scholarly journals Cultivating Collaborative Resilience to Social and Ecological Change: An Assessment of Adaptive Capacity, Actions, and Barriers Among Collaborative Forest Restoration Groups in the United States

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler A Beeton ◽  
Antony S Cheng ◽  
Melanie M Colavito

Abstract Collaboration is increasingly emphasized as a tool to realize national-level policy goals in public lands management. Yet, collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are nested within traditional bureaucracies and are affected by internal and external disruptions. The extent to which CGRs adapt and remain resilient to these disruptions remains under-explored. Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other CGRs. We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our analysis is informed by a synthesis of the literature, case examples and exemplars from focus groups, and a national CFLRP survey. CGRs demonstrated the ability to mobilize social capital, learning, resources, and flexibility to respond to disruptions. Yet authority, accountability, and capacity complicated collaborative resilience. We conclude with policy and practice recommendations to cultivate collaborative resilience moving forward. Study Implications Collaborative approaches between public lands management agencies and nongovernment organizations have become common in forest restoration. Yet collaborative progress may be affected by turnover, wildfire disturbances, or legal or policy changes. We assessed how forest collaboratives in the United States adapted to changes that affected their performance and documented the factors that constrained response. We found that forest collaboratives developed myriad strategies to adapt to these changes, although limited authority, capacity, and accountability constrain adaptation options. We offer policy and practice recommendations to overcome these constraints, increase adaptation options, and enhance the sustainability of forest collaboratives.

2020 ◽  
pp. 089976402096458
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Boyer ◽  
Katherine R. Cooper ◽  
Shaun M. Dougherty ◽  
Rong Wang ◽  
Michelle Shumate

Collaborative governance research examines the role of individuals, organizations, and partnerships within a community to understand why particular interorganizational networks emerge. We take a different tact, arguing that communities adopt collaborative governance models based upon exposure to the models and the individual and organizational resources in a community. We conducted a web-based national-level scan of communities in the United States ( N = 1,162) for the presence of one model of collaborative governance, education-focused collective impact. We found that spatial proximity, poverty rate, and individual resources each predicted the existence of collective impact in a U.S. county. Implications for collaborative governance research are drawn from the results.


Author(s):  
Mary Donnelly ◽  
Jessica Berg

This chapter explores a number of key issues: the role of competence and capacity, advance directives, and decisions made for others. It analyses the ways these are treated in the United States and in selected European jurisdictions. National-level capacity legislation and human rights norms play a central role in Europe, which means that healthcare decisions in situations of impaired capacity operate in accordance with a national standard. In the United States, the legal framework is more state-based (rather than federal), and the courts have played a significant role, with both common law and legislation varying considerably across jurisdictions. Despite these differences, this chapter identifies some similar legal principles which have developed.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1816
Author(s):  
Michael F. Tlusty

Humans under-consume fish, especially species high in long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Food-based dietary guidelines are one means for nations to encourage the consumption of healthy, nutritious food. Here, associations between dietary omega-3 consumption and food-based dietary guidelines, gross domestic product, the ranked price of fish, and the proportions of marine fish available at a national level were assessed. Minor associations were found between consumption and variables, except for food-based dietary guidelines, where calling out seafood in FBDGs did not associate with greater consumption. This relationship was explored for consumers in the United States, and it was observed that the predominant seafood they ate, shrimp, resulted in little benefit for dietary omega-3 consumption. Seafood is listed under the protein category in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and aggregating seafood under this category may limit a more complete understanding of its nutrient benefits beyond protein.


Author(s):  
Michael A. Nunno ◽  
Lisa A. McCabe ◽  
Charles V. Izzo ◽  
Elliott G. Smith ◽  
Deborah E. Sellers ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Physical and mechanical restraints used in treatment, care, education, and corrections programs for children are high-risk interventions primarily due to their adverse physical, emotional, and fatal consequences. Objective This study explores the conditions and circumstances of restraint-related fatalities in the United States by asking (1) Who are the children that died due to physical restraint? and (2) How did they die? Method The study employs internet search systems to discover and compile information about restraint-related fatalities of children and youth up to 18 years of age from reputable journalism sources, advocacy groups, activists, and governmental and non-governmental agencies. The child cohort from a published study of restraint fatalities in the United States from 1993 to 2003 is combined with restraint fatalities from 2004 to 2018. This study’s scope has expanded to include restraint deaths in community schools, as well as undiscovered restraint deaths from 1993 to 2003 not in the 2006 study. Results Seventy-nine restraint-related fatalities occurred over the 26-year period from across a spectrum of children’s out-of-home child welfare, corrections, mental health and disability services. The research provides a data snapshot and examples of how fatalities unfold and their consequences for staff and agencies. Practice recommendations are offered to increase safety and transparency. Conclusions The study postulates that restraint fatalities result from a confluence of medical, psychological, and organizational causes; such as cultures prioritizing control, ignoring risk, using dangerous techniques, as well as agencies that lack structures, processes, procedures, and resources to promote learning and to ensure physical and psychological safety.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 441-441
Author(s):  
Joseph Blankholm

