HE study of African town populations may be said to raise some special T theoretical issues in those many areas of Africa where labor migrancy prevails. These are areas where, by and large, the African "town population" is not clearly distinct, It still mostly consists of Africans who are spending parts of their lives in town, in between periods spent in the rural hinterland, and who continue thinking of the hinterland, rather than the town, as their permanent "home" because of the greater security there.One kind of theoretical challenge raised by this phenomenon of migrancy has recently been taken up with marked success. That is, the ongoing nature of the urban social systems has been successfully distinguished from the temporary or shifting nature of the migrant personnel. This is one of the greatest single theoretical contributions made by a recent notable series of studies of Rhodesian Copperbelt towns (e.g., Epstein 1958; Mitchell 1960a; Gluckman 1960). These studies demonstrate that African urban systems, such as trade unions, can and should be studied as urban systems in their own right, independently of the fact that the migrant members are recruited from rustic (tribal) life and keep melting away into it again. As Gluckman has it (1960:57), "an African miner is a miner." His activities at work, and the relations he forms at work, need to be considered in relation to an industrial context, not a tribal one.Thus the Copperbelt work has seemed to forswear "relating the urban African to his tribal background," if by this we mean considering his connections with tribal systems in the hinterland. It has recognized the validity of tribes as categories of interaction within the town setting, but has mostly avoided "explaining" town-located phenomena by reference to tribal systems located outside the town.As a working principle for the study of African towns (or urban societies, or urban social systems), this principle of ignoring what goes on "outside" would seem to be unexceptionable. In much the same way, when an anthropologist works in the tribal hinterland, one would expect an analysis of the local social systems-age-sets, clans, lineages, or whatever they might bewithout much regard for the turnover of personnel caused by migrant members going away to work in town and without reference to what goes on in that "outside" field.On the other hand, it seems evident that in regions of labor migrancy a case exists for the study of migrancy itself as a supplement to the study of towns and town-located systemsS2 The fact that the same individuals are apt 576

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The UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) has potential ramifications for the country’s electricity sector, given its increasing interlinkage with other EU electricity systems. Brexit could hamper the development toward higher market integration and the realization of new interconnector projects. Moreover, a fall in the value of the Pound, resulting from Brexit in the medium term, could also affect the electricity trading structure. Combining a European electricity market model and a multi-criteria decision analysis tool, this study assesses the implications of Brexit for the electricity market of Great Britain (hereafter GB) for 2030, from the perspective of (i) political decision makers, (ii) electricity consumers, and (iii) producers. Results indicate that the implications of Brexit depend on the future development of the GB electricity system and on the objectives of the respective stakeholders. Possible opportunities brought by Brexit under a low-carbon trajectory contrast with greater challenges and tradeoffs between stakeholders under alternative power system development paths. Despite increased British autonomy in energy and climate matters, there remains interdependency between British and EU energy policy.

Several European countries plan to phase out coal-fired power plants in order to reach their greenhouse gas abatement targets. Additionally, the phase-out will bring about so-called ancillary effects or co-effects. In our study, we focus on the co-effects induced in the countries that export coal to Europe. Furthermore, we examine the ancillary effects imposed on China as a major supplier of technologies (like solar energy technologies) that will replace coal-fired power plants. Using a combination of an input-output model, econometric analysis and employing the concept of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, we assess impacts of coal phase-out policies on environmental, economic, and societal dimensions. Our results show that despite negative impacts on income and employment in coal-exporting countries, a phase-out of coal-fired power plants is linked with multiple positive effects. In particular, we observe improvements in water management and biodiversity conservation, reduced release of pollutants, and improvements on a societal level. However, even if we consider a reduction in the use of coal in the European steel production sector as an additional challenge, these positive impacts on coal exporting countries remain rather small. The same applies to the effects we observe for China.

The main drivers of transformation processes of electricity markets stem from climate policies and changing economic environments. In order to analyse the respective developments, modelling approaches regularly rely on multiple structural and parametric simplifications. For example, discontinuities in economic development (recessions and booms) are frequently disregarded. Distorting effects that are caused by such simplifications tend to scale up with an extension of the time horizon of the analysis and can significantly affect the accuracy of long-term projections. In this study, we include information on economic discontinuities and elaborate on their influences on short-and long-term modelling outcomes. Based on historical data, we identify the impact of a high-amplitude change in economic parameters and examine its cumulative effect on the German electricity market by applying a techno-economic electricity market model for the period from 2005 to 2014. Similar changes may consistently occur in the future and we expect that a more comprehensive understanding of their effects on long-term scenarios will increase the validity of long-term models. Results indicate that policy decision making based on modelling frameworks can benefit from a comprehensive understanding of the underlying simplifications of most scenario studies.