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Social contracts for adaptation to climate change
Get PDFAdaptation to the impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly urgent and challenging. Meeting the stark challenges of adaptation will require collective efforts from different actors of society (state, civil society, individuals, private sector, etc.), ideally with a shared understanding of adaptation goals and visions and a clear, agreed-upon distribution of roles and responsibilities. However, in reality, adaptation often occurs in a socially contested arena, characterized by multi-actor constellations with potentially diverging viewpoints on what different actors envision and expect in terms of adaptation priorities and the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation. An urgent requirement to advance adaptation efforts is the need for coherent social contracts where actors ideally agree or find an arrangement, despite conflicting perspectives.
Despite the growing scientific research on adaptation, several gaps could be observed in the conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and methodological debates on understanding and assessing social contracts for adaptation in the current literature. Although previous literature has established the potential usefulness of a social contracts lens to adaptation debates, detailed conceptual and theoretical understanding in the adaptation context is largely lacking to date. Further, empirical evidence and conceptual literature on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and perceived distributions of roles and responsibilities have received some attention yet remain under-researched and often without an explicit social contracts lens. Given such perspectives' tacit and implicit nature, a related methodological challenge is the difficulty in capturing actors’ diverse viewpoints. A significant step toward achieving coherent social contracts for adaptation is understanding how different actors perceive and evaluate their solution spaces for adaptation in a multi-dimensional fashion, which has not received sufficient attention in the literature.
The above-identified gaps are most starkly illustrated in cities and urban areas, especially in countries with emerging markets, that are situated at the confluence of being on the frontlines of climate risk globally, faced with high adaptation pressure, changing patterns of social, economic, and demographic growth but at the same time also seen as frontrunners and role models of countries and regions. Mumbai, the financial capital of India, ranks among the top cities at risk of coastal flooding and the impact of rising sea levels in current and future rankings. The city is characterized by some of the heaviest adaptation challenges that one can find globally, along with stark inequalities, with almost half the population living in slums on the one end and a powerful elite on the other, with a growing aspirational middle class in between. Hence, the study draws on flood risk management in Mumbai, considered a highly relevant and important empirical case.
The study presented here aims to address the above-identified research gaps and adopts a three-fold objective. First, it seeks to advance the conceptual understanding of social contracts for adaptation by providing a framework to guide their assessment. Second, it aims to empirically assess how different actors perceive and evaluate adaptation solution spaces for their desirability and feasibility in a multi-dimensional fashion. Further, the study assesses actors’ desired adaptation objectives and expectations on the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation to flood risk in Mumbai. Finally, in methodological terms, it aims to explore the potential of using social listening on Twitter to assess social contracts for adaptation in cities and other societal contexts.
Against this background, the study adopts a mixed methods approach and combines inductive exploration of the data with the deductive application of a social contracts theoretical lens. The study develops the approach of social listening using Twitter data to capture actors’ diverse viewpoints on adaptation priorities and expectations of roles and responsibilities for flood risk management in Mumbai, given that social media platforms are becoming increasingly important arenas of exchange. This involved collecting all flood-risk-related Tweets over four months of the monsoon season 2021 (ca. 70,000 Tweets), which were subsequently filtered for their dominance and analyzed. These findings are triangulated with semi-structured expert interviews conducted with key stakeholders across the state, civil society, and academic actors from Mumbai and field-based participant observation at workshops and meetings. The initially planned household survey had to be postponed due to the pandemic that heavily influenced the research design of this study.
Guided by the conceptual lens of social contracts and the mixed-methods approach, the study draws on the empirical analysis of flood risk management in Mumbai. The findings from the multi-dimensional evaluation of perceived solution spaces for adaptation revealed significant mismatches between state and non-state actors’ perceptions of desirability and the evaluation of the feasibility of different adaptation options. Overall, institutional changes and the pivotal role of institutional dimensions were most strongly identified, especially by non-state actors. At the same time, the starkest disparities were found between state and non-state actors on physical infrastructure measures. In operationalizing the conceptual framework of social contracts for adaptation, the study found surprisingly wide gaps and large contestations in the adaptation debates in Mumbai in two respects: between different actors and between what actors envisioned, observed in reality, and perceived as legally defined. Diverging viewpoints on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and target actors could be observed as well as strong rifts in the distribution of roles and responsibilities. In addition to the diverging perspectives, the findings also showed ambiguity in both regards, where actors did not clearly articulate their views. Social listening on Twitter allowed to capture actors' unsolicited, implicit, and tacit viewpoints in a large N sample in almost real-time. Further, the qualitative sentiment analysis proved to be a helpful entry point for understanding the gaps between actors’ viewpoints and expectations.
The study could make an empirical and analytical contribution to advance current feasibility assessments of adaptation options by including an actor-specific lens, distinguishing desirability from feasibility, and applying it to real-world settings. An explicit focus on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and target actors and the contestations revealed through the empirical findings emphasize the importance of assessing and aligning actors’ underlying priorities in negotiating the process of forming coherent social contracts for adaptation. The findings suggest aligning actors’ desired adaptation objectives as a first step toward shaping coherent social contracts for adaptation. Rifts and ambiguities in actors’ perceptions of who is or should be responsible for what tasks in adapting ultimately have severe implications on the distribution of burdens. These questions become critical when existing risk management regimes start to approach their limits not only in light of the changing feasibility or effectiveness of adaptation options but also in the face of evolving priorities in rapidly growing economies and aspirational societies such as India. The study's most novel contribution lies in its methodological development of social listening on Twitter to assess gaps in social contracts for adaptation. The study could contribute to the conceptual, empirical, and methodological realms of scientific knowledge on social contracts for adaptation and propose several questions for future research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Actor-specific adaptation objectives shape perceived roles and responsibilities: lessons from Mumbai’s flood risk reduction and general considerations
Get PDF<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Adaptation efforts need to be advanced significantly, involving multiple actors and a diverse portfolio of options. Despite this being well established, there is little understanding of different actors’ perceptions of adaptation goals and their associated expectations regarding roles and responsibilities to achieve them. In this analysis, we seek to address this gap by elucidating the diverging viewpoints held by various actor groups concerning adaptation objectives, target beneficiaries, and the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation. Here, we use the case study of flood risk in Mumbai, drawing upon qualitative interview data collected through key informant interviews with diverse stakeholders including state, civil society, and academic actors. Interviews revealed stark disparities between state and non-state actors, in particular on the objective of efficiency, largely emphasized by state actors for physical infrastructure measures. Other contested objectives included ecosystem protection and fairness for vulnerable populations. The findings showed consensus on the importance of planning. Non-state actors heavily debated the lack of planning and implementation of institutional changes and ecosystem-based measures. They called for a stronger role of the state in caretaking and fairness for vulnerable populations, mainly through deeper institutional changes. Overall, the findings point to the urgent need for understanding how actors navigate competing priorities, make trade-offs, and negotiate conflicting viewpoints on the distribution of roles and responsibilities. This paper makes an empirical and conceptual contribution to the debates on “social contracts” for adaptation, offering an operationalization of the concept and application to a real-world example through an actor lens.</jats:p>
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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