Plan Across Borders

This chapter looks at promising regional cooperation efforts to de-escalate tensions heightened by climate change. Tackling problems like pandemics or climate change within the framework of traditional jurisdictional boundaries means that policymakers continue to treat these challenges like matters of domestic or local concern, rather than the transboundary threats that they are. Breaking down these barriers requires deep focus on cross-border solutions. For example, the climate change problem of “too little and too much water” demands transboundary consideration of evolving conditions in river basins and ocean fisheries. Risk reduction efforts that stretch across regions also offer good avenues for building disaster preparedness, including stockpiling, creating insurance risk pools, setting up systems for regional climate forecasting and early warning, and re-energizing multilateralism. Likewise, the most urgent transborder challenge of all, climate-induced migration, calls for ever greater global cooperation—not less.

Livable Cities and Public Gardens

This chapter discusses how cities can be made more livable through public gardens. It differentiates livability from sustainability in that sustainability adopts a long view of actions and policies and the ways in which development, according to a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” while livability focuses on current conditions and interventions, incorporating the environmental, economic, and equity priorities on a narrower spatial scale relevant to individual people, neighborhoods, and communities in geographically smaller areas. Efforts to enhance livability are primarily community based and driven by issues of local concern that reflect changing conditions. The chapter discusses the public garden movement in the United States and how it began with the early recognition of botanical gardens as keys to economic development. The involvement of botanical gardens in the livability of cities came largely in response to the challenges associated with nineteenth-century urbanization. Our concept of livability has now expanded to include concerns for sustainable development, smart growth and urban design, and community-identified priorities such as access to fresh and affordable food and urban green space as part of the public realm. Finally, the chapter also discusses cross-sector partnerships with public gardens and how this leads to collective action and collective impact.

Identities and Communities: Negotiating Working-Class Identity in the Regional Press

National newspapers have long been considered key agents in the formation of national identity and the reinforcement of social class. Yet questions concerning the way in which the regional press reflects and reinforces both regional and class identity remain relatively underexplored. This chapter explores these issues which include a role in providing independent and critical commentary on issues of local concern as well as refracting national debates through regional and local perspectives (Franklin, 2006). I addition, the chapter examines how these newspapers are important in the reflection of distinctive regional identities which have enabled them to carve out a distinguishing role in the construction of ‘the local’. By keeping the national news agenda in the frame, the local press has sought to present national and local news to its target audience with a distinctive local voice that is closely tied to conceptions of place and belonging. As such, a negotiation between national and local is always present and the chapter examines this negotiation during three distinctive periods of the twentieth century: the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1980s.

Carolingian Lombardy (780–860)

It was not in Francia but Lombardy that councils turned their attention to xenodochia, in what was to be the only sustained effort by Western law-makers to engage with welfare houses. This chapter explores their activity, which was the product of local concern, given voice through a new forum, the Carolingian council. It identifies a programme of reform initiated under Pope Hadrian I and then Charlemagne: restauratio, a call to restore the material inheritance of the landscape, especially buildings and public infrastructure. In Lombardy, the call brought xenodochia to the attention of councils who, over time, developed language and strategies by which to address these facilities. The Lombard capitularies offer a clear definition of xenodochia, one distinct from monasteries, which the chapter then teases out. It argues that a xenodochium was not a community but a material endowment, a gift dedicated in perpetuity to a specific task or tasks of Christian welfare. To councils, the central issue was its dispositio or institutio: the directives of a will-maker as enshrined in his or her testament. This provided a fixed constitution, particular to each xenodochium. A final section explores the implications for these findings on the character of a xenodochium’s endowment.

Citizen science campaign reveals widespread fallout of contaminated dust from mining activities in the central Peruvian Andes

Inadequate management of mine tailings at Cerro de Pasco, one of Peru’s largest mining complexes, has resulted in elevated concentrations of Pb, As, Cu, Zn, and Ag in surface soil horizons across the Junín Plain, central Peru. During June 2016, in response to local concern over mine contamination, teams of local citizens armed with sample bags, plastic trowels, and GPS receivers acquired 385 surface soil samples and 9 plant samples from agricultural lands from an area ∼1000 km2 on the Junín Plain. Metal concentrations were determined by acid digestion and inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry, and results revealed elevated levels of Pb, As, Cu, Zn, and Ag in all samples within a 10 km radius of the center of mining activities, and measurable contamination at least 30 km to the south-southwest, in the direction of prevailing winds. Dust traps emplaced for a 12 month period confirmed that contamination is ongoing. High metal concentrations in grasses growing on contaminated soils revealed that a portion of the total metal contamination is removed from the soil and held in grass tissue, where it can be ingested by graminivores, especially llama, alpaca, and sheep, thereby entering the human food supply.

The Distribution of Sustainable Decision-Making in Multinational Manufacturing Enterprises

In order to contribute to research on implementing business sustainability, this study aims to explore the distribution of decision-making authority related to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Sustainability objectives between different organizational levels in multinational manufacturing enterprises (MMEs) are investigated. The research is fundamentally exploratory. We conducted a multiple case study endeavor with nine participating case organizations. The study identified five different decision-making approaches to sustainability in multinational manufacturing enterprises. The findings showed that there was no consistent way of deciding upon sustainability issues. Some case organizations seemed to regard sustainability as a global concern, while others regarded it as a more local concern. In general, the economic sustainability dimension was regarded as more of a global concern, while the environmental dimension was more of a local concern, and the social dimension more of an integrated concern. The findings of this study can act as guidance for managers when implementing or improving sustainability strategies. The findings will also serve as a map to navigate and understand what should be given the strongest priority in different situations concerning decision-making relating to sustainability in manufacturing processes and networks.