Understanding the Implications of Alternative Bioenergy Crops to Support Smallholder Farmers in Brazil

Smallholders constitute more than three quarters of the world’s farmers, and despite their numbers, they commonly lack opportunities to advance their development status. Bioenergy production and consumption can help sustain smallholders’ energy needs and generate employment and income, but it also raises concerns over social justice and equity, especially where crops used for bioenergy could also be used for food. This perspective paper is grounded in a literature review related to three different crops in Brazil: sugarcane, landrace maize and sweet potato. It seeks to determine if these crops offer the potential to support smallholder farmers’ development in a more equitable way, focusing on opportunities for their use in bioenergy. We review the literature to identify policies shaping the smallholder development context in relation to these crops, assessing whose knowledge informs policy and institutional decision making, and highlighting the policy attention afforded to the different crops from different sectors. We further evaluate the literature on each crop in relation to water use and calorific value (i.e., food and energy). Our review indicates that while sugarcane has received the most policy and institutional attention, its development is largely anchored in research and development investments that support large-scale commercial farms and agri-businesses. Smallholders have not benefited or had the opportunity to engage in relevant policy decision making for sugarcane cultivation. At the same time, smallholders hold valuable untapped knowledge on the cultivation of sweet potato and landrace maize, both of which have the potential to generate development opportunities for smallholders. Our review suggests that the environmental impact of landrace maize and sweet potato in terms of water use is significantly lower than sugarcane, while they can generate more calories for energy or food consumption and offer diversification opportunities. Despite that these alternative crops offer considerable untapped potential to support rural development, more research is still needed to harness these benefits. Changes are needed to address inequities in policies, institutions and the types of knowledge informing decision making. Such changes need to afford smallholder farmers greater recognition and participation in decision making, so that the distribution of benefits from the three study crops can reach them to support their development better.

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Water Use and Risk: the Use of Prospect Theory to Guide Public Policy Decision-Making

Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge ◽

10.1007/978-1-4020-6748-8_10 ◽

2008 ◽

pp. 161-178

Author(s):

Raymond Dacey

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

Decision Making ◽

Prospect Theory ◽

Water Use ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Policy Decision Making

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An investigation of the effects of PICSA on smallholder farmers’ decision-making and livelihoods when implemented at large scale – The case of Northern Ghana

Climate Services ◽

10.1016/j.cliser.2019.02.002 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 14 ◽

pp. 1-14 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Graham Clarkson ◽

Peter Dorward ◽

Henny Osbahr ◽

Francis Torgbor ◽

Isaac Kankam-Boadu

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Large Scale ◽

Smallholder Farmers ◽

Northern Ghana

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How Can Landscape Architecture Influence Systemic Change to Achieve Sustainable Cities and Regions

Athens Journal of Architecture ◽

10.30958/aja.8-1-2 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 35-50

Author(s):

Anastasia Nikologianni

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Stakeholder Engagement ◽

Large Scale ◽

Systemic Change ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Sustainable Cities ◽

Design Quality ◽

New Methodologies ◽

Growing Network

This paper presents how the ideas of landscape, design quality and drawings can influence systemic change to result in sustainable cities and regions. The research related to this paper explores project frameworks and design methods in order to reveal innovative ways and processes for creating environmentally friendly cities and regions that will have the power to adapt and mitigate climatic issues of the future. Through a series of explorations on existing landscape projects and while using a series of stakeholder engagement workshops contacted at a pan-European level the paper examines ways in which systemic change is possible and the outcomes it has in relation to the landscape. Using previously implemented and ongoing landscape projects such as the Room for the River (the Netherlands) and the West Midlands National Park (UK), the paper discusses how bold landscape-led visions influence decision making and support systemic change on a spatial scale. Drawing on experience gained during a series of stakeholder engagement workshops, where the projects of the Tame Valley Wetlands Partnership (UK) and the Urban Farming and Growing Network (UK) were selected as case studies, the research presents key findings and presents lessons learned that can build capacity and improve the understanding and management of stakeholders when it comes to spatial planning and urban design. The paper argues that a new way of thinking in design, policy or governance is not enough if these disciplines act individually. The breakthrough comes when each discipline collaborates with the aim to future proof our cities and regions. By presenting pioneering examples and models giving us tools for a systemic change, the paper aims to demonstrate that large scale developments can be brilliant examples of the new methodologies applied and lessons learnt. This research concludes that systemic change is represented across all levels, policy, decision making, governance, design and implementation if the aim is to deliver a sustainable city.

