Community Council Research Articles

Decentralizing the Governance of Inland Fisheries in the Pacific Region of Colombia

In 1993, Colombia launched a decentralization process granting Black communities collective property rights over territories they had inhabited for centuries. Decentralization was intended to promote inclusive governance, enhance environmental governance in Black communities’ territories, and reduce poverty. This paper presents a qualitative case study of decentralized inland fisheries governance in the country’s largest Community Council. Our results suggest that decentralization policies need to account for particularities of resource systems and community dynamics. Inland fisheries governance poses specific challenges for decentralization because a) ecological dynamics supporting the resource system take place beyond the administrative boundaries of fisheries; b) rivers are public goods in Colombia, and therefore it is impossible to exclude users from accessing them; and c) regulations are not well-enforced in places where fish are sold. This calls for a combined effort from stakeholders with different rights, duties, and capacities within the governance system to coordinate actions for enforcing regulations.

Insights from Research Network Collaborators on How to Reach Rural Communities with Cancer Prevention and Control Programs.

This paper examines community leaders' and researchers' recommendations for reaching rural communities in a southeastern U.S. state with cancer prevention and control programming. A qualitative inquiry of a grant network's research and community councils was conducted to explore members' opinions on how to engage rural communities and obtain input on how to recruit rural organizations for a mini-grants program. Telephone/virtual interviews were conducted with all 13 council members. Responses were analyzed using thematic analysis and findings were examined within the context of system-centric and patient-centric dimensions. Council members discussed limited education, lack of insurance, low socioeconomic status, health care avoidance, and transportation as barriers to cancer prevention and control. They recommended reaching rural populations by partnering with community and faith-based organizations, use of targeted multi-media, and tailored cancer education trainings. Findings are used for guiding outreach with rural communities and recruitment of rural organizations for a cancer-focused mini-grants initiative.

Methodology for the decision-making process in Social District Heating implementation

District heating is a centralized energetic system, capable of providing heat to different structures. This technology helps achieving energetic efficiency with a high fuel flexibility, enabling the use of various renewable sources, which will lead to a lower pollution potential. Beside the environmental perspective, these systems show a great ability concerning the social context. Benefits such as, tackling fuel poverty, increasing employment and population in areas suffering from desertification, along with forest fire prevention, lead to the social perspective as the primary motivation for the implementation of these systems, creating the concept of Social District Heating (SDH). Therefore, this paper developed a decision support tool to prioritize locations in the most need of an SHD, with the necessary features to include this technology in its area. A methodology intended to assess quantitative and qualitative variables is presented, step by step, evaluating each location relatively to community aspects, background context and council power criteria. The results presented enhance more than one location, however one appears as the most appropriate for the SDH implementation.

СОЦІАЛЬНО-ПСИХОЛОГІЧНА ГАРМОНІЗАЦІЯ МОЛОДІ У ПОЛІТИЧНОМУ ЧАСО-ПРОСТОРІ

The article considers the description of the developed training program, which is aimed at optimizing the political behavior of young people and neutralizing the potential of their political conflict. It is determined that neutralizing the potential of political conflict among young people requires a number of measures, in particular, at the stage of providing educational services, which should include both educational and counseling activities aimed at optimizing the political behavior of young people. It is proved that an effective mechanism to counteract this and neutralize the destructive influences of extremist organizations is to increase the political culture and maturity of the political identity of the younger generation, namely the development of its political activity in line with democratic initiatives and political identity of the younger generation. stimulating youth participation. And the main forms of implementation of this are the involvement of young people in public administration, namely the internship of students in order to develop the necessary professional qualities and prepare for further work in local governments. It is also important to involve the most active youth representatives in community councils or advisory bodies, which will also help them to develop the professional skills needed to work in this field. It is determined that, given the multinational and multi-religious composition of modern Ukrainian society, it is especially important to hold mass events aimed at forming a tolerant attitude of young people to different cultures and traditions and non-acceptance of any manifestations of intolerance and discrimination. It was found that the most effective socio-psychological tool for harmonizing the political behavior of young people is to conduct appropriate training aimed at forming a mature political culture that will provide a tolerant attitude and constructive ways to overcome political contradictions and conflicts. The developed program of socio-psychological training, aimed at harmonizing the political behavior of young people and neutralizing conflicts in the political space, includes the following 5 sessions. The study concludes that the implementation of this training program will increase the maturity of political identity of young people and, as a result of optimizing their political behavior and developing skills of constructive interaction in society in situations of political contradictions and conflicts, significantly reduce their potential for political conflict.

ENLARGEMENT OF COMMUNITIES AND LEGISLATIVE BASES FOR THE FORMATION OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT BODIES / ՀԱՄԱՅՆՔՆԵՐԻ ԽՈՇՈՐԱՑՈՒՄԸ ԵՎ ՏԵՂԱԿԱՆ ԻՆՔՆԱԿԱՌԱՎԱՐՄԱՆ ՄԱՐՄԻՆՆԵՐԻ ՁԵՎԱՎՈՐՄԱՆ ՕՐԵՆՍԴՐԱԿԱՆ ՀԻՄՔԵՐԸ

The administrative-territorial reforms launched in the Republic of Armenia continued with great vigor at the end of 2021. As a result of the administrative-territorial reforms, 441 communities were joined into about 38 enlarged communities. In parallel with the enlargement, changes were made in the electoral system, according to which the elections of the community council should be conducted by the proportional electoral system, and the head of the community should be elected by the municipal council. This marked the beginning of a new phase of the administrative reform, the aim of which should be the establishment and continuous development of the local self-government system.

Is It Time to De-Proscribe Terrorist Organisations in Northern Ireland?

ABSTRACT In 2017 an application to de-proscribe The Red Hand Commando (RHC) loyalist paramilitary organisation was submitted by an organisation known as the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) which has the backing of other proscribed loyalist groups including the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and RHC. The application was understandably considered negatively by some relatives of RHC victims as well as by Sinn Féin. The application was rejected for failing to comply with the necessary process of de-proscription which reinforces the criticism and difficulty for proscribed organisations that are no longer engaged in terrorism to de-proscribe. If the Northern Ireland Assembly and Commissions set up in Northern Ireland (NI) following the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) with support from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are to dismantle paramilitary groups, then they must take bold decisions and decide whether it is time to support the de-proscription of paramilitary groups that have relinquished political violence. This article recommends that agencies should set out a staged process which can be followed by proscribed organisations in NI interested in applying for de-proscription thereby enabling them to self-evaluate whether or not they are ready for de-proscription.

Decolonizing local planning through new social cartography: making Black geographies visible in a plantation context in Colombia

ABSTRACT Maps produced during the saga of European ‘discovery’ were shown to erase local forms of spatial knowledge of colonised populations to serve domination interests. This paper explores the continuation of this colonial erasing logic in local planning practices in Jamundí, a municipality where Black peasants’ traditional farms persist in a sugarcane dominated landscape. We first compare official maps from the current Land Use Plan of Jamundí with social cartography produced by afro-descendant community councils to analyse the maps’ selections, omissions and additions. Through community map drawings and collective discussions during cartography workshops, interviews and tours of the territory, we then reconstruct a Black geography that is concealed in official maps. Our analysis shows that official maps naturalise a scale in which only plantations are formally represented, rendering invisible small-scale traditional agricultural systems and Black ecologies, favouring the expansion of uses and activities detrimental to Black territorial projects in Jamundí. We argue that afro-descendant living spaces and experiences are visually omitted from spatial representation in the physical planning maps through institutionalised processes. We conclude that decolonising local planning is crucial for the recognition and securing of afro-descendant customary land and territorial rights in Colombia as well as for regional sustainability.

Shifting COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions in New Zealand: Next Steps in the Vaccination Campaign.

Shifting COVID-19 Vaccine Intentions in New Zealand: Next Steps in the Vaccination Campaign.

Environmental strategy of improving green space in Tawaka City, Barinas State

<p>Green areas are the starting point of a city because they represent the greatest purification of any pollutants in the surrounding environment, which is caused by the discovery of different reasons for population growth, the lack of environmental programs, and human indifference to environmental problems. This affects the overall formation of man because he needs environmental balance, that is, human nature. Therefore, this behavior leads to the reduction and generation of environmental degradation. The main objective of this work is to develop an environmental strategy to improve the green area. Department C, “Terrace Community Council on 28 July”, is located in Tawaka City, Barinas City, Barinas State. The method used is quantitative, and the type of research is a feasible project with an on-site design. The tool used for data collection is the questionnaire to obtain the results. The study population was 192, and the sample was represented by 57 subjects. On the other hand, reliability was proved after the instrument tabulation, and the result was 0.92. In this sense, this conclusion is handled according to the objectives proposed in the study because the application of environmental technology helps to improve green space in the short term, as is the case with Tawaka urban development. If the green space is a space, it has been phased out because the residents of the department have not taken any strategy to maintain it, where they provide residents and tourists with the aesthetics of the area and the relaxing benefits provided by the green space.</p>

Workplace information literacy

This paper focuses information literacy (IL) from a methodological perspective, addressing quantitative IL measures, suitable for evaluating the role of IL in supporting work activities. So far, IL in workplace contexts has mostly been studied using qualitative methods, designed for studying situational and context-dependent practices. Therefore it is important to explore how quantitative measures could be used to bring forward the relation between IL and organisational outcomes, that is the assessment of the impact of IL in workplace contexts. Quantitative research into IL is not unknown, but has been mainly developed in higher education, in order to measure students’ abilities to make use of information. This paper brings forward three separate studies, conducted by the authors, highlighting different workplace contexts: small and medium enterprises; universities; and community councils. The common approach is that survey instruments were used to measure IL and its impact in these organisational contexts. The methodological implementations and insights are presented and combined, and methodological strengths and challenges are discussed, with the aims of (1) building knowledge about IL measures in workplace settings that is currently lacking, (2) finding additional measures for the complex IL construct, and (3) considering the scope of the practices that can be measured. The paper highlights the complexity of studying the impacts of IL in workplace contexts, and the importance of using multiple methods. It constitutes an important step towards a more unified understanding of how to study workplace IL.

The Festivalisation of Edinburgh: Manifestations, Impacts and Responses

The Festivalisation of Edinburgh: Constructing its Governance was published in Scottish Affairs 30.1. It showed how the city council, Scottish Government and the events, festivals and tourism industries worked in partnership as a growth coalition. This follow-up article describes some of the results they achieved. It focuses on Edinburgh's August and Winter Festivals, as these are the largest scale festival events. It also analyses the project that sought to re-imagine West Princes Street Gardens. It explores the meaning of ‘festivalisation’ both through its direct impacts on the use of urban space, but also in its relation to the commodification of public space and austerity urbanism. Festivalisation has normalised the flow of value from local public spaces to geographically dispersed asset owners. However, opposition emerged from some local residents and community councils, with the long-established civic amenity charity, the Cockburn Association, playing a catalytic role. The Covid pandemic disrupted this process in 2020, opening up further debates about the role of festivals and tourism in the recovery.

Sidon against Beirut: Space, Control, and the Limits of Sectarianism within the Jewish Community of Modern Lebanon

AbstractWhen the State of Greater Lebanon was established in 1920, the Jewish Community Council of Beirut was officially recognized as the central administrative body within Lebanon, and although smaller communities such as Sidon and Tripoli also had their own councils they were consequently made subject to the authority of Beirut. In this context of political overhaul, I argue that some Jewish actors made use “from below” of political opportunities provided by sectarianism “from above”—or national sectarianism—to garner control over all Jewish political structures in Lebanon. But by examining in particular activities in and around the Israelite Community Council in Sidon (al-Majlis al-Milli al-Isra'ili bi-Sayda), I show how and why these attempts to practice new forms of sectarianism were met with resistance, despite connections that tied Lebanon's Jews together administratively in one community.

Burnout among primary health care workers in Brazil: results of a multilevel analysis.

Burnout among health care workers may hamper the quality of care and effectiveness of health systems. Hence, we examined the prevalence of burnout in primary care teams, including community health workers; and investigated associations between individuals' characteristics, team and primary care center factors, and burnout. We carried out a cross-sectional study among primary care teams in the city of São Paulo, Brazil (n = 2940). We randomly selected 66 primary care centers. The Maslach burnout inventory was used to investigate burnout. We used multilevel modelling to examine the associations between individuals' characteristics, team and primary care center variables with burnout. We addressed 351 primary care teams, with 11.4% of participants presenting severe burnout. The variance in burnout among primary care workers was partially explained by individuals' characteristics, and by team and primary care center factors. Severe burnout was associated with the following: (1) individuals' characteristics: being black, being younger, a higher length of employment in primary care, and presenting a lack of feedback from supervisors; (2) team factors: working in deprived areas and not receiving the support of a multidisciplinary team; and (3) primary care center factors: inadequate infrastructure (less than one office available per team), and having a bad/very bad relationship with the community council. To reduce burnout among primary care teams, stakeholders should: (1) train managers/supervisors on leadership styles that prioritize performance feedback, support, and communication skills; (2) allocate catchment areas to teams according to each community's vulnerability; (3) provide a multidisciplinary team to support primary care workers; and (4) offer suitable facilities and infra-structure.

Tackling challenges for co-management of natural resources: the community council in Limpopo National Park, Mozambique

ABSTRACT Mozambican law recommends community councils to promote the co-management of natural resources in protected areas. In the Limpopo National Park, the park committee has served as the community council for the last two decades. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2009–2019, this practical note identifies challenges that the committee faces and suggests two pathways to tackle the challenges: the committee members should be selected based on individual capacity; and financial resources must be directed towards developing their capacity. Further research on how to establish these pathways are imperative to enable the committee members to focus on activities for the co-management.

Foundation News: Impact of the pandemic on the GWB drinking water project in the Nepal Himalaya region

In 2019, after almost a decade of working on water quality in the Himalayas, we submitted a proposal to Geoscientists Without Borders® (GWB) titled “Understanding high mountain aquifers to source drinking water in Sagarmatha National Park.” The project involves a combination of water-quality and quantity measurements, geologic mapping, and an electrical resistivity tomography survey. The goal of the project is to help two communities (Phortse and Lobuche within Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal) minimize their water vulnerability to climate change and earthquakes. The project team includes researchers and students from the United States and Nepal, as well as nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, and community councils. In the proposal, we identified physical health and altitude as the primary risks that could hinder the success of the project. Like everyone else in early 2019, we had no way to foresee the events of 2020, which would almost completely derail our project. Health has turned out to be the major hinderance. The irony of the global pandemic is how much it has impacted the work of the U.S.-based team and how little it has impacted the necessity of the project.

Limited urban citizenship: the case of community councils in East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT Urban environments are often disputed over issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Urban citizenship within such spaces has been found to be fragmented, or even ‘dark.’ This paper focuses on the role of an intermediary institution, the Community Council (CC), in the contested city of (East) Jerusalem. Building on in-depth interviews and site visits, we suggest that CCs implement a limited form of urban citizenship via a range of functions that vary from service provision to political representation. We explain the process by which this form of urban citizenship is created and operated, and highlight the precarity of limited urban citizenship in a non-democratic context where most people are stateless residents. Through this case, we seek to enrich the literature on urban citizenship and CCs in contested cities with an emphasis on the multiple urban and national logics that operate in space.

Thinking through Community Spirit: Zainichi Koreans in Post-Korean Wave Japanese Communities

ABSTRACT This article explores the notion of ‘community spirit’ as it occurs in the discourse of community development (machizukuri) in the context of a society characterised by multicultural coexistence (tabunka kyōsei). It does so by examining multigenerational Korean residents’ integration in post-Korean Wave Japan. Despite the recognised deficiencies in Japan’s attempt to accommodate ethnic diversity in line with the government’s vision of multicultural coexistence, some long-term Korean and Japanese residents have begun to foster a shared sense of community as Japanese consumers of mainstream culture have familiarised themselves with Korean culture in recent years. Inspired by the existing gap between community spirit embodied among residents and the Japanese government’s sustained rhetoric aimed at maintaining the existing social order by juxtaposing Japanese and non-Japanese residents, this article aims to identify the keys to fostering an effective vision of an inclusive society in Japan. I argue that informal networks, personal engagement, and active participation would complement the current top-down policy that is implemented to negotiate Japan’s increasing diversity. Based on data gathered during ethnographic work that included participation in community initiatives and council discussions in western Japan’s Hanshin area, I shed light on the competing forces of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Japanese society.

Teriflunomide provides protective properties after oxygen-glucose-deprivation in hippocampal and cerebellar slice cultures.

One of the major challenges in emergency medicine is out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). Every year, about 53-62/100 000 people worldwide suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest with serious consequences, whereas persistent brain injury is a major cause of morbidity and mortality of those surviving a cardiac arrest. Today, only few and insufficient strategies are known to limit neurological damage of ischemia and reperfusion injury. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether teriflunomide, an approved drug for treatment of relapsing-remitting-multiple-sclerosis, exerts a protective effect on brain cells in an in vitro model of ischemia. Therefore, organotypic slice cultures from rat hippocampus and cerebellum were exposed to oxygen-glucose-deprivation and subsequently treated with teriflunomide. The administration of teriflunomide in the reperfusion time on both hippocampal and cerebellar slice cultures significantly decreased the amount of detectable propidium iodide signal compared with an untreated culture, indicating that more cells survive after oxygen-glucose-deprivation. However, hippocampal slice cultures showed a higher vulnerability to ischemic conditions and a more sensitive response to teriflunomide compared with cerebellar slice cultures. Our study suggests that teriflunomide, applied as a post-treatment after an oxygen-glucose-deprivation, has a protective effect on hippocampal and cerebellar cells in organotypic slice cultures of rats. All procedures were conducted under established standards of the German federal state of North Rhine Westphalia, in accordance with the European Communities Council Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes.

Animation of a Local Urban Community. Sebastian Latocha Talks to Remigiusz Kaczmarek, the Chairman of the Józef Montwiłł-Mirecki Community Council in Łódź

How do you nurture common welfare in a modern city? What is the role of local urban communities and the networked cooperation of numerous bodies like community councils, district NGOs, neighbourhood initiatives and particular individuals (animators, activists, involved citizens) – in creating a community, which, being subject to the municipality’s activity, does not patiently await its fate, but takes matters into its own hands? What impact does the history, tradition, urban planning and architecture, local symbols, rituals and institutions of a location have on creating a sense of identity for that given place and for creating an atmosphere of education, animation and activity in the public sphere in cooperation ‘with’ (and not ‘for’) the local community? How do Community Councils support and develop neighbourhood communities? An interview with Remigiusz Kaczmarek, the Chairman of the Jozef Montwill-Mirecki Community Council in Łodź, reveals how the difficult heritage of this district provided the residents with a model of collaboration and social participation. The case of this modernist housing estate constructed in Łodź before the Second World War shows the dynamics of urban local community development based on the common experience of its residents.

Underground Multiculturalism: Contentious Cultural Politics in Gold-Mining Regions in Chocó, Colombia

AbstractThis article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.