scholarly journals Integrated Assessment—How Does It Help Unpack Water Access by Marginalized Farmers?

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 3444
Author(s):  
Serena H. Hamilton ◽  
Wendy S. Merritt ◽  
Mahanambrota Das ◽  
M. Wakilur Rahman ◽  
Sumana S. Bhuiya ◽  
...  

Water is critical to the lives and livelihoods of rural communities in developing countries; however, access to water can be inequitable within communities. This paper uses a generalized integrated assessment approach to explore the determinants of water access by marginalized farmers in two villages in coastal Bangladesh, before and after the setup of local water institutions. The study was part of a broader project aimed at promoting socially inclusive agricultural intensification. An integrative framework was developed in this study to capture and link the diverse range of factors that influence the distribution of water, including the often-overlooked role of social dynamics and governance arrangements. While interventions around improving water resource infrastructure can be critical for freshwater availability, the case studies show that a breakdown of asymmetric power structures may also be needed for water access to all individuals, especially marginalized groups. Establishing a community-based water institution on its own does not necessarily address power issues in a community. It is imperative that the agency and capacities of the marginalized members are developed and that the institutional arrangements foster an enabling environment for marginalized members to influence decision making. Integrated assessment allowed the case studies to be explored from multiple perspectives so as to gain a greater understanding of the barriers and levers to obtaining equitable outcomes from water interventions.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5491
Author(s):  
Melissa Robson-Williams ◽  
Bruce Small ◽  
Roger Robson-Williams ◽  
Nick Kirk

The socio-environmental challenges the world faces are ‘swamps’: situations that are messy, complex, and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to help disciplinary scientists navigate these swamps. To achieve this, the paper evaluates an integrative framework designed for researching complex real-world problems, the Integration and Implementation Science (i2S) framework. As a pilot study, we examine seven inter and transdisciplinary agri-environmental case studies against the concepts presented in the i2S framework, and we hypothesise that considering concepts in the i2S framework during the planning and delivery of agri-environmental research will increase the usefulness of the research for next users. We found that for the types of complex, real-world research done in the case studies, increasing attention to the i2S dimensions correlated with increased usefulness for the end users. We conclude that using the i2S framework could provide handrails for researchers, to help them navigate the swamps when engaging with the complexity of socio-environmental problems.


Author(s):  
Belinda Jessup ◽  
Tony Barnett ◽  
Kehinde Obamiro ◽  
Merylin Cross ◽  
Edwin Mseke

Background: On a per capita basis, rural communities are underserviced by health professionals when compared to metropolitan areas of Australia. However, most studies evaluating health workforce focus on discrete professional groups rather than the collective contribution of the range of health, care and welfare workers within communities. The objective of this study was therefore to illustrate a novel approach for evaluating the broader composition of the health, welfare and care (HWC) workforce in Tasmania, Australia, and its potential to inform the delivery of healthcare services within rural communities. Methods: Census data (2011 and 2016) were obtained for all workers involved in health, welfare and care service provision in Tasmania and in each statistical level 4 area (SA4) of the state. Workers were grouped into seven categories: medicine, nursing, allied health, dentistry and oral health, health-other, welfare and carers. Data were aggregated for each category to obtain total headcount, total full time equivalent (FTE) positions and total annual hours of service per capita, with changes observed over the five-year period. Results: All categories of the Tasmanian HWC workforce except welfare grew between 2011 and 2016. While this growth occurred in all SA4 regions across the state, the HWC workforce remained maldistributed, with more annual hours of service per capita provided in the Hobart area. Although the HWC workforce remained highly feminised, a move toward gender balance was observed in some categories, including medicine, dentistry and oral health, and carers. The HWC workforce also saw an increase in part-time workers across all categories. Conclusions: Adopting a broad approach to health workforce planning can better reflect the reality of healthcare service delivery. For underserviced rural communities, recognising the diverse range of workers who can contribute to the provision of health, welfare and care services offers the opportunity to realise existing workforce capacity and explore how ‘total care’ may be delivered by different combinations of health, welfare and care workers.


