Search results for "Community"

Regional Economic Integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC): Analysing the Dynamics and Performance

2020

This article analyses the dynamics and performance of regional economic integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It proposes an innovative theoretical approach to the analysis of regionalism that refers to cooperation theory and takes the impact of external actors explicitly into account. The motivation for this research stems from the observation of a new wave of regionalism in the Global South. Many of these new or reformed regional integration organisations (RIOs) comprise of developing countries, particularly in Africa. In contrast to expectations of most mainstream integration theories, new regionalisms in the Southern Hemisphere have come into existence and sh…

Reliģiski-filozofiski raksti, XXXI

2021

The articles of Latvian and foreign researchers published in this issue represent various branches of humanities and social sciences. Researchers have used various research methods to help understand the research potential of scientific atheism and Soviet spirituality phenomena and their versatility and multi-layered nature.

Wspólnoty wyznaniowe w powiecie wieluńskim w II Rzeczypospolitej

2019

The Village of the Year Competition Constructing an Ideal Model of a Rural Community in Finland

2016

The Village Action Association of Finland (SYTY) organizes the Village of the Year competition annually to award active rural communities. The competition has taken place since 1985, but after the village action movement was integrated into Finnish rural policy networks in the 1990s, it also became a part of rural policy instruments. The competition can be considered a governing technique that constructs norms and an ideal model for rural communities to pursue. In this article, I study the representation of an ideal rural community by analysing the criteria of the competition. I also look for changes to see whether the integration of the village action movement into rural policy is reflecte…

Cohabiting in Multiethnic Community: Forms, Representations and Images of the Diversity

2008

Modern culture, based on disinhibition of cultural trends and on heterodirection, is promoting openmindedness attitudes towards ethnic diversity, but on the other hand also new forms of social representations of the foreigner. Social representation is situated between the psychic field and the social one; it is the representation of oneself and of the other one, hanging between social categories and individual inner world. We will produce the results of a research on the representation of the foreigner, built on the type of prejudice prevailing among middle-low or middle-high educational qualification subjects, in which prejudicial attitudes seem to descend from precise mental images of the…

Political community resilience in declining rural areas in Finland

2021

Abstract In this article, we study how declining rural communities build political resilience in Finland. Community resilience is an adaptive process through which rural communities try to maintain their viability in changed circumstances. This process does not entail a submissive attitude, but rather active agency and an effort to influence matters concerning the community’s well-being. We focus on the political dimension of resilience by identifying different local tactics that rural communities adopt to promote their own development following municipal mergers. We classify these tactics into three categories: cooperation, conflict and community-led development. The significant difference…

Does Intraspecific Variation in rDNA Copy Number Affect Analysis of Microbial Communities?

2021

Amplicon sequencing of partial regions of the ribosomal RNA loci (rDNA) is widely used to profile microbial communities. However, the rDNA is dynamic and can exhibit substantial interspecific and intraspecific variation in copy number in prokaryotes and, especially, in microbial eukaryotes. As change in rDNA copy number is a common response to environmental change, rDNA copy number is not necessarily a property of a species. Variation in rDNA copy number, especially the capacity for large intraspecific changes driven by external cues, complicates analyses of rDNA amplicon sequence data. We highlight the need to (i) interpret amplicon sequence data in light of possible interspecific and intr…

The psycho-physical risk and the Rasch model application

2011

Is it possible to understand a book missing a quarter of the letters? Unveiling the belowground species richness of grasslands

2022

Abstract Knowledge of species richness patterns in plant communities is biased toward its hidden belowground part and is derived only from the part visible aboveground. Studies on the relationship of the above- to belowground parts of plant communities suffer from the lack of a consistent and uniform approach to assess their taxonomic composition, particularly in species-rich ecosystems. This study described the proportion between above- and belowground parts of vegetation in three grassland types along with the environmental factors that affect them, using eDNA metabarcoding and an observer survey. The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region was used to analyze the total plant richness…

Service provision and social cohesion in rural areas: interaction between commuting, mobility and the residential preferences in Latvia

2012

The main issue addressed in this study is interaction of development policy of agricultural and rural areas with the regional and cohesion policies. This paper is based on an empirical study of everyday commuting models and spatial practices of different social groups of rural people in Latvia. This article analyzes data from a survey “Place, capabilities, migration” conducted in 2011 with a total of 1009 respondents in Latvia. The theoretical basis of research is rooted in the mobility studies and sociological and geographical conceptualization of space and place. The main focus is on analysis of relationship between commuting, mobility and the placeattachment. What are the main reasons of…