the legitimacy of local systems of governance and authority, and generated heterogeneous interests among resource users. Despite these pressures, however, resource management institutions in Kangchenjunga have not broken down. Rather villagers have resisted attempts to enclose or nationalise the commons, and have modified their CPR institutions to accommodate economic and demographic change.

This dissertation attempts to investigate income disparities between the rural and urban sectors of the provincial and lower levels in Heilongjiang Province by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Unlike most studies on income disparity, this research avoids being a purely economic calculation by adding first-hand data from the interviews with the peasants and local cadres. It is also one of the few studies to examine the size of the income gap by estimating the overall Gini coefficients for Heilongjiang Province and one of the first attempts to study the composition of the income divide in this region by working out the Theil Index based on county level data. Findings confirm that, during the reform years the income disparities in Heilongjiang Province have been increasing, mainly due to the growing divide between the rural and urban sectors. In addition, the enlarged rural-urban income disparity is the result of the limited resource inflow into and great outflow out of the rural households. However, such resource flows at the micro level are deeply influenced by the national policies, which decide the overall resource movements between sectors. Meanwhile, the redirection of resources at the lower level is also subject to non-economic factors, such as local <i>guanxi</i> relationships. The central government has introduced polices aimed at increasing rural income since 2004, such as the removal of agricultural taxes. However, as agricultural tax and its affiliated charges had been the major source of local revenue, its abolition would definitely exacerbate the local finance difficulties and have an adverse effect on rural residents in terms of income and income-earning opportunities. The overall impact of the state’s pro-agricultural policies is far from clear now, and it is argued that with the institutions that keep the rural and urban sectors separated remaining unchanged, the influence of any pro-agricultural policies in reducing rural-urban income disparities will be severely limited.

It is a widespread assumption in economic geography, regional studies and the economics of innovation that firms located in clusters benefit from personal knowledge networks and technological knowledge spillovers. However, it remains unclear to what extent these benefits actually occur. Furthermore, the spatial dimensions of knowledge networks and the role of different forms of proximity remain underexplored. This thesis addresses these issues by examining the role of personal knowledge networks for research and development (R&amp;D) workers in the Cambridge Information Technology Cluster. The empirical results are based on interviews and a survey with 105 R&amp;D workers in 46 innovation-based firms in the greater Cambridge region, UK. This thesis systematically examines to what extent, how and why different types of extra-firm personal relations lead to knowledge flows. The analysis shows the reasons why extra-firm personal knowledge networks are not important for the work of many R&amp;D workers, in particular non-managerial engineers and developers. Furthermore, the results reveal the social mechanisms of personal knowledge networks. This illustrates that the role of spatial proximity varies for the formation of networks, the maintenance of network relations, and the actual knowledge flows through networks. Overall, the results challenge widespread assumptions in economic geography. They show that most R&amp;D workers have only few local personal knowledge contacts and local technological knowledge spillovers seem very limited. Counter to much of the existing theory, in one of the most innovative and successful high-technology regions in Europe, the vast majority of R&amp;D workers do not perceive a real knowledge benefit from being located next to many innovative firms in the same sector for their work.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.