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How do decision-makers use evidence in community health policy and financing decisions? A qualitative study and conceptual framework in four African countries

Health Policy and Planning ◽

10.1093/heapol/czaa027 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 35 (7) ◽

pp. 799-809 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Meghan Bruce Kumar ◽

Miriam Taegtmeyer ◽

Jason Madan ◽

Sozinho Ndima ◽

Kingsley Chikaphupha ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Qualitative Study ◽

Community Health ◽

Large Scale ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Health Coverage ◽

African Countries ◽

Evidence Use ◽

Financing Decisions

Abstract Various investments could help countries deliver on the universal health coverage (UHC) goals set by the global community; community health is a pillar of many national strategies towards UHC. Yet despite resource mobilization towards this end, little is known about the potential costs and value of these investments, as well as how evidence on the same would be used in related decisions. This qualitative study was conducted to understand the use of evidence in policy and financing decisions for large-scale community health programmes in low- and middle-income countries. Through key informant interviews with 43 respondents in countries with community health embedded in national UHC strategies (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique) and at global institutions, we investigated evidence use in community health financing and policy decision-making, as well as evidentiary needs related to community health data for decision-making. We found that evidence use is limited at all levels, in part due to a perceived lack of high-quality, relevant evidence. This perception stems from two main areas: first, desire for local evidence that reflects the context, and second, much existing economic evidence does not deal with what decision-makers value when it comes to community health systems—i.e. coverage and (to a lesser extent) quality. Beyond the evidence gap, there is limited capacity to assess and use the evidence. Elected officials also face political challenges to disinvestment as well as structural obstacles to evidence use, including the outsized influence of donor priorities. Evaluation data must to speak to decision-maker interests and constraints more directly, alongside financiers of community health providing explicit guidance and support on the role of evidence use in decision-making, empowering national decision-makers. Improved data quality, increased relevance of evidence and capacity for evidence use can drive improved efficiency of financing and evidence-based policymaking.

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Measuring daily-life fear perception change: a computational study in the context of COVID-19 (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.33872 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yuchen Chai ◽

Juan Palacios ◽

Jianghao Wang ◽

Yichun Fan ◽

Siqi Zheng

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Media ◽

Large Scale ◽

Daily Life ◽

Computational Study ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Health Crisis ◽

The Social ◽

Policy Decision Making ◽

Media Data

BACKGROUND COVID-19, as a global health crisis, has triggered the fear emotion with unprecedented intensity. Besides the fear of getting infected, the outbreak of COVID-19 also created significant disruptions in people’s daily life and thus evoked intensive psychological responses indirect to COVID-19 infections. OBJECTIVE This study aims to develop novel digital trackers of public fear emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to uncover meaningful topics that the citizens are concerned about to inform policy decision-making. METHODS We construct an expressed fear database using 16 million social media posts generated by 536 thousand users in China between January 1st, 2019 and August 31st, 2020. We employ Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect the fear emotion within each post and apply BERTopic to extract the central fear topics. RESULTS We find that on average, 2.45% of posts per day having fear as the dominant emotion in 2019. This share spiked after the COVID-19 outbreak and peaked at 9.1% on the date that China’s epi-center Wuhan city announced lockdown. Among the fear posts, topics related to health takes the largest share (39%). Specifically, we find that posts regarding sleep disorders (Nightmare and Insomnia) have the most significant increase during the pandemic. We also observe gender heterogeneity in fear topics, with females being more concerned with health while males being more concerned with job. CONCLUSIONS Our work leverages the social media data coupled with computational methods to track the emotional response on a large scale and with high temporal granularity. While we conduct this research in a tracing back mode, it is possible to use such a method to achieve real-time emotion monitoring, thus serving as a helpful tool to discern societal concerns and aid for policy decision-making.

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