Böcker i Yale Agrarian Studies Series-serien

Why are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) so successful in today’s world? How do they empower themselves? This insightful book provides important new perspectives on the strategic thinking of NGOs, the way they identify themselves, and how they behave. Raymond L. Bryant develops a novel theoretical perspective around the concept of moral capital and assesses that concept through in-depth case studies of NGOs in the Philippines.The book’s focus is on perceptions of NGOs as moral and altruistic and how such perceptions can translate into social power. Bryant examines the ambiguous qualities of NGO strategizing, the ways in which the quest for moral capital is bedeviled by the need to compromise with political and economic elites, and the possibilities for NGOs to achieve political goals as moral leaders.

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country’s political collapse in the late 1980s. The clues were there in the natural landscape, Arvid Nelson argues in this groundbreaking book, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership’s values and goals manifest in the landscape, they wouldn’t have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. Nelson sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them.Cold War Ecology records how East German leaders’ indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, Nelson shows, and he proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment’s system qualities rather than on political leaders’ goals and beliefs.

A new history of post-Revolutionary Haiti, and the society that emerged in the aftermath of the world's most successful slave revolution

This work contains ten chapters on rural society and agrarian issues, encompassing various disciplines, historical periods, and regions of the world. It examines such topics as poverty, subsistence, cultivation, ecology, justice, art, custom, law, ritual life, co-operation and state action.

From Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Michelle Obama's White House organic garden, the image of America as a nation of farmers has persisted from the beginnings of the American experiment. This collection presents a complex historical portrait of the American character through its relationship to the land.

Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, this book shows how and why agrarian Americans - yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike - accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land.

Examines the inner workings of the World Bank, the foundations of its global achievements, its propensity for intensifying the problems it intends to cure, and its remarkable ability to tame criticism and extend its own reach.