In developing countries, skills development has been neglected. Skills development does not appear in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or in many poverty reduction strategies and has been side-lined in favour of investment in primary education. However, it is hoped that discussion of skills development in the 2005 Global Monitoring Report and the forthcoming World Summit in September 2005, will refocus attention on skills training. In Ghana, skills development has received too little actual emphasis, despite the rhetoric of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper and more than one hundred and fifty years of preoccupation with making education more relevant to the world of work. This paper argues that the current state of, and recent trends in, skills development opportunities in rural Ghana fail to adequately address the multiple occupational pathways of the youth, and especially the poor, as they attempt to become fully and productively engaged in decent livelihoods in the rural informal economy. Skills development interventions follow a top-down strategy, with programmes having little labour market relevance, and post-training support that is either absent or weak. Support for skills development in the informal economy, which is by far the largest destination for school leavers, is virtually non-existent. This paper will analyse and critique skills development in relation to Ghana's rural informal economy. This paper argues that the underlying assumption of the Ghanaian skills development agenda, that skills training solves un/under-employment and leads to economic growth and poverty reduction, will not be realised unless an effective and innovative pro-poor informal economy strategy is developed in order for skills development to result in livelihood outcomes that are both decent and productive. 1 The author gratefully acknowledges the Economic and Social Research Council for covering fieldwork and research costs for this paper (grant number PTA-030-2002-00044). This paper also draws in part on a longer study of education and training policy in Ghana, part of a multi-country study on post-basic education and training funded by DFID. The full study, Palmer, R. (2005) Beyond the Basics: Post-basic Education and Training and Poverty Reduction in Ghana, and more information on the full project, is available in electronic format from http://www.cas.ed.ac.uk/pbet.html. The author gratefully acknowledges comments from Professor Kenneth King, Rachel Hayman and Ruth Wedgwood all from the Centre for African Studies. Some of you might be asking yourself this question: What next after this graduation?... You will need to start working immediately… but your parents and guardians perhaps do not have means to set you up in business. The government is mindful of this situation and efforts are being put in place to offer you some assistance. In view of the problems which were associated with a similar scheme organised a few years ago where the majority of people who were given free tools and kits after their training...

Universities are both disseminators and producers of the climate knowledge needed to institute the social and cultural change required for climate adaptation and mitigation to occur. They also have the opportunity to lead and model pro-environmental behavior, yet often have large carbon budgets, partly caused by staff travel. This paper explores this topic via an institutional case study of what factors motivate the academic community to undertake plane travel and the implications this has for wielding wider societal influence in terms of pro-environmental behavior. We report on a year-long qualitative social science study of academic plane travel at the University of Adelaide, South Australia where we investigated the tension between academic requirements to travel and the institution’s formal commitment to sustainability within the Campus Sustainability Plan. We found that, while many academics were worried about climate change, very few were willing to change their current practice and travel less because they are not institutionally incentivized to do so. There is a fear of not flying: plane travel is perceived as a key driver for career progression and this is an ongoing barrier to pro-environmental behavior. We conclude that institutional and political change will be required for individual change to occur and sustainable agendas to be met within academic communities.

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This paper explores how Australia's Indigenous peoples understand and respond to climate change impacts on their traditional land and seas. Our results show that: (i) Indigenous peoples are observing modifications to their country due to climate change, and are doing so in both ancient and colonial time scales; (ii) the ways that climate change terminology is discursively understood and used is fundamental to achieving deep engagement and effective adaptive governance; (iii) Indigenous peoples in Australia exhibit a high level of agency via diverse approaches to climate adaptation; and (iv) humour is perceived as an important cultural component of engagement about climate change and adaptation. However, wider governance regimes consistently attempt to "upscale" Indigenous initiatives into their own culturally governed frameworks -or ignore them totally as they "don't fit" within neoliberal policy regimes. We argue that an opportunity exists to acknowledge the ways in which Indigenous peoples are agents of their own change, and to support the strategic localism of Indigenous adaptation approaches through tailored and place-based adaptation for traditional country. ARTICLE HISTORY

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