Thèse--Lettres--Paris I, 1980. / Résumé en persan. Bibliogr. t. 2, p. 253-278. Index.

Texte remanié de: Thèse--Lettres--Paris I, 1975. / Bibliogr. p. 413-423.

Present-day development theory and practice highlight the potential of micro-entrepreneurship for poverty reduction in least developed countries. Fostered by the seminal writings of microfinance founder Muhammad Yunus and the bottom-of-the-pyramid propagator Krishnarao Prahalad, the new approach is marked by a stress on participation and sustainability, and the new, market-based development models. With the growing popularity of the new approach there has been an increased demand for research on the efficacy and impact of innovations. What has scarcely been addressed, however, is the legitimacy of the new paradigm within its contexts of application. Since engagement and participation have been made the focal point of the new approach, my research investigates how the innovative, mostly market-based models have been received by the local populations on the ground. This doctoral dissertation is looking up-close at the rural populations of Burundi, describing and explaining their perceptions, behaviors and actions in response to the market-based development innovations: microfinance, rural entrepreneurship and community social enterprise. Do the concepts of entrepreneurship, community engagement and participation find a fertile ground among the poorest rural dwellers of sub-Saharan Africa? Can subsistence farmers be entrepreneurs? How to create social value in the context of extreme resource scarcity? It is investigating these and other questions that guided the subsequent stages of my work. I based my dissertation on extensive field research, conducted periodically over the period of four years in the remote areas of rural Burundi.In the first chapter, I question the applicability of entrepreneurship-based interventions to the socio-cultural context of rural Burundi. Basing my quantitative analysis on a unique cross-section dataset from Burundi of over 900 households, I look into the entrepreneurial livelihood strategies at the near-subsistence level: diversifying crops, processing food for sale, supplementary wage work and non-agricultural employment. I find that the farmers living closer to the subsistence level are indeed less likely to pursue innovative entrepreneurial opportunities, unable to break the poverty cycle and move beyond subsistence agriculture. The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on by analyzing its drivers and inhibitors in the context of a subsistence economy. It questions the idea of alleviating rural poverty through the external promotion of entrepreneurship as it constitutes ‘a denial of the poor’s capacity for agency to bring about social change by themselves on their own terms’.Drawing on these findings, the second chapter focusses on the role of local communities as shareholders of projects. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the agrarian communities in rural Burundi accommodate the model of a community social enterprise. The project understudy, implemented by the UNICEF Burundi Innovation Lab, builds upon the provision of green energy generators to the village child protection committees in the energy-deficient rural regions of the country. The electricity-producing machines are also a new income source for the groups, transforming them into economically viable community enterprises. Since the revenue earned is to directly support the village orphans’ fund, the communities in question engage in a true post-development venture: they gradually assume the role of the development-provisioning organizations.The third chapter of this work focusses on the complex interaction between the microfinance providers and the population of its clients and potential clients: the rural poor. It draws on the existing research on positive deviance among African communities and explores the social entrepreneurial potential of the rule-breaking practices of microfinance programs’ beneficiaries. Using the storyboard methodology, I examine the strategies employed by the poor in Burundi to bypass institutional rules. My results suggest that transgressive practices and nonconformity of development beneficiaries can indeed be seen as innovative, entrepreneurial initiatives to reform the microfinance system from within, postulating a more participatory mode of MFIs’ organizational governance. The three empirical chapters provide concrete examples illustrating the contested nature of the development process. In the last, theoretical, chapter, I examine how the different conceptualizations of social entrepreneurship have been shaped by the disparate socio-political realities in the North and in the South. I then analyze how the process of constructing academic representation has been influenced by the prevalent public discourses.Since doubling or tripling of the external development finance has not sufficed to bring about systemic change, the assumption that technology, managerial efficacy and the leveraging power of financial markets could be applied to solving the problem of persisting global poverty has a lot of appeal. At the same time, my findings point to the fact that if the ultimate objective of development is broadly defined value creation, the definition of what constitutes value should be negotiated among all the stakeholders. The dissertation makes an important contribution to the understanding of participation, entrepreneurship and community engagement in the context of development studies.I strongly believe that development organizations must have a quality understanding of the social and cultural characteristics of the need or problem they are targeting in order to make productive decisions about the application and scaling of interventions. I very much hope that my work can provide some guidance for their work on the ground. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Produits principalement entre le IIe s. av. et le Ier s. ap. J.-C., les écrits agronomiques latins, de Caton à Pline l'Ancien, permettent d'évaluer et de comprendre les contraintes naturelles et sociales qui ont déterminé, de façon évolutive, un modèle d'organisation et de gestion du domaine agropastoral. Formes de raisonnement et caractéristiques de composition et d'énonciation participent d'un effort de codification de la science agronimique et de ses objets. Tout en impliquant une représentation idéale des paysages du fundus, les normes agronomiques romaines sont édictées de façon de plus en plus souple pour intégrer la pluralité et la diversité des situations agraires que rencontre Rome au fur et à mesure de son expansion. Une analyse de fréquence des thèmes relatifs aux paysages fait apparaître les critères majeurs d'appréciation de l'environnement qui retiennent l'attention des experts agronomiques dans la perspective d'une exploitation et d'un aménagement, raisonnés et rentables, de l'espace rural. Ces normes agronomiques sont également soutenues par des considérations d'ordre idéologique. Illustrées par l'utilisation de symboles et d'images, les valeurs prônées, issues de l'ornamentum nobiliaire, viennent justifier les principes d'ordre et de mesure qui dovent présider à l'organisation spatiale et humaine des fundi ruraux.

