Search Results (1,610)

Criminality represents one of the major challenges faced by Brazilian cities, particularly due to the limited state capacity to control violence. To provide support for addressing this issue, the research focuses on systematizing responses to the investigative question regarding the identifiable foundations for sharing urbanistic-criminal solutions within the framework of the urban agenda. With the aim of analyzing this reality through a case study in Itumbiara, Goiás, Brazil, the assessment relied on field surveys and relational analysis of criminal, landscape, and institutional data. Considering three temporal intervals—before, parallel, and after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic—to recognize its influence on the phenomenon under review, the results on the distribution of thefts and robberies along a road sample show a decline in crime even after the official end of the health crisis. Socio-behavioral and socio-political parameters scored lower than socio-morphological ones but overall were classified as medium-low quality. The formulated guidelines combine analytical variables and criminological theories to support public policies for integrated management of safe scenarios, reinforcing the hypothesis that such interactions enable principles for coordinated measures in planning and security in urbanized areas. Full article

This article examines virtual international work-integrated learning (VIWIL) through the lens of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). ESD, as defined by UNESCO, seeks to equip learners with the knowledge, skills and dispositions required to make informed decisions and take responsible actions to contribute to environmentally sustainable, socially just, economically viable, and peaceful futures. Drawing on UNESCO’s four interdependent sustainability dimensions, we highlight its environmental benefits in reducing carbon-intensive travel, its social contribution to broadening equitable access to international learning opportunities, its political role in fostering global citizenship and intercultural competence, and its economic potential in providing a scalable and financially viable model for work-integrated learning. We present a series of ten design principles for enhancing the contribution of VIWIL to ESD outcomes. Through an anonymised case study, we argue that VIWIL has the potential to offer a practical and inclusive mechanism for developing socio-emotional, cognitive and behavioural global citizenship competencies through digitally mediated workplace learning. In doing so, VIWIL is positioned as an important approach for advancing ESD and contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Full article

Online toxicity has become a defining feature of contemporary digital discourse, permeating all forms of online discussion, from news websites and discussion forums to social media platforms. While prior research has examined toxic behaviour across these domains, less attention has been paid to the interplay among broader socio-political polarization, platform architectures, and psychological mechanisms that jointly sustain this discursive paradigm. This literature review proposes a multi-level integrative framework to conceptualize the toxicity lifecycle. At the macro level, affective polarization fosters societal antagonism, reinforcing entrenched in-group and out-group dynamics. However, the intensity and expression of these societal cleavages are shaped by distinct media–political system configurations, including varying degrees of political parallelism, and journalistic professionalization. At the meso level, platform affordances such as algorithmic amplification and engagement-based metrics promote emotionally charged, conflict-driven content. At the micro level, disinhibition lowers normative constraints on expression, often leading to verbal aggression that undermines the principles of healthy public deliberation. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive response that brings together users, platforms, and policymakers to safeguard the normative democratic values of constructive public deliberation. Full article

The return of the wolf is causing controversy. Herders (hereafter referred to interchangeably as shepherds) are among the groups most strongly affected and yet scarcely investigated. Using a mixed-methods online questionnaire, 82 German-speaking herders provided information on their assessment of the wolf’s return, their perception of the risk to their livestock, and their evaluation of the socio-political debate. Overall, the shepherds view the wolf rather critically; at the same time, their opinions are nuanced: opposition is less pronounced than might be expected based on similar studies. Negative assessments are grounded in three ethical lines of reasoning: agent-centered, since the wolf increases the workload and mental strain for the shepherds; anthropocentric, as it threatens pastoral farming; and pathocentric, because the grazing animals suffer from its presence. Positive assessments reflect biocentric–holistic arguments, according to which the wolf has a right to exist and is welcomed as part of a diverse natural environment. In addition, supporters point out that the wolf’s return leads to greater appreciation of the shepherding profession. The effectiveness of herd protection measures is subject to widely differing assessments. Generally, the wolf is considered one of several risk factors; however, unlike force majeure events such as lightning strikes or falls, the wolf is perceived by critical voices as anthropogenic and therefore avoidable. The perception that the wolf’s return has been intentionally facilitated by humans appears to reinforce the rejection. Respondents criticize the socio-political debate on the wolf as detached from practical realities, dominated by actors who lack on-site experience and are not directly affected. Full article

