With structural changes in agriculture, new types of forest owners have become increasingly important. This article develops an empirically-based typology of forest owners in Austria. Based on a representative survey and by means of cluster analysis, seven types of forest owners are identified. These types form a sequence, ranging from forest owners with a strong agricultural background to forest owners with no agricultural background at all. The latter exhibit markedly different behaviour in various respects, e.g. in their interest in forestrelated information. The increasing number of 'new' forest owners raises important questions for forest policy, especially how policy instruments can reach these owners and how extension services can address them.
Uganda has experienced a major policy shift from a supply-driven to a demand-driven approach in rural water provision since 1990. The article sheds light on the rural population's access to safe water within the changing institutional frameworks. We analysed individual and group interviews with key informants from national to community levels and relevant official documents with the 'SocialEcological Systems' framework and the 'design principles'. Since the implementation of the demand-driven approach, rural safe water coverage has slightly improved but operation and maintenance of water sources pose a great challenge hampering, longterm access to safe water. The abrupt and top-down imposed policy shift has resulted in competing signals from old and new policies creating uncertainty and ambiguity about responsibilities, rules and incentives. The analysis shows the importance of taking into account the implications of national institutional disturbances on local collective action for long-term access to safe water.
Responding to a number of longstanding challenges such as poverty, wide-ranging inequalities, environmental problems, and migration, requires new and creative responses that are often not provided by traditional governments. Social innovations can offer socio-ecological and economic solutions by introducing new practices that reduce social inequalities, disproportionate resource use and foster sustainable development. Understanding the role of social innovations is especially complicated in unstable institutional environments, e.g. in developing countries and countries in transition. This paper analyses nine social innovations in rural areas in Serbia, based on in-depth interviews and document analysis. This analysis reveals factors that facilitate or constrain social innovations whilst simultaneously identifying related formal and informal institutional voids, for example, poor law enforcement, a lack of adequate infrastructure, lack of trust, as well as norms and values that bolster patriarchal systems. The results that emerged from this research show that social innovations are operating in spite of these challenges and are facilitating improvements in a number of the aforementioned challenging areas. Some innovators engage in social entrepreneurship activities because of subsistence-oriented goals, while others follow idealistic or life-style oriented goals, thus creating new social values. Moving beyond these observations, this paper also identifies means to overcome institutional voids, such as creation of context-specific organisational structures, improved legal frameworks, and innovative financial mechanisms.
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