Rozprawa (o nadaniu tytulu docenta)--Warsaw, 1961. / With a summary in English. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

La thèse porte sur les organisations de coopération agricole au stade de la production (OCAP) en Belgique. Elle s’inscrit dans le champ de l’économie institutionnelle, de l’économie sociale et de l’économie politique agraire. À partir d’une enquête empirique, la recherche s’efforce d’étayer la thèse de la complexité du fonctionnement interne des OCAP en Belgique étant donné la multiplicité des objectifs poursuivis par leurs membres et la nature des relations sociales dans lesquelles sont insérées ces structures coopératives de production agricole. En tant qu’objet d’étude, les OCAP sont définies comme les formes volontaires de coopération qui portent sur les processus biologiques de la culture des plantes et de l'élevage des animaux. Ces arrangements institutionnels sont caractérisés par la construction d'un ensemble de règles collectives qui organisent la mise en commun de ressources et d’activités et par la négociation entre associés des critères de répartition des résultats monétaires et non monétaires issus du travail. Les OCAP se distinguent des coopératives agricoles largement développées depuis le 19e siècle en Europe de l’Ouest pour offrir des services en amont ou en aval de la production. Ces coopératives de services ont été constituées pour faciliter l’intégration verticale sur les marchés d’exploitations indépendantes tandis que les OCAP, en intervenant au stade de la production, organisent la coopération horizontale entre agriculteurs associés.Les OCAP sont relativement peu développées en Europe et ailleurs dans le monde. Pourtant, les arguments pour coopérer au stade de la production agricole sont multiples et articulent des motivations d’ordre économique, social, politique, écologique et idéologique. Elles relèvent notamment de la volonté d’accéder aux ressources productives, de bénéficier d’économies d’échelle, d’améliorer les conditions de travail ou de renforcer les interdépendances des exploitations avec leur environnement biophysique et socioéconomique. Plusieurs raisons peuvent toutefois expliquer le fait que les OCAP sont peu répandues, comme l’attachement des agriculteurs à leur terre ou l’apparition de déséconomies d’échelle à partir d’un seuil de dimension relativement bas, liées aux coûts de déplacement des travailleurs et du matériel et aux coûts de coordination du travail. Malgré ces difficultés, depuis les années 2000 en Belgique, de nouvelles initiatives coopératives au stade de la production agricole sont portées par des néo-agriculteurs et coexistent avec les autres types d’exploitations agricoles. Notre recherche interroge en particulier la diversité des pratiques organisationnelles déployées au sein des OCAP à travers l’analyse des conditions sociales de production, des mécanismes qui permettent d’articuler la multiplicité des objectifs poursuivis et des processus de démocratisation de l’économie rurale. Pour cela, nous avons mené trois enquêtes empiriques complémentaires à partir d’une combinaison de méthodes de recherche qualitative. La première permet de caractériser la diversité organisationnelle des OCAP par la construction d’une typologie empirique menée sur la base d’un échantillon de 31 organisations. Trois variables dichotomiques définissent les types d’OCAP :la mise en commun du travail de la terre, le contrôle de la production et l’étendue de la coopération. L’analyse des conditions sociales de production dans chacun des types procède ensuite à l’examen des formes d’accès au foncier et au capital d’exploitation, des modes de prise de décision, des conditions de travail et des modalités de répartition des résultats produits. Cette première étude met finalement en évidence les tensions qui caractérisent la nature des relations que les agriculteurs nouent entre eux et avec d’autres catégories d’acteurs. La deuxième enquête empirique investigue les mécanismes par lesquels les membres des structures intégrales de coopération agricole, dont la particularité est d’organiser en commun le travail de la terre selon des principes agroécologiques, parviennent à construire une cohérence interne à leur organisation étant donné la multiplicité des objectifs qu’ils poursuivent. À travers une analyse comparative de dix organisations, les structures coopératives de production agroécologique sont alors étudiées à travers le prisme des organisations hybrides car, au-delà de la logique commerciale, elles combinent des demandes contradictoires issues de leur engagement dans des logiques d’autogestion, d’agroécologie et d’ancrage territorial. Après avoir défini les propriétés de ces logiques institutionnelles, l’analyse met en évidence les tensions paradoxales qui découlent de leur combinaison et les réponses organisationnelles mises en œuvre pour poursuivre dans la durée les multiples rationalités engagées. La troisième analyse consiste en une monographie d’une OCAP dont la singularité est de répartir le contrôle de la production agroécologique entre agriculteurs et citoyens. L’analyse vise à préciser la notion de démocratie économique à partir des principes qu’elle sous-tend et des principales praxis démocratiques mises en œuvre par les acteurs pour réguler leurs activités économiques. En particulier, nous avons cherché à comprendre les contradictions des pratiques organisationnelles avec les principes de