In China’s Erhai Lake basin, strict agricultural pollution control policies have reduced ecological degradation but severely disrupted smallholder livelihoods, creating an urgent need for institutional actors capable of mediating between state mandates and rural communities. This study examines Science and Technology Backyards (STBs), university-based knowledge intermediaries, as a distinctive governance mechanism embedded within China’s state-led environmental governance system. Drawing on 60 days of ethnographic fieldwork and 33 semi-structured interviews with 36 participants in Gusheng Village, Dali City, we develop a socio-technical institutional framework that conceptualizes STB effectiveness as depending on the joint operation of three dimensions: technological rationality, social embeddedness, and institutional access. Empirically, the findings show that STBs operate through three bridging mechanisms: technical correction, power adjustment, and market linkage. However, their influence is structurally uneven. Vertically, STB engagement is strong at the prefectural level but weakens sharply at township and village levels. Horizontally, technology diffusion concentrates in core villages and disproportionately benefits large-scale farmers over smallholders. Market linkage remains the weakest mechanism due to deep institutional deficits in cooperative development, supply chain infrastructure, and state–market coordination. These findings contribute to understanding how knowledge intermediaries produce uneven governance outcomes within hierarchical political systems. Full article

This Special Issue invites us to think about the conditions of possibility for sustainable welfare within the current political and ecological conjuncture. This paper approaches sustainable welfare through an analysis of transformative eco-social practices, highlighting the generative, experimental, situated, and territorial dimensions of ecological transition. Drawing on the case of Bologna, this study examines the initiatives of agroecological and food movements. This territorial case illustrates the intersection between welfare and agroecological transition, suggesting that welfare can play a proactive role in fostering socio-ecological transformation and reshaping key sectors such as agriculture and food systems. What I am calling agroecological welfare has the potential to connect diverse eco-social experiments with the emergence of new forms of social, economic, ecological, and regulatory governance. Full article

Environmental injustices in the United States are rooted in structural racism, particularly policies of racial segregation and disinvestment such as redlining that have produced enduring inequalities in the built environment and population health. This concept paper examines extreme heat as a racialized environmental exposure in Buffalo, New York—a post-industrial Great Lakes city increasingly framed as a “climate haven”. While such designations suggest relative protection from climate risk, they obscure the socio-spatial inequalities that shape uneven vulnerability on the ground. Drawing on a structural racism framework and insights from urban political economy, this study argues that extreme heat vulnerability in Buffalo is not incidental but produced through historically embedded patterns of disinvestment in housing, infrastructure, and environmental resources. Neighborhoods such as the East Side, Black Rock, and the West Side exhibit heightened exposure due to concentrations of thermally inefficient housing, limited tree canopy and green space, and unequal access to cooling resources. These conditions reflect the material legacy of segregation and uneven urban development, which continue to structure differential capacity to adapt to rising temperatures. Although extreme heat is widely recognized as a major public health threat, it remains underexamined in mid-sized northern and Rust Belt cities, where risk is often perceived as episodic rather than structurally produced. This paper addresses this gap by advancing a conceptual critique of the “climate haven” narrative, demonstrating that relative geographic advantage does not equate to equitable resilience. By theorizing extreme heat as a mechanism through which structural racism is reproduced, this study highlights the need for place-based, justice-oriented climate adaptation strategies that confront the historical and institutional drivers of vulnerability in Great Lakes cities. Full article

Mentoring has become a central mechanism of teacher support and professional learning, while the conditions of teaching have been reshaped by socio-political uncertainty, teacher shortages, digitalisation, increasingly diverse student needs, and the COVID-19 pandemic itself. This study aimed to map the conceptual structure and temporal evolution of research on teacher mentoring and professional learning. A longitudinal bibliometric and science-mapping analysis was conducted on 2843 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Scopus database and published between 2010 and 2025, using co-occurrence (co-word) analysis of author and indexed keywords in VOSviewer 1.6.20, complemented by network, overlay and density visualisations. The final co-word map comprised 123 keyword elements organised into four clusters, with 3312 links and a total link strength of 17,024. The central node was ‘mentoring’ (532 occurrences; 121 links; total link strength = 2212; average publication year = 2019.40). Four thematic lines structured the discourse: (1) professionalisation in the wider sense, including health education mentoring; (2) initial teacher education and the induction of new teachers; (3) higher education and digitally mediated environments of professional learning; and (4) bridging concepts of collaboration and professional identity formation. The findings indicate that, within the literature mapped, mentoring functions as a relational, context-sensitive form of support connecting several arenas of professional learning. This study contributes a longitudinal conceptual map of the field; the results describe the intellectual structure of the literature and do not constitute evidence of the effectiveness of mentoring practices. Full article