Author(s):  
Fabian Frenzel ◽  
Gavin Brown ◽  
Anna Feigenbaum ◽  
Patrick McCurdy

This chapter concludes the volume by highlighting key themes that have run through the book and the case studies of diverse contemporary and historical protest camps contained within it. The chapter recognises that protest camps have come into being motivated by a diverse range of political imperatives and that these political motivations, as much as local context, shape the form that specific protest camps take. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of studying the infrastructural arrangements through which protest camps function. It highlights several of the contradictions posed by protest camping – both around the valorisation of territory and the act of camping itself, and the tensions arising out of attention to social reproduction and care within camps. Finally, the conclusion reflects on some of the gaps in existing research highlighted by the book, and outlines priority areas for future protest camps research.


Author(s):  
Alessia Pugliese ◽  
Jordan Scholten ◽  
Samantha Yeung

Cannabis production has expanded significantly across southern Ontario with the legalisation of theindustry. Much of this expansion has occurred within the rural countryside, through the utilisation of existinggreenhouse infrastructure. While the growth of this sector provides economic benefits to rural communities, complaints from adjacent residents related to lighting and odour issues are common and mitigation of such issues is complex. Land use planning policies have been established across southern Ontario to manage the development of cannabis greenhouses; however, policies vary by region and countyand the appropriateness of these policies have not been tested. This study seeks to analyse municipalplanning policies that regulate cannabis production and understand the impacts of these policies on sector,adjacent land owners and rural communities. Planning policies will be analysed at the municipal, regional orcounty level, with the creation of a database to highlight consistency and differences between communities. Case studies will be utilised to gain better insights into the challenges and opportunities related to cannabis production and planning mitigation. This presentation will provide a summary of current research findings, including highlights of a municipal scan of zoning by-law policies and informalinsights into policy appeals in southern Ontario.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194277512110469
Author(s):  
Steve Sider ◽  
Kimberly Maich ◽  
Jacqueline Specht ◽  
Carolyn Treadgold ◽  
Hillary Winger

We examine the process of developing web-based case studies, a novel form of professional learning for principals, specifically related to inclusive school leadership. Based on the input from 39 principals, 5 case studies were developed with branching scenarios that provided multiple options for decision-making. These “choose your own adventure” case studies were used in a special education for school administrators course with 109 participants in Ontario, Canada. We consider the authenticity of the cases, the importance of incorporating multiple perspectives, and issues related to function, form, and choice. We incorporate five lessons for developing web-based case studies.


Author(s):  
Thushara Dibley ◽  
Michele Ford

This introductory chapter focuses on the collective contribution of progressive social movements to Indonesia's transition to democracy and their collective fate in the decades since. This sets the scene for the case studies to follow. It also explains how the relationship between social movements and democratization is understood in this context. Social movements consist of networks involving a diverse range of actors, including individuals, groups, or organizations that may be loosely connected or tightly clustered. Democratization, meanwhile, is a process through which a polity moves toward “a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.”


Author(s):  
Gaganmeet Kaur Awal ◽  
K. K. Bharadwaj

Due to the digital nature of the web, the social web mimics the real-world social dynamics that manifest themselves as data and can be easily mined as patterns, making the web a fertile ground for business and research-oriented analytical applications. Collective intelligence (CI) is a multifaceted field with roots in sociology, biology, and many other disciplines. Various manifestations of CI support the successful existence of large-scale social systems. This chapter gives an overview of the principles of CI and the concept of “wisdom of crowds” and highlights how to maximize the potential of big data analytics for CI. Also, various techniques and approaches have been described that leverage these CI concepts across a diverse range of ever-evolving social systems for commercial business applications like influence mining, expertise discovery, etc.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Steidl

Reference to identity is ubiquitous in archaeology. Even when identity is not part of the questions driving research, assumptions about it affect interpretations of data; the terms used to designate individuals or collective groups carry implicit ideas about their identities. Default categories used to describe people, however, are often rooted in binary oppositions instead of the interactions that made up their daily social lives. In an archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, these oppositional categories are most frequently rooted in ethnicity. This article presents the community as an ideal framework to address the problems posed by an overreliance on ethnicity for understanding ancient identities, but also to compare collective social dynamics more broadly. Laying out a methodology for communities’ archaeological study, it uses two case studies from Emporion (Spain) and Ephesos (Turkey) to illustrate the new questions and conversations facilitated by an archaeology of communities that complement ongoing identity studies.


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