There is growing concern that the accelerated pace and increasing complexity of environmental change may be challenging people's ability to test, refine, and adjust livelihood strategies. This would be particularly challenging for poor households in hazardous environments, generating greater vulnerability to disasters. The context for this concern was examined in four rural communities from two different cultural realms along the Caribbean coast of Honduras. An ethnographic approach was used to understand how women household managers, community leaders, and elderly residents from Garifuna and Mestizo communities perceive and respond to hazards and other challenges in their environment. The analysis revealed how economic pressures combine with political context to contribute to an intensification of local land and resource use in the four communities. The consequent matrix of environmental hazards generates troubling uncertainties for these small-scale socioecological systems, particularly as the local ecological resources once available for livelihood adjustments become scarce. To make matters worse, institutional efforts to resolve environmental and economic challenges generating vulnerabilities for some rural communities are perceived as authoritarian, superimposed, and even culturally inappropriate. Confused or frustrated by so many uncertainties, households from both cultural realms try to adjust by increasing their dependence on an evolving web of political and financial resources beyond their communities, indeed from outside Honduras. / text

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters by Coursework and Research Report in the Department of History, the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg / This study analyzes the “socialization of the countryside” and its consequences for agricultural production in Manica district during the postcolonial period from 1975 until 1987. The impact of this policy, developed by FRELIMO as guerrilla movement during the struggle of liberation of Mozambique (1964-1974) and as FRELIMO government from 1975 until 1987, has been analyzed here in historical perspective. During the struggle in liberated zones, FRELIMO along with the rural African population developed a collective form of production inspired by African socialism developed by President Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. FRELIMO’s new policy was implemented in whole country after independence in 1975, through the creation of the state companies, communal villages, and cooperatives of production between 1976 and 1987. This policy was implemented in the countryside without having the rural experience necessary to inform its functioning. Additionally, the weakness of human resources in its management of the policy further undermined its success. Furthermore, the war led by RRENAMO from 1976 until its end in 1992 weakened the state’s resolve. These three factors became the basic causes of the policy’s abandonment in 1983, and its replaced by the neo-liberal economic adjustment policy in 1987. / MT2016

MCOM / Department of Economics / The study aimed to empirically examine the impact of foreign direct investment on economic growth in the Southern African Development Community countries for the period 1980-2015. The relation between foreign direct investment and economic growth has been a subject of extensive discussion in the economic literature. The debate revolves around the growth implications of foreign direct investment. The extraordinary increase in global FDI flows in the last three decades triggered an interest to investigate the growth implications of such huge amounts of cross-border capital movements. Owing to this surge in foreign direct investment flows and the effort countries are putting forth to attract it, it would seem straightforward to argue that foreign direct investment would convey net positive effects on economic growth of a host country. From a theoretical standpoint foreign direct investment has been shown to boost economic growth through technology transfer and diffusion. In light of the expected benefits of foreign direct investment, many empirical studies have been conducted on this subject matter. While the explosion of foreign direct investment flows is distinctive, the evidence accumulated on the growth effects remains mixed. Using fixed effect panel data analysis, on the overall, the findings of the study show a negative effect of FDI on economic growth in the SADC countries for the period 1980 to 2015. The findings are not in tandem with theoretical predictions from growth theorists and some empirical studies carried out on the same topic. The findings of the study imply that FDI does not seem to have an independent effect on economic growth for the panel of countries in the SADC region. This maybe because FDI flows to Africa and into the SADC countries, in particular, are channelled mainly to the extractive sector with little to no linkages with the other sectors of the host country economy. The findings of the study also show that the growth-enhancing potential of FDI is higher in middle-income countries than low-income countries in the SADC region.