démocratie économique et avec certains fondements du mouvement coopératif, ainsi que les tensions internes qui en résultent. Ce travail nous permet finalement d’appréhender dans une perspective critique et nuancée la transformation du rôle des citoyens dans les activités économiques et la diversification contemporaine des formes coopératives dans le secteur agricole et alimentaire induites par l’émergence d’initiatives aux multiples parties prenantes. / This thesis focuses on agricultural production cooperatives (APCs) in Belgium. It is framed within the fields of institutional economics, social economics, and agrarian political economy. Based on qualitative empirical research, this work seeks to untangle the thesis of the complexity of the internal functioning of APCs in Belgium, given the multiplicity of objectives pursued by their members, and the nature of the social relations in which these agricultural production cooperatives are embedded. APCs are defined here as voluntary forms of cooperation that deal with the biological processes of cropping plants and rearing animals. These voluntary arrangements are premised upon the construction of a set of collective rules that organize the pooling of resources and activities, as well as the negotiation between associates of the criteria for redistribution of monetary and non-monetary working outcomes. APCs are different from the agricultural cooperatives that, since the 19th century, have developed widely in Western Europe to offer upstream or downstream production services. The latter were established to facilitate the vertical integration of independent farms into markets. Instead, APCs, by intervening at the production stage, organize horizontal cooperation between associated farmers.APCs are relatively undeveloped in Europe and elsewhere in the world. However, incentives for cooperating at the agricultural production stage are multiple, and articulate economic, social, political, ecological, and ideological motivations. Such motivations relate to the desire to access productive resources, to benefit from economies of scale, to improve working conditions, or to strengthen the interdependence of farms with their biophysical and socioeconomic environment. Notwithstanding this, various elements may explain the limited presence of APCs such as farmers' attachment to the land or the appearance of diseconomies of scale from low dimension thresholds, linked to the costs of moving workers and equipment and the costs of coordinating work. Despite these difficulties, in Belgium, from the 2000s, new initiatives of agricultural production cooperation have been created by neo-farmers, and coexist with other social types of farms.Our research specifically examines the diversity of organizational practices implemented within APCs through the analysis of the social conditions of production, the mechanisms that allow the combination of the multiple objectives pursued and the processes of democratization of the rural economy. To do this, we conducted three complementary empirical analyses using a combination of qualitative research methods. The first analysis allows us to characterize the organizational diversity of APCs by constructing an empirical typology based on a sample of 31 organizations. Three dichotomous variables define the types of APCs: the pooling of labour on the land, the control of production, and the extent of cooperation. From the analysis of the social conditions of production in each type of APCs, it then proceeds to examine the forms of access to land and capital, the modes of decision-making, the working conditions, and the modalities of outcomes distribution.The second empirical study investigates the mechanisms by which members of the integral structures of agricultural cooperation, whose peculiarity is to organize farming labour collectively according to agroecological principles, manage to build an internal coherence within their organization given the multiple objectives they pursue. Through a comparative analysis of ten organizations, agroecological production cooperatives are studied through the prism of hybrid organizations, as they combine contradictory demands stemming from their commitment to logics of self-management, agroecology, and territorial embeddedness. After defining the properties of these institutional logics, the analysis reveals the paradoxical tensions that arise from the combination and the organisational responses adopted to pursue this multiplicity of rationalities on the long run. The third empirical analysis consists of a single case study on one type of APC, whose singularity is to allocate the control of production between farmers and citizens. Through an in-depth study of a citizen agroecological production cooperative, the analysis aims to clarify the notion of economic democracy by looking at its underpinning principles, and at the main democratic praxis that actors implement to regulate their economic activities. In particular, we unveil the internal contradictions that emerge from the organizational practices with the principles of economic democracy and certain foundations of the cooperative movement. This work finally allows us to grasp, through the adoption of a critical and nuanced perspective, the transformation of the citizen's role in economic activities, and the contemporary diversification of cooperative forms propelled by the emergence of multi-stakeholder initiatives in the agricultural sector. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation comprises four chapters, which mainly deal with female's participation in household decision-making, a very important aspect of female's bargaining power within the household and closely linked to female's empowerment. The first three chapters, which all deal with female's participation in household decision-making, are two sides of the same coin, in that while the first one delves into the determinants of female's participation in household decision-making, the second and third chapters deal with its beneficial consequences. The fourth chapter is linked with Chapter 1. As a matter of fact, the data used in Chapter 1 has been collected in Rural Burundi, in the framework of the FNRS/FRFC-funded project “Microfinance Services, Intra-household Behavior and Welfare in Developing Countries: A Longitudinal and Experimental Approach”, which funded my PhD scholarship. In 2012, the project funded data collection in Rural Burundi. In respect to the experimental component of the project, these are baseline data. The 2012 household survey targeted a sample of rural households that have been interviewed in 1998 and 2007. This is where the longitudinal design of the project comes into play. Independently from the experimental research, the longitudinal nature of the data, that is to say three waves of data (1998, 2007 and 2012), had the advantage of allowing panel analysis of interesting and relevant issues in development, including for example the long-term welfare effects of shocks at either individual or household levels.In Chapter 1, entitled “The Power of The Family: kinship and Intra-household Decision-making in Rural Burundi” and co-authored with Bram De Rock and Philip Verwimp, we delve into the determinants of female's participation in household decision-making, by laying a particular emphasis on the role of female's kinship. We show that in rural Burundi the characteristics of the female's kinship are highly correlated with her decision-making power. First, a female whose own immediate family is at least as rich as her husband's counterpart enjoys a greater say over children- and asset-related decision-making. Second, the size, relative wealth and proximity of the extended family also matter. Third, kinship characteristics prove to be more important than (standard) individual and household characteristics. Finally, we also show that the female's say over asset-related decision-making is positively associated with males' education, more than with female's education per se. All these correlation patterns can inform policies aiming at empowering women or targeting children through women's empowerment.In Chapter 2, entitled “The Returns of I Do: Multifaceted Female Decision-making and Agricultural Yields in Tanzania?”, I use the third round of the Tanzanian National Panel Survey to investigate the effect of multifaceted female's empowerment in agriculture on agricultural yields. The classic approach in the empirical literature on gender gap in agriculture includes the gender of the plot's owner/manager as the covariate of interest and interprets the associated coefficient estimate as the gender gap in agricultural productivity. Unlike this classic approach in the analysis of productivity differentials, my approach lays emphasis on the overlapping and interaction effects of manifold aspects of female's empowerment in agriculture, including female plot's ownership, female plot's management and female output's control. I find significant productivity gaps, which the classic empirical approach does not bring out in the same context. As compared to plots (solely) owned, managed and controlled by male, (i) plots merely owned by female and (ii) those owned & managed (but not controlled) by female are less productive, but those owned, managed & controlled by female are not. Furthermore, the latter are the more productive among plots at least owned by female. All these productivity gaps are predominantly explained by the structural effect, that is differences in productivity returns to observable production factors. Our findings are robust along a number of dimensions and suggest that female's management and control rights are of prime importance. Therefore, female plot's owners should be entitled the rights to manage their plot and, subsequently and most importantly, the rights to control the (agricultural) output of their work, for their productivity to be enhanced and the gender gap in agriculture to be closed. In Chapter 3, entitled “Say On Income and Children's Outcomes: Evidence from Nigeria”, I delve into the effect of female bargaining power on child education and labor outcomes in Nigeria. Female bargaining power is proxied by “female say on labor income”, rather than by her income per se. This is motivated by the fact the female labor force participation might be low in some contexts, while control over income is by all means what matters the most. The empirical methodology accounts for a number of empirical issues, including endogeneity and sample selection issues of female say on labor income, the multi-equation and mixed process features of the child outcomes, as well as the fact that hours of work are left-censored. My findings are consistent with the overall idea that female say on income leads to better child outcomes, rather than female income earning per se. Nevertheless, the type