Environmental hazard and migration intentions in a coastal area in Ghana: a case of sea flooding

Recently, there has been significant debate about whether ‘environmental migration’ can constitute a form of adaptation to environmental change, as opposed to forced or flight migration. The Foresight Report on Migration and Environmental Change (2011) suggested environmental factors are one driver of migration, as well as political, social, economic and demographic drivers, and that—under the right conditions—migration can be a form of adaptation to changing climatic conditions. However, this is dependent on migrants having adequate social and financial capital to undertake beneficial types of migration; it further argues that environmental change may result in ‘trapped populations’ whereby people who lack the necessary resources to re-establish livelihoods elsewhere may be left exposed to increasingly severe environmental shocks and stresses in situ. Research on the climate-migration nexus in West Africa has largely focused on out-migration from the semi-arid Sahel with more limited evidence about how sea flooding interacts with migration flows. This paper attempts to help fill this knowledge gap. Using data from a representative survey of households across three coastal communities in Ghana’s Volta River Delta, this paper concludes that exposure to sea flooding may not be a primary cause of out-migration as other community, economic and political factors influence migration intentions and decisions. Thus, it is important for planned adaptation interventions to be strengthened in situ to enable households, particularly farming households, sustain their livelihoods.     

The Community Well-Being Questionnaire: Theoretical Context and Initial Assessment of Its Reliability and Validity

The article presents the theoretical contextand the elements that underlie the developmentof the community well-being questionnaire. Italso discusses the reliability and validity ofthe questionnaire's scales by presentingresults from two studies carried out in urbanareas in the U.K., Ireland and Greece. Thescales assess satisfaction with the builtenvironment, environmental quality and services and facilities. They also measure personal safety, informal interaction,community spirit, income sufficiency, decisionmaking process and place attachment. Analysesshowed that they have high internal and goodtest-retest reliability. They also performwell, when subjected to factorial validity andconstruct validity assessments.     

Measuring is Believing! Improving Conventional Indicators of Welfare State Development

Welfare effort (social spending as a percentage of GDP) has conventionally been the preferred measure for comparisons in space and time of the level of development of welfare states. However, a wide variety of other measuring systems are potentially available in this field, because there are different sources and different methods for calculating social spending, so a variety of indicators can be calculated, each of which best reflects a different aspect of social protection systems. This paper presents two innovations: first it proposes options other than those generally used to measure the relative development of welfare states. Secondly, it uses those new measurements to show that some widely accepted conclusions on the relative development of welfare states need to be reviewed.     

A Coalition Perspective on Nonprofit Governance Quality: Analyzing Dimensions of Influence in an Exploratory Comparative Case Analysis

We answer the call that governance research should focus more on processes outside the boundaries of boards, especially for nonprofit organizations. In particular, we suggest and elaborate concrete steps with respect to the advantages of a leadership coalition perspective to focus more on the behavioral and informal aspects of governance. Through a comparative case analysis of five nonprofit organizations, we explore contingencies between characteristics of nonprofit leadership coalitions and governance quality. We identify two dimensions to classify leadership coalitions: centralized versus diffused influence and specific versus holistic influence. These dimensions are subsequently related with observed governance quality. We frame our finding in the existing literature on group faultlines, which are socially constructed dividing lines within groups, and we discuss the importance of establishing a balanced coalition between a weak or nonexisting and a strong dominant coalition to ensure high governance quality. We also present propositions on how governance quality and its various sub-dimensions can be studied as a complex, nonlinear intermediate concept between coalitional aspects of leadership groups and nonprofit organizational performance. Finally, we discuss concrete avenues for further testing and verification of our theoretical interpretation.     

Blame the Parents? Challenges for Parent‐Focused Programmes for Families of Gang‐Involved Young People

Parent‐focused interventions are a potentially effective tool for preventing and reducing gang involvement, although the challenges of delivering such services are considerable. Drawing from data collected over 26 months for the ethnographic study, Youth Gangs in an English City, including interviews with parents of gang‐involved young people, we identify potential obstacles. These include: psychological barriers to the participation of parents relating to perceived denial, stigma and blame; and possible counter‐productivity of interventions. Strategies to minimise these are discussed.     

Reflection on action: The process of helping social work students to develop their use of theory in practice

Over the years, college and practice-based social work teachers have been expected to help social work students to relate or integrate theory and practice, to transfer knowledge and/or to be a reflective practitioner. This paper first seeks to unpick and clarify what integrating theory and practice actually means and then goes on to suggest a model for exploring the use of theory in practice which a practice teacher could use with students in supervision.