The Centre for Society, Technology and Development ( is an interdisciplinary research centre at 成人VR视频 that reports to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and the Faculty of Arts. It was founded in 1990 to support and coordinate research at 成人VR视频 on the interaction between society and technology in the process of development.
A current focus of centre research is on the implications of property forms of poorer regions of the world. Property rights are central to how social and technological factors influence development, by structuring how people manage their resources and provide for their essential needs. Linking people to the environment, rights in resources secure the basis on which cultural and biological diversity is maintained. Changes in systems of agrarian property are both symptom and cause of environmental decline and poverty. Rural communities are involved in complex claims and conflicts over resources, and at worst face an inexorable process of dispossession.
A central question we address concerns the effects of different property systems on the use and conservation of resources and on the capacity of rural people to escape from poverty. Which forms of property are associated with better food production methods, fuller employment, more equitable systems of distribution, and more effective ways by which rural people manage their affairs? Can transformation in property enable peasant farmers, pastoralists, forest dwellers and urban dwellers to manage rapid population growth, deepening poverty, unsustainable extraction of resources, and environmental degradation?
Such questions concerning society and technology, the economy of the environment, spill over the boundaries of particular disciplines. STANDD has a transdisciplinary profile of researchers concerned with the environment and sustainability, community institutions, food systems, domestic economy, land tenure, indigenous knowledge, and the provision of basic needs for adequate community health, nutrition, and education.
STANDD includes participants from the Faculties of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Arts, Law, Management, Medicine and Science at 成人VR视频. They have experience working in numerous regions of the developing Third and Fourth Worlds, including Eastern Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania and the Canadian North, and have worked in a variety of overlapping team projects. Participants examine the interplay between technological innovation, institutional change, and the genesis and diffusion of knowledge and information in the process of development.
Agenda 21, set forth in 1992 at the World Summit in Rio, called for the protection of the earth's biodiversity even as we seek to support a growing human population. This mandate, in the context of the current review of land policies by international agencies, lends a timeliness to STANDD's program of research.
The Research Program
Research is currently being pursued by centre staff and graduate students in many regions of the developing world, including China, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica and Brazil, with funding from SSHRC, NSERC, FCAR, CIDA, IDRC, NRC, and other foundations and agencies. These projects tend to fall within three axes of research at STANDD:
Property Systems and Resources:
We seek to understand how forms of property affect the use and management of resources. Which aspects of communal, private and state property are associated with which environmental, economic and social outcomes. A STANDD working group on Land Tenure and Common Property Conflicts convenes a seminar on land tenure. In a variety of field projects, attention is focused on the interrelations between state property (state enterprises, parks and reserves, forests), common property (village and community managed) and private property (commercial enterprises, individual farms). We focus on questions of environmental management, focusing on arid and semi-arid environments, forest preservation, soil erosion and the management of water, vegetation, and pasture resources. Close links are maintained with relevant institutions in the developing world, the Arid Lands and Resource Management network in Eastern Africa (ALARM), in Nairobi, and the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) in London.
Local Institutions:
Participants have wide experience investigating the organization of local institutions and their functioning: which control territory, which exercise administrative functions (such as villages or groups) or which manage resources and perform particular economic and political functions (ie. self-help groups, cooperatives, grazing schemes, irrigation councils, organized descent groups, religious groups, etc.). When are intermediate-level institutions effective and fair in local administration, in pursuing collective tasks, or managing resources, and when do they appear less effective than government, state corporations, private enterprises or individual private holdings? Is there an optimal fit between functions and institutions?
Indigenous Knowledge and Community Needs:
Under what kinds of property systems and forms of local organization are basic needs most effectively provided? Property forms underpin a community's subsistence and indirectly affects states of health and illness. STANDD members have experience understanding how local knowledge and institutions influences nutrition, health care and family planning. Knowledge, of indigenous or external origin, shapes the response of domestic groups to crisis, and this in turn is influenced by institutionalized channels of diffusion. Basic notions of person, self, family and community, and of body, mind and society, affect local understanding of human needs and interests. These ideas provide a cognitive framework within which local peasant, pastoral, urban and refugee communities address questions of nutrition, health, and reproduction.
Mandate and Objectives
STANDD's mandate is to provide a setting for transdisciplinary research and learning at 成人VR视频 regarding social and technological aspects of development. Its aims include the integration of research, having both scientific and policy significance, on the developing world. It seeks to advance the three axes of comparative research noted above, to strengthen international collaborations, to disseminate scientific findings through international meetings and publications, and to make the work of its participants accessible to researchers, local communities and policy-makers.
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