Abstract There are more than 1,400 nonbeliever communities in the United States and well over a dozen organizations that advocate for secular people on the national level. Together, these local and national groups comprise a social movement that includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other kinds of nonbelievers. Despite the fact that retired people over 60 dedicate most of the money and energy needed to run these groups, the increasingly vast literature on secular people and secularism has paid them almost no attention. Relying on more than one hundred interviews (including dozens with people over 60), several years of ethnographic research, and a survey of organized nonbelievers, this paper demonstrates the crucial role that people over 60 play in the American secular movement today. It also considers the reasons older adults are so important to these groups, the challenges they face in trying to recruit younger members and combat stereotypes about aging leadership, and generational differences that structure how various types of nonbeliever groups look and feel. This paper reframes scholarly understandings of very secular Americans by focusing on people over 60 and charts a new path in secular studies.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Koehn

At present, progress in mitigating global GHG emissions is impeded by political stalemate at the national level in the United States and the People's Republic of China. Through the conceptual lenses of multilevel governance and framing politics, the article analyzes emerging policy initiatives among subnational governments in both countries. Effective subnational emission-mitigating action requires framing climatic-stabilization policies in terms of local co-benefits associated with environmental protection, health promotion, and economic advantage. In an impressive group of US states and cities, and increasingly at the local level in China, public concerns about air pollution, consumption and waste management, traffic congestion, health threats, the ability to attract tourists, and/or diminishing resources are legitimizing policy developments that carry the co-benefit of controlling GHG emissions. A co-benefits framing strategy that links individual and community concerns for morbidity, mortality, stress reduction, and healthy human development for all with GHG-emission limitation/reduction is especially likely to resonate powerfully at the subnational level throughout China and the United States.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Aldrich ◽  
Daniel J. Lee

Duverger’s Law suggests that two parties will dominate under first-past-the-post (FPTP) within an electoral district, but the law does not necessarily establish two-party competition at the national level. United States is unique among FPTP countries in having the only durable and nearly pure, two-party system. Following this observation, we answer two questions. First, what contributes to the same two parties competing in districts all across the country and at different levels of office? Second, why is the US two-party system so durable over time, dominated by the same two parties? That is, “Why two parties?” As an answer, we propose the APP: ambition, the presidency, and policy. The presidency with its national electorate and electoral rules that favor two-party competition establishes two national major parties, which frames the opportunity structure that influences party affiliation decisions of ambitious politicians running for lower offices. Control over the policy agenda helps reinforce the continuation of a particular two-party system in equilibrium by blocking third parties through divergence on the main issue dimension and the suppression of latent issue dimensions that could benefit new parties. The confluence of the three factors explains why the United States is so uniquely a durable two-party system.


Author(s):  
Scott Edwards

From 6 June to 20 August, 2020, I undertook a 76-day, ~3800 mile bicycle trip across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. In this talk I will share with you some of the amazing people, landscapes and birds I encountered, mostly in rural towns and along blue highways. The gradually changing birdscape, both in sight and sound, underscored the sensitive ecological gradients to which birds respond, as well as the ability of some species to thrive in agricultural monocultures. Rivers large and small regularly benchmarked my progress, as well as the western journey of Lewis & Clark over 200 years ago. The recent incidents in the US involving African Americans as targets of white violence inexorably caused me to festoon my bicycle with #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) signs and share my experiences on social media. I encountered a variety of reactions, often positive and occasionally sharply negative, in a sea of generosity and extraordinary kindness as I wheeled my way through towns on the brink of collapse, vast private ranches and the occasional city. Rural America exhibits an abundance of loyalty and empathy for local communities, yet it is sometimes hard for Americans – myself included – to empathize with people they have never met in person. Two imperatives I took away, with ramifications for both biodiversity and political stability, were the need to somehow bring divergent communities together and to encourage empathy at the national level, among communities that otherwise experience each other only on TV.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0013189X2110657
Author(s):  
Margaret Vaughn ◽  
Seth A. Parsons ◽  
Melissa A. Gallagher

Although adaptive teaching is considered a cornerstone of effective instruction, there remains a lack of focus on teacher adaptability in policy, professional practice, and teacher education in the United States. High-profile educational reform efforts have pressured districts and states across the nation to rely on prescriptive curricula that fail to meet the linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs of the nation’s diverse student population. In this article, we describe the development of the Adaptive Teaching Inventory and present validity evidence from our administration in the United States. These findings provide insight into the potential for widespread implementation of adaptability and its focus to support teacher professionalism and decision-making. The discussion centers on moving adaptability to the forefront of policy and practice efforts to counter the prevailing emphasis on restrictive curricula that has stymied teachers in their efforts to support students for far too long. Implications for administrators, policymakers, and researchers are discussed.


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