The classical Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan and Riyoko Ikeda’s iconic shōjo manga series The Rose of Versailles are two important East Asian cultural texts that are compared in this article to examine feminist resistance and gender negotiation. The protagonists of both stories are women who work in very patriarchal environments while also opposing, subverting, and eventually overcoming traditional gender norms. This paper argues that both texts enact what could be called a “dialectics of compliance and resistance”—that is, a simultaneous negotiation between conformity to institutional norms for survival and resistance through exposing and challenging those same norms in which heroines must adopt masculine codes to survive institutional structures, but in doing so reveal those structures as arbitrary and historically contingent—through the analytical lenses of feminist literary criticism, queer theory, postcolonial gender studies, and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. The article explores the mechanics of cross-dressing as a political act, the ideological ambivalence ingrained in narrative closure, the construction of female heroism, and the divergent yet convergent ways in which each text positions itself relative to its own socio-political moment. They do this by drawing on close textual reading and cultural-historical contextualisation. In the end, the paper argues that The Ballad of Mulan and The Rose of Versailles share a feminist imaginary that resonates strongly with current discourses on gender, identity, and resistance, even though they come from different cultural and generic traditions and are separated by more than fourteen centuries. Full article

Dominant rationalist and neoliberal frameworks have often privatized love by treating it as an intimate emotion detached from institutions, power, and collective life. This article examines when love becomes publicly consequential as a sociological force. Using an interpretive, cross-cultural, and dialogical approach, it brings into conversation three situated sociological traditions developed in Brazil, Italy, and South Korea. Rather than comparing nation-states as fixed units, the article analyses how different sociological traditions interpret shared public problems through distinct moral vocabularies and institutional contexts. Three public grammars of love emerge: struggles over inequality and ecological justice in Brazil; tensions between expertise and democratic mediation in Italy; and questions of social empathy, hyper-competition, and post-growth transformation in South Korea. Love also appears as an ambivalent force that may generate cohesion or conflict, inclusion or exclusion. The article concludes that de-privatizing love broadens sociological understanding of how emotions shape collective life and demonstrates the analytical value of dialogical engagement between sociological traditions for reconstructing the public meanings of love across different socio-political contexts. Full article

The paper addresses the intersection between modern built heritage preservation and Climate-Aided Design (CADe) processes in fragile coastal Mediterranean contexts. The study focuses on the city of Beirut in Lebanon, part of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) region and considered a climate change hotspot facing extreme challenges. Rapid urbanization and socio-political instability, especially during the twentieth century, have undermined the city’s ability to mitigate and adapt to future climate change scenarios. Moreover, Beirut’s modern built heritage faces a constant threat of demolition due to the absence of protective legislation, compounded by aggressive real-estate development ambitions. The hypothesis is that the integration of climatic data and regenerative design with modern cultural heritage classification frameworks can aid the preservation process, drive a more adaptive and inclusive approach to urban regeneration, and inform legislative integration of climate adaptation in conservation frameworks. To test this hypothesis, a multi-scalar case-study-based methodology is adopted using a combination of digital tools to assess and analyze the current and future impacts of climate change on two main case studies. First, the St. George Hotel & Bay, one of the first reinforced concrete recreational buildings in the city, was built during the French Mandate (1920–1946) and is vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, and demolition. Second, the Beirut City Center “The Egg”, a Brutalist structure built during Beirut’s modernist “golden era”, which is prone to structural deterioration and demolition. The main objective is to highlight 20th-century built heritage as part of Beirut’s spatial narrative worthy of conservation and rehabilitation by analyzing their capability to adapt to, mitigate, or benefit from future environmental risk. Ultimately, the study explores their potential to catalyze climate-resilient urban regeneration practices in the city. Results show that the integration of current and future forecast environmental analyses informed early preservation and intervention decision-making stages to position 20th-century modern built heritage as an asset to climate action in addition to being a socio-cultural and economic asset. Full article

The reunification of scientific, artistic, and philosophical knowledge empowers us to rethink our relationship with nature in light of a biocultural ethic grounded in co-inhabitation among humans and other-than-human beings in shared habitats. To this end, the biocultural ethic is built upon the 3H model, which values the vital links among co-inhabitants and their life habits in shared habitats. The model integrates the biophysical, cultural, and sociopolitical dimensions characteristic of environmental complexity. In this essay, the 3H model is applied to rivers, examined from biological, philosophical, poetic, and legal perspectives. The result is not only to highlight that rivers are more than merely exploitable resources, but also to show that their “voice” raises a normative (ethical and legal) appeal that, among other aspects, has inspired the new Latin American constitutionalism. This ontological, epistemological, and ethical turn seeks to foster a transition from destruction and homogenization toward a bioculture that values biological and cultural diversity through renewed forms of co-inhabitation with rivers and the biosphere. Full article

