Book Review: POPULATION-ENVIRONMENT-DEVELOPMENT INTERACTIONS edited by John I. Clarke and Léon Tabah. Comité International de Coopération dans les Recherches Nationales en Démographie (CICRED), Paris, 1995, distributed by John Wiley & Sons (Chichester). No. of pages: 430. Price not stated.
✍ Scribed by Convey, Andrew
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 81 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1077-3495
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
1995, distributed by John Wiley & Sons (Chichester). No. of pages: 430. Price not stated.
Clarke and Tabah have put together this volume as a result of the 1993 CICRED Conference hosted by IIASA (in Laxenberg) and held with the additional support of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP). The editors stress that this book is not intended as a report on the conference, but is designed around some of the conceptual issues raised by the conference, together with supporting cases of these issues in practice. In this way, the editors hope that the publication will have more coherence than a 'mere conference report'. In a special preface to the book, Collomb and Véron suggest that the interactive field of population, environment and development is one of such complexity that despite its worldwide importance, it has so far received little of the serious attention which it deserves. The main purpose of the highly integrated approach to this interactive field in this book, therefore, would be to make an important contribution to further study by opening up a number of research pathways for the future.
The book is presented in four main sections. The first is a major contribution on concepts, theories and methods of analysis. This is followed by a second on 'polls, perceptions and policies', a third on 'mortality and health in urban and industrialised environments', and finally, some cases of population-environmentdevelopment problems. There are 23 chapters in all, three of which are presented in French (all in Part one on theories and concepts), thereby making the book accessible to a wider linguistic audience than might normally be the case. Fifty-four figures, both cartographic and diagrammatic, are used to illustrate the text and there are bibliographies of varying length with most of the chapters.
In general, the more substantial contributions appear in the first section of the book, where concepts, theories and methods of analysis are under consideration, and both the editors are represented here. Clarke reviews both the rising understanding of and the