Promoting Resilient Livelihoods through Adaptive Social Protection: Lessons from 124 programmes in South Asia

Adaptive Social Protection refers to efforts to integrate social protection (SP), disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), the need for which is increasingly recognised by practitioners and academics. Relying on 124 agricultural programmes implemented in five countries in Asia, this article considers how these elements are being brought together, and explores the potential gains of these linkages. It shows that full integration is still relatively limited but that, when it occurs, it helps to shift the time horizon beyond short‐term interventions aimed at supporting peoples' coping strategies and/or graduation objectives, towards longer‐term interventions that can help promote transformation towards climate and disaster resilient livelihood options.     

Developing interests in child care outcome measurement: a central government perspective

Over the last decade, the research interest of central government in services to children and families has covered various parts of the child care system, though the focus on evaluation of outcomes has remained constant. Major research programmes encompass the outcomes of: child protection interventions, residential care and the implementation of the Children Act 1989.     

Planning participation in public decision making

By posing as specialists in forecasting the future, by arguing the “inevitability of technological progress, and by hiding behind the skirts of public officials, planners in the public sector seek to exercise power without responsibility—power to determine the shape of life for the rest of us. The author attacks this myth of the all- seeing planner and in the process seeks to demolish some of the planners' unwarranted assumptions about “the year 2000”, the future of technology, the affluent society, the age of leisure, etc.     

Analysis of longitudinal binary data from multiphase sampling

The efficient use of surrogate or auxiliary information has been investigated within both model-based and design-based approaches to data analysis, particularly in the context of missing data. Here we consider the use of such data in epidemiological studies of disease incidence in which surrogate measures of disease status are available for all subjects at two time points, but definitive diagnoses are available only in stratified subsamples. We briefly review methods for the analysis of two-phase studies of disease prevalence at a single time point, and we discuss the extension of four of these methods to the analysis of incidence studies. Their performance is compared with special reference to a study of the incidence of senile dementia.     

City-wide relationships between green spaces,urban land use and topography

The growing proportion of human populations living in urban areas, and consequent trends of increasing urban expansion and densification fuel a need to understand how urban form and land use affect environmental quality, including the availability of urban green spaces. Here we use Sheffield as a case study of city-wide relationships between urban green space extent, quality (vegetation cover and tree-cover), and gradients in urban form and topography. The total area of buildings and length of the road network are equally strong negative predictors of extent of green space, while the former predictor is a more important negative influence upon green space quality. Elevation positively influences extent of green space but negatively influences tree-cover. In contrast, slope of terrain positively influences green space quality and is the best predictor of tree-cover. Overall housing density is a more important negative predictor of extent of green space and tree-cover than the densities of individual housing types. Nevertheless, the latter are more important influences upon levels of vegetation cover. Threshold effects of densities of different housing types suggest opportunities for optimising green space quality, with implications for housing policy. Variation in ecological quality of green space may partly reflect different historical intensities of industrial activity.     

Environmentalism, Feminism, and Gender

Although social scientists have written much recently about environmentalism, feminism, and gender, insufficient systematic examination of their interrelations has been done. The lack of adequate research on links among these three concepts limits their usefulness for both grassroots mobilization efforts and general theory development. The present exploratory study surveys a college student sample ( N = 393) clarifying the relationships between liberal environmentalism, gender, and feminism. Relationship between feminism and attitudes toward human use of the environment and between gender and environmental regulation are found suppressed by a relationship between feminism and environmentalism. Although tentative, these findings suggest new directions for the study of ecofeminism.