Positioning theory as a design lens

Theorizing about environmental or collective action relies on individualistic or collectivistic assumptions, respectively. Thus, a unified explanation for lowering one’s thermostat (a form of environmental action) and participating in mass protest (a form of collective action) is lacking. Building on a broad literature that views humans as relational beings, I aim to show that (a) a relational perspective synthesizes these two perspectives by reconceptualizing environmental and collective action as types of social interaction that regulate social relationships and (b) therefore, environmental and collective action have a similar motivational profile. This implies that both collective and environmental action are ultimately relational phenomena; that any assumption that environmental action is motivated by individualistic concerns and collective action by collectivistic concerns, limits our understanding of either type of action; and that future theorizing and research on environmental and collective action will benefit from adopting a relational perspective.

The socio-cultural value of urban wetlands: Insights into local sustainable management.

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

This chapter highlights the link between individual and community. This chapter shows the extent to which microfinance creates new networks that motivate women to get involved, either individually or collectively, in community actions. The chapter describes how women as a group utilize their new platform to undertake collective community action. As far as this study is concerned, collective action is defined as the joint effort undertaken by a microfinance group or groups. An appropriate level of empowerment for women can only be achieved if their household level of empowerment spreads to the community level. The empirical examples of collective action reveals that comparatively more women respondents took actions for community social welfare activities and this had a spill over effect to non-members and other community people. However, when it was necessary to take challenging actions against patriarchal social norms, comparatively less women respondents were found to be involved.

Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. She blogs at www.adaptivepath.com or at her personal site www.intelleto.com. Her email address is kate adaptivepath.com. I magine you’re in a forest, surrounded by majestic towering trees. Underfoot is the soft, leafy, damp forest floor. Taking a seat on a fallen log, you arch the kinks out of your hunched shoulders, shake off the stress of the office and take a deep breath of fragrant, moist air. You ask yourself why work feels like you are part of a never-ending rat race...and you wonder...will it ever stop? How are you going to spearhead that major project or work with a new cross-functional team and deliver great results when the organizational environment hampers you? Much as I hate to interrupt your well-earned contemplation, I’m compelled to inform you that on the underside of the log you are sitting on is a life form teeming with insight about organizational behavior. Throughout the seemingly quiet forest, thousands of spores are performing an age-old dance, expressing quietly the tactics of surviving and thriving in this dynamic and ever-changing wooded environment. Say “hello” to slime mold. This lower fungus has evolved a clear set of survival techniques that are potent lessons for people grappling with challenges posed by shifting companies and markets. Who knew that insights into survival could be found literally under your feet? For years, biologists, botanists, media moguls, artists, authors and technologists have been captivated by the sophistication and tenacity of the slime mold lifecycle and the slime mold’s ability to morph from plant-like to animal-like behaviors in constant sync with the environment. I’m not a biologist. I’m a designer working in the field of digital products, information architecture and interaction design. But over the past eight years, I’ve been entranced with slime mold as a compelling metaphor for organizational development. In my work as an employee, manager, director and consultant, I’ve observed how organizations and teams shift in response to external forces, and I’ve found trends and patterns for acclimating and adapting to change. This article shares the examples that I’ve observed and explores possibilities and approaches for how businesses and people in them can better adapt to a rate of change that is rapidly becoming the standard for doing business. By using slime mold as a learning tool, we can identify practical tips and tools for surviving, thriving and doing great work in even the toughest of environments. This fascinating life form holds intriguing lessons for today’s knowledge worker... from sensing and responding to environments that become hostile to using the power of signals to create alignment and collective action.

Social scientific research from different traditions on collective action under repressive conditions is fragmented across different levels of analysis. The current paper takes a first step toward remedying this fragmentation by reviewing research findings on repression and collective action and organizing them into a multilevel framework. We describe the impact of repression on antecedents of collective action at the (a) individual level (including grievances, emotions, efficacy beliefs, politicized identity, and individual differences), (b) group level (including community cohesion and norms), and (c) structural level (including political opportunities and socioecological conditions). We then present an integrative summary reflecting on the broad patterns we observed in the literature. We conclude with policy implications of this work, suggesting recommendations for activists to overcome repression, for authorities to foster pluralist political participation while maintaining stability, and for researchers to further advance knowledge on repression and collective action.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in gender norms within development practice, alongside a rise of individually focused, highly technical, and quantifiable approaches. This viewpoint explores why such approaches have gained prominence and resources from major donors – an issue with material implications for feminist and women’s rights actors seeking to fund the work they know is most effective. Drawing on my experience working with a range of development actors, and as an interdisciplinary scholar, I situate these trends within the logics of datafication, evidence, and accountability shaping global development. The article contributes a framework – DEEP (Depth, Evidence better, Embed ethics, Foster participation) – to guide feminist measurement of norms change while also accounting for the politics of data-driven development. Moving beyond critique, it offers a pragmatic pathway for practitioners and donors to negotiate measurement regimes while sustaining feminist commitments to complexity, ethics, and collective action.

