Climate Change and Buildings Energy Efficiency – the Key Role of Residents

Eastern Europe today is confronted with an unavoidable problem - the multifamily apartment building stock is deteriorating but apartment owners do not have sufficient access to resources be they organizational, financial, technical or legal. In addition, destructive myths have grown about the Soviet era buildings despite their continued resilience or the ex- GDR experience in the 90s with the same buildings. Further, without resources, decision making in residential apartments is seen as a major obstacle and used as an explanation why renovation has not taken place in Latvia. This is important not only in the context of a potential housing crisis but also because the renovation of the apartment buildings is an effective solution to significantly reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. It has a proven potential to effectively finance the long term renovation of these buildings. This paper summarizes the first findings of a comprehensive and in-depth study of apartment buildings, their owners and the processes relating to renovation, combining social and environmental engineering research methods. It seeks to understand how owners of multi-family buildings in Eastern Europe understand their buildings and then to answer two questions - how to motivate owners to renovate their homes and increase energy efficiency and what business models should be used to implement economically viable and high quality projects

Language, culture and communication in development cooperation. On the role of ICTs in networking online communities of practice

Globalization results in the exclusion and marginalization of diverse categories of stakeholders at the local level in developing countries, while decentralization leads to integration and participation of some of these stakeholders. In this evolving process, increasingly facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the role of language and literacy, and their relationship with culture, have been given scant attention. ICTs facilitate language marginalization and homogenization, while it is an open question whether they contribute to language growth and survival. Within the context of development cooperation and natural resource management, the Community-Based Natural Resource Management Network (CBNRM Net), which serves the global CBNRM community of practice, uses ICTs to communicate with its global membership. CBNRM Net is concerned with how globalization and decentralization is influencing traditional and modern CBNRM practices. This includes how the present massive use of ICTs to facilitate communication, relying largely on English, is affecting literacy and language in the area of traditional knowledge on CBNRM. The paper presents a framework for analyzing use of language, and impacts on culture, in online communication and networking

New tools to connect people and places: the impact of ICTs on learning among resource poor farmers in Bolivia

Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have the ability to rapidly connect the poor to both wider communities and larger knowledge sets. However, while the use of ICTs in development has increased dramatically in recent years, there is a dearth of evidence regarding the impact and uptake of programmes. Therefore, the following article describes the development of El Promotor, a multi-media, interactive programme for poor farmers on the Bolivian Altiplano. The study further examined the relationship between new and existing knowledge regarding animal health and production among 85 farmers in 13 communities, who utilised the programme. The authors found that the uptake of new knowledge was highly dependent upon the specific topic involved i.e. disease causation, symptoms, treatment and prevention. Not surprisingly, the level of challenge to existing beliefs also impacted learning levels. Nonetheless, by utilising visual referents, which supported customary knowledge, improvements in farmer understanding of disease causation, diagnosis, treatment were noted after use of the programme. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A socio-technical analysis of ICT investments in developing countries: A capability perspective

Most existing ICT for development (ICT4D) literature tends to focus mainly on design, transfer and implementation issues. There is limited focus on the impact of ICT projects on development and little concrete analysis of these initiatives in terms of their long-term developmental impact. In this paper, we draw upon Luke's (1974) concept of power and Sen's (1999) notion of capabilities as an evaluative space for ICT project assessment. The novel approach taken from Luke's concept of power with Sen's capability approach attempts to understand the social powers that may inhibit or enable individuals from taking full advantage of ICT resources for furtherance of their lives. The framework's utility is illustrated with a case study based on an empirical work in the Nigerian electricity sector. The combined framework and case study contribute to knowledge on the development of theory and informs practice by offering a novel approach to examining ICT-led developmental projects. The study concludes with some implications for policy makers advancing an agenda on "ICT for Development"