Roy Maconachie - Böcker

The peri-urban interface in poor countries is frequently an area of great dynamism and a focus of competition for basic resources. In Nigeria, peri-urban livelihood strategies have become an increasingly important survival mechanism in the context of rapid urban growth. This book uses an innovative combination of methodologies from both the natural and social sciences to examine recent developments in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, and in doing so, provides insights into the sustainability of these livelihood strategies. Identifying some of the most significant forces that are currently shaping the process of peri-urban change, it argues that, despite the adoption of creative and ingenious strategies by many farmers, urban growth is having a considerable effect on the livelihood resilience of individuals, households and communities. The findings presented in this book have much wider relevance and are transferable to other burgeoning Third World cities where increased pressures on urban hinterlands have intensified contests amongst various actors, made access to resources much more difficult and made traditional smallholder mechanisms of adaptation and resilience increasingly challenging.

The peri-urban interface in poor countries is frequently an area of great dynamism and a focus of competition for basic resources. In Nigeria, peri-urban livelihood strategies have become an increasingly important survival mechanism in the context of rapid urban growth. This book uses an innovative combination of methodologies from both the natural and social sciences to examine recent developments in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, and in doing so, provides insights into the sustainability of these livelihood strategies. Identifying some of the most significant forces that are currently shaping the process of peri-urban change, it argues that, despite the adoption of creative and ingenious strategies by many farmers, urban growth is having a considerable effect on the livelihood resilience of individuals, households and communities. The findings presented in this book have much wider relevance and are transferable to other burgeoning Third World cities where increased pressures on urban hinterlands have intensified contests amongst various actors, made access to resources much more difficult and made traditional smallholder mechanisms of adaptation and resilience increasingly challenging.

Gold remains a highly prized and impactful resource within the global economy. From the insatiable demand for gold in the electronics that permeate our day-to-day lives to the environmental desolation driven by gold mining in the Amazon, the gold trade continues to touch the lives and livelihoods of people across the world.Bloomfield and Maconachie tell the intriguing story of the yellow metal, tracing the seismic shifts in the industry over the past few decades. They show how huge purchases of gold reserves by BRICS countries mark the shifting balance of power away from the West, and how rising affluence in India and China has led to a surging demand for gold jewellery, calling into question current approaches to make supply chains more responsible. Explaining why gold is so difficult to regulate and why it is only becoming more so, the authors suggest ways we could, collectively, make practices work better for the countless workers and communities who suffer at the producer end of the supply chain. Linking local to global, producer to consumer, and gold’s extraction from the Earth to the financial centres that fuel it, this book offers a probing analysis that reveals who wins and who loses and what this means for the future of gold.