Psychosocial perspectives on children’s development are allied to theories that recognize the ‘self’ as essentially a social entity. The quality of relationships that children experience in their social environment have a profound effect on their socio‐emotional development, personality formation and social competence. To this extent, psychosocial theories of children’s development and wellbeing can provide child and family social workers with a powerful framework within which to analyse, assess and practise. However, it is also recognized that the character of child welfare practices and policies are influenced by prevailing political climates. A simple dichotomy is described between political philosophies of the right and left; libertarianism and communitarianism; individual freedom and collective action. It is argued that the present swing to libertarian individualism has brought about major changes in the policy and practice of much child and family social work, including a preference for theories that emphasize people’s psychological independence, rationality and personal responsibility. In such a climate, child and family social work becomes more legalistic, orientated towards principles of justice rather than welfare, and towards rights and responsibilities rather than personal relationships and social competence. Psychosocial developmental theories, with their emphasis on the importance of social relationships and the emotional interconnectedness of people in community, fare less well under the rigours of psychological individualism and free‐market economics. The paper concludes that if children’s psychosocial development and competence are a product of their social history, practices that psychologically ‘disembed’ people from their relationship environment are unable to consider children’s needs within a coherent, well‐grounded theoretical framework. If child and family social work is premised on helping children develop social understanding and emotional wellbeing, theory and practice are best served by taking a psychosocial perspective.

Spatial and temporal attributes of watersheds and the associated market failures that accelerate degradation of agricultural and environmental resources require innovative institutional arrangements for coordinating use and management of resources. Effective collective action (CA) allows smallholder farmers to jointly invest in management practices that provide collective benefits in terms of economic and sustainability gains. The Government of India takes integrated watershed management (IWM) as a key strategy for improving productivity and livelihoods in the rain-fed and drought-prone regions. This study investigates the institutional and policy issues that limit effective participation of people in community watershed programs and identifies key determinants for the degree of CA and its effectiveness in achieving economic and environmental outcomes. We use empirical data from a survey of 87 watershed communities in semi-arid Indian villages to identify a set of indicators of CA and its performance in attaining desired outcomes. Factor analysis is used to develop aggregate indices of CA and its effectiveness. Regression methods are then employed to test the effects of certain policy relevant variables and to determine the potential effects of CA in achieving desired poverty reduction and resource improvement outcomes. We find a positive and highly significant effect of CA on natural resource investments, but no evidence of its effects on household assets and poverty reduction outcomes. This may be attributable to longer gestation periods for realizing indirect effects from collective natural resource investments and the lack of institutional mechanisms to ensure equitable distribution of such gains across the community, including the landless and marginal farmers. authors' abstract

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is the largest professional membership body within the field of counselling and psychological therapies in the UK, but there is a mismatch between its membership of >65,000 and its research impact. This article sets out a potential strategic direction as considered by an informal grouping of researchers and teachers in the field. Actionable research plans are outlined at three levels: client–practitioner, local communities, and societies. At the client–practitioner level, data‐informed practice can be readily implemented as a therapeutic aid akin to supervision, providing the potential for integrating research into everyday practice. At the community level, interdisciplinary collaborations together with a focus on equality, diversity, and inclusiveness are paths to building a community of researchers and citizens that includes marginalised populations. The importance of social justice extends to the societal level, connecting with politics at a micro and macro level, and engaging internationally to respond to actual threats (e.g., climate change). Across these three levels, high value is placed on data with its potential for informing and improving practice, but also enhancing the lives of people in communities and societies. Overall, research strategies need to be collaborative (i.e., collegial) and less singular (i.e., individually project‐based), developing cumulative knowledge around specific topics via a ‘capture and build’ strategy for small projects with strategic oversight by BACP. Clarity of research strategy combined with collaborative and collective action from BACP and leaders in the field can help realise the full potential of BACP's research capacity.

Readers of the journal may be interested in the recent Appreciating Assets report from the International Association for Community Development (IACD, 2011), in collaboration with the Carnegie UK Trust, which draws together the various strands of ‘asset’ approaches to community development that have become increasingly influential. These include approaches that focus on: the importance of the strengths and assets that people in communities bring to change processes, such as Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), strengths-based work and citizen-led development; the idea of assets as providing the basis of community capital, including human, social, built, political, cultural, natural and financial capitals; and the importance of asset ownership for building pathways out of poverty and exclusion, including asset transfer, asset-building and community-led management of assets. The Report is exploratory and aimed at practitioners and policy-makers, while this Reflections article develops more critical reflection on asset-based approaches and the challenges and opportunities they present for community development. The strands of asset approaches that are drawn together in ‘Appreciating Assets’ may not instantly sit comfortably together despite the shared concept. They do not represent a coherent body of work and are not entirely new. However, their roots and intentions link them in important ways, and they certainly relate local concerns to key global political and economic agendas. It is not altogether surprising that approaches built on economic discourses (i.e. assets and capital) gain popularity within policy frameworks shaped by neoliberalism, and could therefore easily be dismissed as simply products of their time. Certainly, these approaches throw up all the ideological tensions and polemics we by now expect within neoliberal frameworks – the more benign communitarian discourses that replace a focus on social justice; the agenda of self-reliance that challenges more structural responses; and the individualism and competition that contrast with collective action as a basis for social change. Unfortunately, these tensions are heightened because in some policy circles now, a distinction is made between asset-based approaches, which are seen either as ‘new’ or as more aligned with a ‘rediscovered’ community organizing process, and what is seen as ‘traditional’ community development. From this perspective, the latter is seen as ideologically driven, and aligned with a model of the welfare state which is not only under significant financial pressure, but also is being questioned on the grounds of effectiveness.

Translating the Sustainable Development Goals into action: A participatory backcasting approach for developing national agricultural transformation pathways

A systematic review of the outcomes of sustained environmental collective action

BackgroundThe implementation of evidence-based protocols for stroke management in the emergency department (ED) for the appropriate triage, administration of tissue plasminogen activator to eligible patients, management of fever, hyperglycaemia and swallowing, and prompt transfer to a stroke unit were evaluated in an Australian cluster-randomised trial (T3 trial) conducted at 26 emergency departments. There was no reduction in 90-day death or dependency nor improved processes of ED care. We conducted an a priori planned process influential factors that impacted upon protocol uptake.MethodsQualitative face-to-face interviews were conducted with purposively selected ED and stroke clinicians from two high- and two low-performing intervention sites about their views on factors that influenced protocol uptake. All Trial State Co-ordinators (n = 3) who supported the implementation at the 13 intervention sites were also interviewed. Data were analysed thematically using normalisation process theory as a sensitising framework to understand key findings, and compared and contrasted between interviewee groups.ResultsTwenty-five ED and stroke clinicians, and three Trial State Co-ordinators were interviewed. Three major themes represented key influences on evidence uptake: (i) Readiness to change: reflected strategies to mobilise and engage clinical teams to foster cognitive participation and collective action; (ii) Fidelity to the protocols: reflected that beliefs about the evidence underpinning the protocols impeded the development of a shared understanding about the applicability of the protocols in the ED context (coherence); and (iii) Boundaries of care: reflected that appraisal (reflexive monitoring) by ED and stroke teams about their respective boundaries of clinical practice impeded uptake of the protocols.ConclusionsDespite initial high ‘buy-in’ from clinicians, a theoretically informed and comprehensive implementation strategy was unable to overcome system and clinician level barriers. Initiatives to drive change and integrate protocols rested largely with senior nurses who had to overcome contextual factors that fell outside their control, including low medical engagement, beliefs about the supporting evidence and perceptions of professional boundaries. To maximise uptake of evidence and adherence to intervention fidelity in complex clinical settings such as ED cost-effective strategies are needed to overcome these barriers.Trial registrationAustralian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12614000939695).

[ Public diplomacy received general recognition and significant scholarly attention during the Cold War, and that attention was renewed after 11 September 2001. Public diplomacy is now recognised as of the most salient political communication issues in the 21st century. The shift toward a genuinely new Public diplomacy is much more than the references to engagement which appear, for example, in the Djerejian, Princeton Project on National Security, and CSIS Smart Power reports. Public diplomacy is the attempt to influence or change behaviour. The emphasis on interaction through digital media has become increasingly important as the barriers of entry into the business of influence through these means are lowered. The public diplomacy of tomorrow must not merely foster subservient participation; it has to support a space for discourse and collective action on complex problems, which have multiple potential outcomes and effects. Keywords:digital media; public diplomacy , As the ensuing war in Afghanistan and Iraq initially provided the United States with a greater sense of national unity and purpose, George W. Bush's rhetoric and the emergent narratives-in which there was little consideration of the roots of such hatred and violence-juxtaposed terrorism against the benign framework of US history and diplomacy. Various tactics to improve the American image were advanced. First, Washington had to work on the image of the US as honest broker; it had to treat other nations with renewed respect; they needed to listen better to the opinions around the world; policies had to be more closely aligned to traditional American ideals; and finally US public diplomacy, recently in decline, had to be bolstered. Secondly, if experience might be one mitigating factor that inhibits the impact of public diplomacy, another might be the too pervasive declarative tone in much of its rhetoric. Keywords:George W. Bush; US public diplomacy ]