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One of the most important routes for cultural tourism in Bali connects the seaside tourist town of Sanur to the provincial capital city of Denpasar, continues through the Sukawati Art Market, skirts the village of Mas, site of many studios and workshops, and culminates in Ubud, the historic artistic center of Bali. The city of Ubud is the epicenter of a renowned tradition of painting but it is also a community staggering under the influx of tourists arriving via this route. The roadway from Sanur to Ubud illustrates a range of different types of arts-based heritage tourism, from mass produced art for beachside tourists in Sanur to several high-end galleries in Ubud. This trajectory of towns and their varied relationships with the arts and tourism illustrate the potentials and pitfalls of arts tourism as a means of development, and this roadway highlights the challenges of crafting sustainable routes for tourists interested in the arts. Almatourism - Journal of Tourism, Culture and Territorial Development, Vol 4, No 8 (2013)

This study aims to separately investigate: 1.The political reasons behind Norway‟s controversial decision to encourage a coal enterprise on Svalbard (an archipelago in the Arctic) and, 2.The current and future potential of wind and solar energy as untapped renewable sources, locally exploited through a hybrid wind-PV system. In doing so this preliminary study attempts to provide insights for the implementation of an alternative, sustainable strategy to keep a Norwegian year-round settlement at Longyearbyen, Svalbard, without any recourse to polluting mining operations. Such an eventuality, despite the need for further research, is promisingly described as feasible, environmentally advantageous and politically conceivable. Consilience, No 6 (2011): Issue Six: 2011

The study was designed to assess the impact of participation of Port Harcourt indigenous women in poverty eradication programmes in Rivers State, Nigeria. The study used questionnaires to elicit responses from 385 indigenous women randomly selected in a multi-stage technique. Descriptive statistics and t-test were used to analyze the data collected. Results showed that majority (58.3%) of the women were members of a cooperative society, 63.5 percent were members of community-based organizations (CBO) while 60.9 percent were members of “Esusu” (rotator credit schemes). About 66.3 percent of the women had engaged in jobs aimed at poverty alleviation. Only 6.0 percent identified that they were not members of any poverty alleviation programmes (PAP) by government. It was found that after joining the PAP, 75.5 percent of them experienced an increase in income of 36.6 percent. Significant differences existed in the income of the women after joining poverty alleviation programmes. It was therefore recommended that more programmes designed to alleviate poverty in Rivers State should target indigenous women; government should also establish entrepreneurship capacity-building programmes to enable women to bring out their optimal input while participating in the poverty eradication programmes. Consilience, No 14 (2015): Issue Fourteen: 2015

Freight transport has emerged as one of the most critical and dynamic aspects of the transport sector where change has become the norm. It is now the main element supporting global commodity and more generally supply chains. Yet the lack of seamlessness and inefficiencies in general as well as the rising costs and complexities of shipping and delivering goods are adding to profit pressures faced by manufacturers across the globe. Our paper first discusses the concept of seamlessness, and then examines some of the consequences of the lack of seamlessness in terms of freight transport inefficiencies. We then begin to examine the new developments in which intermodality, technology (e-commerce), and logistics are changing and will have the impact of heightening competitive advantage and reducing constraint points in production value chains and global production networks. Finally the intent is to show how research on this theme might be advanced in a trans-Atlantic framework.

Discussions of global environmental governance seem to have gotten nowhere in the last thirty years despite environmental problems that continue to grow in scope and magnitude. Here, the role of sustainable development in that failure is examined, particularly the constructively ambiguous nature of the paradigm. It is suggested that an emphasis on the shifting, contextualized and relative term ―needs‖ in the definition of sustainable development has led to paralysis at the international level in addressing environmental problems, particularly climate change. Contradictions that emerge when sustainable development is formalized in economic models as weak and strong sustainability are discussed. Finally, promising future pathways for environmental actions are explored. Consilience, No 5 (2011): Issue Five: 2011

CO2 emissions from non-domestic buildings - primarily workplaces - make up 18 percent of the UK's carbon footprint. A combination of technology advances and behavioural changes have the potential to make significant impact, but interventions have often been planned in ways which do not take into account the needs, levels of understanding and everyday behavioural contexts of building users - and hence do not achieve the hoped-for success.This paper provides a brief introduction to the Empower project, a current industrial-academic collaboration in the UK which is applying methods from user-centred design practice to understand diverse users' needs, priorities, mental models of energy and decision-making heuristics - as well as the affordances available to them - in a number of office buildings. We are developing and trialling a set of low-cost, simple software interventions tailored to multiple user groups with different degrees of agency over their energy use, which seek to influence more energy efficient behaviour at work in areas such as HVAC, lighting and equipment use. The project comprises an ethnographic research phase, a participatory design programme involving building users in the design of interventions, and iterative trials in a large office building in central London.

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the fiscal situ- ation of Egypt. We model Egypt as a small open economy that takes real interest rates and world prices of fuel as given. Since a large component of the government budget consists of pensions payments, we use an overlapping generations struc- ture. The model contains descriptions of the public and private sector, as well as descriptions of the production sectors for a public good such as infrastructure, energy, and a final aggregate consumption good. The model pays special atten- tion to the energy sector. We then calibrate the model to data from Egypt. The following policy reforms are considered: (i) reductions in pensions to public sector workers, (ii) reductions in pensions to private sector workers, (iii) reductions in the public sector pay premiums, (iv) decreases of the energy subsidies, and (v) a decrease of the public sector workforce. In each case we reduce the “expenditure” by 15 percent. For each of the reforms we adjust consumption taxes, labor taxes, “capital taxes”, or public investments in infrastructure to satisfy the government budget constraint. We calculate the new steady states, the transition paths to the new steady states, and the size of the welfare gains or losses for all reforms. We find that due to the modest nature of the reforms, the effect of the policy reforms on GDP and consumption are modest. Often these gains are in the neighborhood of 1 percent. We find that welfare gains or losses can be sizeable and that the largest gains from the reforms are attained when the freed up resources are used for infrastructure investments or for lowering the tax on company profits.

The 2005 election of Evo Morales as the president of Bolivia marked a moment of celebration for the social movements who backed the rise to power of the Movimiento al Socialismo party (MAS – Movement for Socialism), with Morales as its leader. Morales adopted discourses derived from popularly supported Buen Vivir, alternatives to development, social and solidarity economies, and other forms of localized political and economic autonomy, creating a politics of possibility around such proposals. However, despite initial commitments and actions taken by Morales to improve well-being without replicating historically unsustainable and destructive pathways to industrial development, Bolivia continues to be characterized by fiscal dependence and macroeconomic prioritization of growth-centric policies sustained by extractive activities. In addition, the country is now rife with socio-environmental conflict. This paper will explore Morales’ neglect of longer-term political goals for economic independence, self-sufficiency, and sustainability by considering competing theories of social movements, political parties, and the state that provide different lenses for understanding MAS’ abandonment of its original political platform for change, Twenty-First Century Socialism (Socialismo del Siglo XXI). The paper reveals how the current scenario creates new barriers for the social movements that continue to uphold proposals for sustainable futures, including deepened structural entrenchment in extractivism, the cooptation of alternatives to development proposals by government, the division of once-unified popular fronts, shifting electoral constituencies, and the emergence of new economic elites. Lessons from the Bolivian case are significant for guiding wider efforts at building sustainable alternatives to capitalist development. Consilience, No 15 (2016): Issue Fifteen: 2016