Global restoration frameworks, such as the Bonn Challenge and Forest Landscape Restoration, have endorsed multistakeholder engagement in agroforestry as key to reversing land degradation at scale. This paper follows shifts in how stakeholders have been organised, coordinated and steered since 2010 when Rwanda’s National Forestry Policy came into force, a year ahead of Rwanda’s pledge to the Bonn Challenge. The specific focus is on Bugesera District, representing a national policy shift from focusing on restoration in highland areas only. Bugesera is a lowland area facing complex socio-ecological and livelihood challenges including high rates of deforestation, recurrent drought and rapid population fluctuations. This paper analyses these changes by investigating which stakeholders were involved, how they were engaged (modes of participation) and why they participated (drivers of participation). Conceptually, this follows stakeholder mapping, Reed’s theory of participation and multi-level governance theory. Through thematic analysis, we triangulated data from 15 policy-related documents with semi-structured interviews with representatives from 24 organisations. Our findings show that both before and after 2010, stakeholder engagement has remained top-down. However, since 2010 this has been qualified by an asymmetrical form of collaboration that increasingly takes the form of top-down deliberation. Changes were observed in participation patterns, engagement approaches, and governance arrangements, driven by contextual conditions, power relations, process design, and spatial–temporal dynamics. Within a centrally coordinated government system, shaped by the post-genocide political context and culturally embedded structures such as Umuganda and Ubudehe, multistakeholder restoration initiatives have largely remained state-led, with structured approaches to coordination and implementation that have varied in the extent of local stakeholder engagement. Trust emerged as an important factor influencing stakeholder interactions. Despite more diverse and expanded institutional arrangements over time, variations in levels of participation and influence among stakeholders persist, with differences in how engagement and decision-making power are distributed. We conclude that effective stakeholder engagement is contingent on existing governance structures, the political will to engage with a diversity of actors at different levels, contextual conditions including spatial-temporal dynamics, and opportunities provided by global and regional restoration frameworks. Full article

Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP), a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserve in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, is characterized by its significant biodiversity and ecotourism potential, including endemic forest orchids and rich cultural heritage. Despite its ecological importance, the park continues to face deforestation and illegal land use, partly driven by limited community involvement in conservation governance. In this study, we examine the co-creation of governance in community-based forest orchid cultivation and ecotourism initiatives in Karunia Village, where local communities have developed organic orchid cultivation practices since 2004. Drawing on the co-creation governance framework of Christopher Ansell, Eva Sørensen, and Jacob Torfing, we employ a qualitative case study approach based on a literature review, field observations, and in-depth interviews conducted over four months. Our findings reveal that each phase of co-creation is shaped by distinct institutional and socio-political dynamics. Initiation is strongly influenced by local economic pressures and social solidarity, while design encounters regulatory barriers related to licensing and conservation policy. Implementation remains constrained by fragmented coordination among multi-level stakeholders, and systematic evaluation mechanisms are largely absent. We propose the use of a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) Matrix to clarify institutional roles and strengthen collaborative governance arrangements. This article contributes to the literature by expanding the empirical understanding of co-creation practices in the Global South and highlighting the importance of institutional and socio-political dimensions in community-based environmental governance. Full article

This study develops a novel composite index of women’s empowerment for 54 African economies over the period 1996–2024 (unbalanced), addressing the limitations of existing fragmented measures. The index is constructed using principal component factor loadings and captures multiple dimensions of empowerment, including economic, socio-demographic, cultural, political, physical, and cognitive aspects, particularly for groups historically exposed to structural marginalization. We investigate the structural, distributional, and conditional effects of women’s empowerment on environmental sustainability. Structural heterogeneity is addressed using heterogeneous panel estimators that allow coefficients to vary across countries. Distributional properties are examined through novel panel unit root tests that incorporate quantile-based approaches, enabling assessment of persistence and stationarity across different points of the conditional distribution rather than only the mean. Conditional effects are further explored by introducing renewable energy consumption as a moderating factor in the empowerment–environment nexus. The analysis is supported by a comprehensive set of second-generation econometric techniques that account for cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity. In addition, panel causality tests incorporating Fourier smooth-transition specifications are employed to capture structural breaks and gradual regime shifts, ensuring that causal relationships are not assumed to be time-invariant but are allowed to evolve in response to structural change. The results reveal strong structural heterogeneity across African economies. While static estimators occasionally suggest a carbon-increasing effect of women’s empowerment, heterogeneous and dynamic models consistently show that empowerment reduces carbon emissions in the long run. Renewable energy consumption independently exerts a significant mitigating effect on emissions across all specifications. However, the interaction between women’s empowerment and renewable energy is positive and statistically significant, indicating that greater renewable energy adoption enhances the environmental effectiveness of women’s empowerment, suggesting that gender-inclusive policies are more effective when accompanied by a cleaner energy transition. The study concludes that sustainable development in Africa requires integrated, context-specific policies that jointly promote women’s empowerment, renewable energy expansion, and institutional strengthening. Full article