Dealing with Power Games in a Companion Modelling Process: Lessons from Community Water Management in Thailand Highlands

Abstract

Although stakeholder participation is expected to promote equitable and sustainable natural resource management, lessons from the past tell us that more careful attention needs to be paid to achieving equitable impacts. Now the question is how to address social inequities and power asymmetries. Some authors emphasize the need for more dialogue, while others prefer a critical perspective, arguing that dialogue might not be sufficient to avert the risk of a process deepening existing social inequities. This article aims to enrich this debate and question the practical implications of the critical perspective through an in-depth analysis of power games in a participatory process.

A Companion Modelling (ComMod) process was conducted in an Akha community of Northern Thailand with a critical perspective, i.e. with a concern for the less influent stakeholders. Simulation tools such as role-playing games were used to mediate a cross-cultural learning process among researchers, farmers and administrators about a local irrigation water management problem. The detailed analysis of power games in this learning and negotiation process reveals that in spite of initial power asymmetries, the poorest farmers of the community started to voice and assert their interests. This was very much due to the role of a Western researcher who put the equity issue on the public agenda and to the strategic support of a charismatic Christian leader.

We identify a set of practical facilitation methods that helped to manage power asymmetries and to level the playing field, but we also discuss the main limits of our cultural-embedded methodological choices. Acknowledging that ‘the facilitators’ neutrality' is an illusion, this study allows us to raise the question of their social legitimacy. We suggest that they should systematically make explicit and reflect on their cultural-ideological background and methodological hypothesis and choices and their effects on the socio-political context. This article is an original attempt to accept this challenge.     

不3D不成活的电影时代

CE:Teens曾在2009年7月号的娱乐直播室提及3D风逐渐兴起的电影趋势。经过近两年的发展,而今电影院里似乎随便一部电影都可以带上特制眼镜享受身临其境的快感——听力小提示:这篇访谈语速稍快,但风格幽默搞笑,可以作为泛听材料进行练习。先脱离文字听一遍声音,看看你能否归纳出这段对话中提出了几个方面的问题,被访者对此又是如何作答的呢?     

Flaying Freire? The Workers’ Party and education policy in Brazil, 1980–2007

This article analyses the progression of education policy by the Workers?? Party (PT) in Brazil from its experience of municipal administration to national government. The first section presents this development, noting its progression from a participatory, social(ist) project to a more reformist, elite-directed model. The second section accounts for the domestic influences that led to a more reformist PT education policy by the 2000s. These include: (1) increasing electoral success, (2) changing membership composition, (3) policy innovations supported by its members and (4) a growing asymmetry in resources (and influence) towards the party leadership and its members. The third section presents the global changes in education thinking that coincided with the PT??s entry into national government. It distinguishes between a neo-liberal and neo-conservative ??first generation?? and a state-oriented ??second generation?? Washington Consensus, associated with the New Right and the centre-left that emerged across the region after 2000 respectively.     

On Visions of the Market Place

Few of today's reforms in higher education are not, in one way or another, justified by invoking the need to be more responsive to 'the market'. But what is understood by this term, as too the policies which result from it, vary widely across countries. This article, which examines current developments in France and in the Federal Republic of Germany, suggests that the concept of the market and of competition is interpreted in very different ways and is perceived by academia with similar variety. It concludes that the policies developed in Britain are far more radical in their undiluted application of ideologically-driven measures than their two major European partners.     

Individualized acquisition of knowledge with the computer: Questioning and learning guided by the structure of knowledge

In the first part of this article, we define our view of knowledge acquisition by distinguishing it from text comprehension and memorization, and by presenting the principal characteristics of the concept of knowledge as the formalization used to shape the knowledge domains (Baudet & Denhière, 1988). In the second part, the computerized individual’s knowledge acquisition system we present permits a representation of memory knowledge in accordance with the formalization adopted. This also allows a diagnosis of the learner’s initial knowledge and, according to the diagnosis reached, presents texts and illustrations adapted with the learner’s initial knowledge and with the goal of reaching a particular state of knowledge (Poitrenaud, Denhière & Tapiero, 1987). Finally, in the last part, we relate the first experimental results of learning a particular knowledge domain: sea mammals. This experiment tested the system with children of 7 to 11 years of age (Tapiero, 1987).     

Statistical knowledge and the over-interpretation of student evaluations of teaching

Research shows that teachers interpret small differences in student evaluations of teaching as meaningful even when available statistical information indicates that the differences are not reliable. The current research explored the effect of statistical training on college teachers’ tendency to over-interpret student evaluation differences. A sample of 225 English, mathematics and psychology teachers evaluated statistical reports of student evaluation data corresponding to a fictional teacher’s courses. Teachers from the three disciplines varied significantly in their statistics training, but there were no differences in their tendency to rate small, non-significant differences in student evaluations as indicative of the need to make improvements in a course. These results illustrate that statistical knowledge alone does not prevent the over-interpretation of student evaluation means.