of income under female control, child gender and child outcome matter. Chapter 4, entitled “Violence Exposure and Welfare Over Time: Evidence From The Burundi Civil War” and co-authored with Marion Mercier and Philip Verwimp, investigates the relationship between exposure to conflict and poverty dynamics over time. We use a three-wave panel data from Burundi, which tracked individuals and reported local-level violence exposure in 1998, 2007 and 2012. Firstly, the data reveal that headcount poverty has not changed since 1998 while we observe multiple transitions into and out of poverty. Moreover, households exposed to the war exhibit a lower level of welfare than non-exposed households, with the difference between the two groups predicted to remain significant at least until 2017, i.e. twelve years after the conflict termination. The correlation between violence exposure and deprivation over time is confirmed in a household-level panel setting. Secondly, our empirical investigation shows how violence exposure over different time spans interacts with households' subsequent welfare. Our analysis of the determinants of households' likelihood to switch poverty status (i.e. to fall into poverty or escape poverty) combined with quintile regressions suggest that, (i) exposure during the first phase of the conflict has affected the entire distribution, and (ii) exposure during the second phase of the conflict has mostly affected the upper tail of the distribution: initially non-poor households have a higher propensity to fall into poverty while initially poor households see their propensity to pull through only slightly decrease with recent exposure to violence. Although not directly testable with the data at hand, these results are consistent with the changing nature of violence in the course of the Burundi civil war, from relatively more labor-destructive to relatively more capital-destructive. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis explores the entire cycle of education, from initial access to schooling, over degree completion, to returns to education. Despite recent gains in increasing access, an tens of millions of children worldwide are still out of school. Abolishing school fees has increased enrollment rates in several countries where enrollments were low and fees were high. However, such policies may be less effective, or even have negative consequences, when supply-side responses are weak. The first part of the thesis evaluates the impacts of a tuition waiver program in Haiti, which provided public financing to nonpublic schools conditional on not charging tuition. The chapter concludes that school's participation in the program results in more students enrolled, more staff, and slightly higher student-teacher ratios. The program also reduces grade repetition and the share of overage students. While the increase in students does not directly equate to a reduction in the number of children out of school, it does demonstrate strong demand from families for the program and a correspondingly strong supply response from the nonpublic sector.Pertaining degree completion, it is well established that natural disasters can have a negative effect on human capital accumulation. However, a comparison of the differential impacts of distinct disaster classes is missing. Using census data and information from DesInventar and EMDAT, two large disaster databases, the second part of the thesis assesses how geological disasters and climatic shocks affect the upper secondary degree attainment of adolescents. The chapter focuses on Mexico, given its diverse disaster landscape and lack of obligatory upper secondary education over the observed time period. While all disaster types are found to impede attainment, climatic disasters that are not infrastructure-destructive (e.g. droughts) have the strongest negative effect, decreasing educational expansion by over 40%. The effects seem largely driven by demand-side changes such as increases in school dropouts and fertility, especially for young women. The results may also be influenced by deteriorated parental labor market outcomes. Supply-side effects appear to be solely driven by infrastructure-destructive climatic shocks (e.g. floods). These findings thus call for differential public measures according to specific disaster types and an enhanced attention to climatic events given their potentially stronger impact on younger generations.It is also widely appreciated that natural disasters can have negative impacts on local labor market outcomes. However, the study of differential types of negative capital shocks, the underlying labor market mechanisms, and the context of the poorest countries have been neglected. Following testable predictions of economic theory, the third part of the thesis exploits the exogenous variation of destruction of human and physical capital caused by the 2010 Haiti earthquake to disentangle the differential impact on local individual monetary returns to education. Employing individual-level survey data from before and after the earthquake the chapter finds that the returns decreased on average by 37%, especially in equipment-capital intensive industry. Higher educated individuals adjust into low-paying self-employment or agriculture. The returns are particularly shock-sensitive for urban residents, migrants, males, and people over age 25. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished