Inclusive Debate Research Articles

Toward an evidence‐informed, responsible, and inclusive debate on solar geoengineering: A response to the proposed non‐use agreement

AbstractA prominent recent perspective article in this journal and accompanying open letter propose a broad international “non‐use agreement” (NUA) on activities related to solar geoengineering (SG). The NUA calls on governments to renounce large‐scale use of SG, and also to refuse to fund SG research, ban outdoor experiments, decline to grant IP rights, and reject discussions of SG in international organizations. We argue that such pre‐emptive rejection of public research and consultation would deprive future policy‐makers of knowledge and capability that would support informed decisions to safely and equitably limit climate risk, sustain human welfare, and protect threatened ecosystems. In contrast to the broad prohibitions of the NUA, we propose an alternative near‐term pathway with five elements: assess SG risks and benefits in the context of related climate risks and responses; distinguish the risks and governance needs of SG research and deployment; pursue research that treats uncertainties and divergent results even‐handedly; harness normalization of SG as a path to effective assessment and governance; and build a more globally inclusive conversation on SG and its governance. These principles would support a more informed, responsible, and inclusive approach to limiting climate risks, including judgments on the potential role or rejection of SG, than the prohibitory approach of the NUA.This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy

Modifying Our Genes: Theology, Science and “Playing God”

Modifying Our Genes: Theology, Science and “Playing God”

International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) in Humanitarian Field: why and how to engage with Planetary Health?

Planetary Health is an emerging field reshaping Global Health understanding of health concerns and interventions living into the Anthropocene. Many challenges faced by humanitarian actors are exacerbated by the climate crisis that could be considered itself another humanitarian crisis. However, often the humanitarian response focuses mainly on disaster risk reduction and on efforts to decarbonize operations. Arguing that Planetary Health offer the missing piece to assess and respond to the complexity of the climate crisis, authors identify the added-value of this approach for humanitarian programs. They pinpoint the main barriers among humanitarian actors in adopting or exploring further the Planetary Health approach. Finally, they share few suggestions toward integrated Planetary Health programs in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Ultimately, this personal viewpoint calls for an inclusive debate to bring Planetary Health insights, critics, and innovations into Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs) hard daily-work in order to strengthen co-benefits for health and environment.

Tattooing as a Popular Form of Body Art in Ascendancy among Urban Youths in Tanzania

This article explores the increasing popularity of tattoos as body art amidst the negative attitudes and social stigmas attached to them in the context of Tanzania. Specifically, it delves into aspects of the tattoo culture before examining the influence and motivations behind the decision to tattoo. Finally, it evaluates the attitudes of Tanzanians to individuals with tattoos. With recourse to the Group Norms Theory (GNT) serving as a framework for elucidating on the underlying factors prompting young individuals to embrace tattooing, this article qualitatively examines data to unravel the complexities of the phenomenon under study. The data came from in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations. The article demonstrates how tattoos bearers value them for the personal symbolism they engender and as a form of decorative self-expression. Other push factors towards tattooing include peer pressure, social media, celebrities, and commemoration. In the context of Tanzania, this article provides insights that could help debunk the misconceptions surrounding tattoos and demystify this intriguing body art, and, hopefully, pave the way to more nuanced and inclusive debate and understanding of this type of art.

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

The implications of artificial intelligence for strategic and organisational communication

In this article, he develops a normative framework of three key communicative principles to manage accountability when stakeholder relationships become heavily burdened by epistemic concerns with AI. The communication principles aim to facilitate access to an ongoing, comprehensible and inclusive debate.

Reimagining the cultural impact of neoliberalism: an analysis of Istanbul and Liverpool biennials

ABSTRACT Biennials are one of the most important stagers of contemporary art practices serving as spaces of reflexivity for artistic production, compressing a glocal sphere, offering a culturally inclusive debate. They play a key role in the global transformation of cultural production in a neoliberal age. Based on empirical data collected from the 15th Istanbul and 10th Liverpool biennials, this paper seeks to interrogate the role they play in the relationship between the cultural production and consumption of the arts. The paper presents an alternative perspective from which we can begin to better understand the cultural impact of neoliberalism. It is suggested, on this basis, that as glocal spaces of culture, biennials can generate culturally inclusive debates and participatory constellations offering a more democratic access to cultural participation. They are in this sense a discursive space and facilitate the opening-up of a critical space in which cultural policy can offer a more sophisticated means of critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the arts world.

Taming Proteus: Challenges for Risk Regulation of Powerful Digital Labor Platforms.

The platform economy’s emergence challenges the current labor regulations hinged upon the binary employer–employee relations established during the industrial age. While this burgeoning phenomenon presents several possibilities for workers, customers, and businesses alike, scholars from various fields have sounded alarms regarding pitfalls in platform-mediated work (PMW). The regulation of working conditions, health, and safety risks are integral to these worries. Drawing upon existing research and empirical data from 49 qualitative interviews with several stakeholders, this paper explores the various dimensions of power exerted by platforms and the mismatch with the current risk regulatory framework. Four regulatory gaps are identified and the concept ‘regulatory escape’ is introduced. The study posits that taming powerful platforms requires harnessing adequate regulatory capacity grounded on developing an expansive view of regulation that encompasses all forms of socio-economic influence. The paper invokes reflection on the existing regulatory systems in society and calls for a more profound and inclusive debate on platform-mediated work and how regulatory gaps can be closed.

The Green Backlash against Economic Globalization

AbstractDespite the steady increase in environmental provisions being included in trade agreements to address potential environmental risks associated with increased trade, growing public concern about environmental issues has given rise to major public protests against various trade agreements. However, facing the widespread backlash against the liberal international economic order, pro-trade leaders have yet to respond adequately to the public's concern over the potential implications of trade on the environment. A review of European Union (EU) officials’ public communication on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership shows that trade advocates narrowly focus on the economic benefits of trade in their trade-related communication while paying little attention to the environmental impacts of the trade deal. This ignores an important aspect of the public discontent with economic globalization. This article argues that the pro-trade camp's failure to engage the public in an inclusive and transparent debate about the environmental effects of trade presents a missed opportunity that has triggered widespread resistance to trade liberalization. By studying the communication channel, this essay highlights the important role of information and dialogue as a potential response to the current public backlash against economic globalization.

Practicing Democracy from Childhood

Democracy manifests itself in a range of ways and is an imperfect, dynamic struggle for collective decision-making. This article discusses the multifaceted processes of deliberative democratic praxis found in traditional Māori society. Central to decision-making inte aoMāori,huiprovide formal and informal structures for deliberative democracy, precedent setting, learning, and transformation through consensus making, inclusive debate, and discussion across all levels of society. Rather than coercion and voting,rangatirarelied on a complex mix of customary values and accomplished oratory skills to explore issues in family and community meetings and in public assemblies. Decisions made through inclusive deliberative processes practiced inhuiestablished evident reasoning and responsibility for all community members to uphold the reached consensus. This article claims that practicing deliberative democracy as a fundamental way of life, learned through ongoing active and meaningful participation throughout childhood, improves the integrity of democratic decision-making.

The illusion of choice in inclusive education

ABSTRACT The inclusive education debate is often framed as a choice between outmoded special schools and progressive inclusive general education schools. However, the rhetoric of ‘choice’ hides what is in reality a context of restricted resources, both in general education and in special congregated settings. We interview three deaf-parented families with a total of six deaf children enrolled in different educational settings in Belgium. We explore the educational choices parents made for their children and how these choices are influenced (1) by their own knowledge of and lived experience with the educational choices available and (2) actually existing resources. Our study shows a clear contrast between the capital parents bring to their children’s educational experiences and the choices available. Parents want to send their children to congregated settings to give them an education in sign language but are hindered from doing so because of the schools’ lack of adherence to educational standards. Instead they are pushed into a general education system that tasks their time and energy, as well as their child’s bodies. The paucity of options for these parents calls for a rethinking of the parameters of the inclusive education debate, moving beyond placement to a holistic focus on deaf children’s linguistic, educational, and social development.

Covid action plan: Can we widen the debate?

The authors have gone through all the chapters published in the special issue on Covid 19 in Indian Journal of Community Health carefully to identify areas that need more clarity and offer some suggestions, which are the need of the hour at this time of the pandemic with high communicability, where majority remain asymptomatic. Authors feel that this pandemic invites a larger and inclusive debate to decide the activities to be undertaken in our country for the containment of this pandemic. As epidemiologists, our foremost interest is to understand the epidemiology and the disease spectrum in India. Investigators would also be interested to get preliminary information regarding case definitions like - probable, suspects, contacts, modes of transmission, risk factors, vulnerable population, role of social distancing, physical distancing, symptom surveillance etc. In addition to learning from recently published science and epidemiological characteristics, preventive measures and what needs to be done during and after pandemics could also be highlighted to understand what is best for India and the way forward. Therefore, the authors feel that a comprehensive action plan should be frequently updated and involve stalwarts of public health in India including implementers from the public health department.

Covid action plan: Can we widen the debate?

The authors have gone through all the chapters published in the special issue on Covid 19 in Indian Journal of Community Health carefully to identify areas that need more clarity and offer some suggestions, which are the need of the hour at this time of the pandemic with high communicability, where majority remain asymptomatic. Authors feel that this pandemic invites a larger and inclusive debate to decide the activities to be undertaken in our country for the containment of this pandemic. As epidemiologists, our foremost interest is to understand the epidemiology and the disease spectrum in India. Investigators would also be interested to get preliminary information regarding case definitions like - probable, suspects, contacts, modes of transmission, risk factors, vulnerable population, role of social distancing, physical distancing, symptom surveillance etc. In addition to learning from recently published science and epidemiological characteristics, preventive measures and what needs to be done during and after pandemics could also be highlighted to understand what is best for India and the way forward. Therefore, the authors feel that a comprehensive action plan should be frequently updated and involve stalwarts of public health in India including implementers from the public health department

Social Inclusion and the Ethics of Citation: Introduction

Social Inclusion and the Ethics of CitationIntroduction Mark G. Brett In the heady days of Enlightenment certitude, the ideal of critical objectivity was regularly asserted over against the supposedly uncritical habits of thinking that were bequeathed from the past. "Reason" needed to prevail over tradition. This binary contrast is no longer tenable, even among trenchant defenders of modernity; any effort to recover Enlightenment values now requires complex defenses of public reasoning. In the influential account of discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas, for example, scholarly arguments might be viewed through the lens of an ideal speech situation in which rigorous and inclusive debate is informed by comprehensive scrutiny of available evidence.1 The ideal speech situation is a norm, rather than a reality, because numerous inequalities of power and resources inevitably influence scholarly proceedings. What aims to be an ideal speech situation often turns out to be, on closer inspection, yet one more example of systematically distorted communication.2 In the wake of a pandemic that has starkly revealed the inequalities of the world, the implications for biblical scholarship are clear: minoritized voices need [End Page 819] to be amplified, and more "partial" scholarly traditions built from below. New traditions of citation will need to be invented.3 But, as minoritized scholars build their own traditions of interpretation, they may be rightly skeptical about the possibilities for cosmopolitan exchange.4 In this respect, their practice might reflect a more "communitarian" version of scholarly ethics, rather than a liberal one.5 In any event, in thinking through the implications of inequality for the business of biblical scholarship, a forum on the ethics of citation is timely. The main purpose of this forum is not so much to dispute the need for scholarly norms and rigor as, more specifically, to discuss the ways in which the ethics of citation may illuminate debates about social inclusion. It is often held, for example, that a good scholarly argument is "comprehensive"—covering not just the evidence relevant to a research question but also the best scholarly accounts to date. In the pages of JBL, an article can be selective in its methodology, but it is valued more highly if it can engage judiciously not just with the scholarly works published in English but also in other commonly recognized research languages, especially German, French, Dutch, and Spanish. The ideal of comprehensiveness entails such a broad set of linguistic competencies in ancient and modern languages that one might wonder why an article in biblical studies is normally authored by an individual. An international team of authors (as is common in the natural sciences) would be more likely to gain the ideal coverage of the literature.6 Indeed, the professional ideal of the scholarly individual is itself problematic, even when individuals are scrupulous in awarding honor to predecessors in their own research tradition and strategically citing the younger scholars, or new perspectives, they wish to promote.7 [End Page 820] It is no accident that English, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch are also the foremost languages associated with the history of Christian colonialism, so a question of epistemic injustice could be raised even against an article that is rich with European languages and research traditions. Many anticolonial treatises have been composed in all these languages, of course, but it is also the case that the historic circulation of academic resources, including institutional networks, have been mediated by precisely these European languages. For researchers who come from non-European cultures, being asked to engage comprehensively with international scholarship might well provoke some suspicion of unexamined ideology—revealed not just in the requirement to learn a third or fourth language in order to engage with a vast number of detailed publications in the dominant research traditions, but also in the assumed level of resourcing and institutional support that is necessary in order to make such publications accessible to researchers. Local cultures and needs in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific are likely to generate research questions that grow from their own contexts, rather than from the centuries-old citational practices that inform European scholarship.8 The exclusion of certain groups of people from the business of biblical scholarship can...

Wacana Debat Inklusif

Debate cannot be avoided and denied in the reality of the reality of today's social life. Because basically human conditions and situations are in an inequality or different sociologically and psychologically. Included in the Koran also illustrates the dialogue process and debate that is quite serious about the truth. The position of debate in the Qur'an is called Jadal. Jadal was born from the interaction and historical dynamics in the process of the decline of the Qur'anic teachings. On the other hand, debate is not and can be carried out without a method. If that happens, the hope of the debate process will not be reached. The forerunner to success in the debate is due to the implementation of the right method. However, the debate should be built on the basis of togetherness in order to create an inclusive debate. It has become an ideal in the Qur'an about the process of debate and an inclusive diaologist.

Trust and fake news: Exploratory analysis of the impact of news literacy on the relationship with news content in Portugal

In order to understand the role of contemporary journalism and the media system it is vital to consider consumers’ relationship with news content in terms of trust and perception of dubious content. This analysis is particularly relevant in a context where intense flows of information raise serious questions about individual ability to interpret, validate, and reproduce content. This analysis explores a news literacy scale used by Maskl et al. (2015) and Fletcher (in Newman et al., 2018) to investigate the links between news literacy profiles and their relationship with content, with particular focus on illegitimate/doubtful news pieces. Results suggest individuals with higher news literacy tend to trust news in general but not when content originates in social media. Higher literacy profiles are also associated with increased concern regarding online content legitimacy. These conclusions are particularly relevant in the currently volatile media sphere, highly dependent on a substantially informed public to ensure the legitimacy and importance of journalistic content and to distinguish it from other kinds of content flooding communication networks. These efforts depend not only on the journalistic sphere but also on democratic systems themselves as they rely on a well-informed public to guarantee a healthy and inclusive debate.

The North–South Divide on Public Perceptions of Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering?: A Survey in Six Asia-Pacific Countries

ABSTRACT Solar radiation management (SRM) is a controversial technological proposal to deliberately cool the Earth for addressing climate change. Because of great concerns over global consequences of SRM deployment, an inclusive and global conversation is considered necessary for the governance of SRM. However, public perception research on SRM to date has been mostly limited to the Global North or Western democracy. Because social acceptability is crucial for SRM governance, such research must also encompass the Global South or Eastern perspectives beyond the Western bias. The present study conducted an online survey of college students in six Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, China, India, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea) about their attitudes toward stratospheric aerosol geoengineering, one of most discussed SRM proposals. Our results showed that students from the Global South (China, India, the Philippines) were more willing to accept geoengineering as a potential option than those from the Global North (Australia, Japan, and South Korea). We also found an overwhelming consensus in support of geoengineering governance principles such as information disclosure and pre-deployment regulation across all six countries. Our results suggest that more nuanced and granular understandings of non-Western perspectives are critical to enable inclusive democratic debate on geoengineering governance.

Regulating germline editing in assisted reproductive technology: An EU cross-disciplinary perspective.

Potential applications of genome editing in assisted reproductive technology (ART) raise a vast array of strong opinions, emotional reactions and divergent perceptions. Acknowledging the need for caution and respecting such reactions, we observe that at least some are based on either a misunderstanding of the science or misconceptions about the content and flexibility of the existing legal frameworks. Combining medical, legal and ethical expertise, we present and discuss regulatory responses at the national, European and international levels. The discussion has an EU starting point and is meant as a contribution to the general international regulatory debate. Overall, this paper concludes that gene editing technologies should not be regulated autonomously. Rather, potential uses should be regulated under general, existing frameworks and where applicable by reference to sufficiently equivalent technologies and techniques already subject to specific regulation. To be clear, we do not argue for the hasty introduction of gene editing as a reproductive treatment option in the immediate future. We call for caution with regard to overreaching moratoria and prohibitions that will also affect basic research. We recommend flexible regulations that allow for further responsible research into the potential development of the technology. We call for an open and inclusive debate and argue that scientific communication should claim a more prominent role to counter the danger of widespread misinformation. A high level of transparency and accuracy should guide scientific communication while simultaneously global-scale responsibility and governance should be fostered by promoting cross-disciplinary thinking and multi-level stakeholder involvement in legal and regulatory processes.

Why, and how will it look? Evaluating answers of energy experts concerning the German Energiewende and its implication for communication efforts

The implementation of the German energy transition (Energiewende) is unclearly framed. The future of the transition depends on more than just technological development or economic feasibility. Rather, a positive attitude and an understanding by the general public are critical to its success. Therefore, communicating the complex, polarized and long-term process in an objective way is essential. We show that despite the alleged clarity of goals, German stakeholders have very diverse reasons for their support of the energy transition. One key reason mentioned is climate protection. Another important goal is the desired independence from energy imports. This diversity is at the heart of the communication challenges. We see a wide variety of goals triggering trade-offs and challenges in understanding the process. Therefore, we suggest an infographic as an approach to communicating the energy transition to the general public with a focus on goals and related future challenges of the transition. We conclude that communication tools should promote an inclusive discussion and debate regarding the goals and challenges of a process, such as the energy transition, to help answer the question: How do we want to live in the future? 
 Keywords: climate change, energy transition, communication, framing, media

Technological Revolutions in Agriculture: Implications for the reshaping of rural economy and society

We identify many current and impending technologies that are likely to impact dramatically on most aspects of rural economy, society and environment, even in the short term. As a result, two of society’s major looming problems are (a) how best to accelerate the uptake of beneficial technologies while (b) helping individuals, communities or places damaged by the likely course of events – for example by updating people’s skill sets and revising their ambitions and preferences. The increasing problem for governments, communities and businesses alike is that we have limited knowledge of future economic and social trajectories driven by such technologies. Thus, traditional blue-print planning will be increasingly redundant and effective paths to the future will require intensive and inclusive debate and discussions surrounding best options which, along with strong leadership, will help fashion creative, flexible and adaptive cultures. Given geographical diversity in resources it is quite possible that emergent optimal strategies will vary from place to place.