1,720,966 research outputs found
Q method factor analysis of stakeholder social perspectives of the effectiveness of Environmental Impact Assessment public participation in the Western Cape, South Africa
No full textPublic participation is an integral part of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and as such, has been incorporated into regulatory norms. Assessment of the effectiveness of public participation has remained elusive however. This is partly due to the difficulty in identifying appropriate effectiveness criteria. This research uses Q methodology to discover and analyze stakeholder's social perspectives of the effectiveness of EIAs in the Western Cape, South Africa. It considers two case studies (Main Road and Saldanha Bay EIAs) for contextual participant perspectives of the effectiveness based on their experience. It further considers the more general opinion of provincial consent regulator staff at the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Planning (DEA&DP). Two main themes of investigation are drawn from the South African National Environmental Management Act imperative for effectiveness: firstly, the participation procedure, and secondly, the stakeholder capabilities necessary for effective participation. Four theoretical frameworks drawn from planning, politics and EIA theory are adapted to public participation and used to triangulate the analysis and discussion of the revealed social perspectives. They consider citizen power in deliberation, Habermas' preconditions for the Ideal Speech Situation (ISS), a Foucauldian perspective of knowledge, power and politics, and a Capabilities Approach to public participation effectiveness. The empirical evidence from this research shows that the capacity and contextual constraints faced by participants demand the legislative imperatives for effective participation set out in the NEMA. The implementation of effective public participation has been shown to be a complex, dynamic and sometimes nebulous practice. The functional level of participant understanding of the process was found to be significantly wide-ranging with consequences of unequal and dissatisfied stakeholder engagements. Furthermore, the considerable variance of stakeholder capabilities in the South African social context, resulted in inequalities in deliberation. The social perspectives revealed significant differences in participant experience in terms of citizen power in deliberation. The ISS preconditions are highly contested in both the Saldanha EIA case study and the DEA&DP social perspectives. Only one Main Road EIA case study social perspective considered Foucault's notion of governmentality as a reality in EIA public participation. The freedom of control of ones environment, based on a Capabilities approach, is a highly contested notion. Although agreed with in principle, all of the social perspectives indicate that contextual and capacity realities constrain its realisation. This research has shown that Q method can be applied to EIA public participation in South Africa and, with the appropriate research or monitoring applications it could serve as a useful feedback tool to inform best practice public participation
Exploring the potential contribution of Environmental Impact Assessments for water resilience: a case study of in-situ upgrading of the Monwabisi Park informal settlement, Cape Town, South Africa
Get PDFInternationally, water resource management is complicated by a myriad of factors. Climate change is just one of such factors that has globally complicated water resource management due to erratic weather patterns, including extreme and prolonged drought. However, there also exist other factors such as rapid urbanisation, migration and inadequate infrastructure which have contributed towards water resource management being complicated. Water resource management therefore spans a wide scope ranging from managing the direct impacts of climate change on water availability to ensuring that water remains accessible to all. From a national perspective, water access is particularly a topical issue in South Africa, due to its ever-expanding cities and informal settlements. Cape Town is no different and in the same way, water access is directly affected by a myriad of factors including natural and social. Natural factors include drought, while social factors include rapid urban expansion, wastage and increasing demand by competing user groups. However, for informal settlements where limited access to water and inadequate socio-economic living conditions are the norm, water access remains a problem. The pre-existing conditions in this regard heightens informal settlements' challenge for access to water. Learning from the severe drought of 2015 to 2018 one of the impacts of climate change in the context of this research, the City of Cape Town introduced long-term policy interventions to ensure water access and promote water resilience by developing both the Cape Town Resilience Strategy and Water Strategy. Despite this progress at a strategic level, guidance on tools for environmental governance of project and local level water resilience remains lacking. This research uses a case study approach to explore Environmental Impact Assessments' potential contribution for water resilience in informal settlements. Water resilience in the context of this research implies that actions are implemented so that water remains accessible for informal settlements while its more vulnerable residents are empowered, in spite of the threat and impacts of future drought scenarios. The Environmental Impact Assessment is therefore explored as a ‘vehicle' or means through which such actions could be implemented and in so doing, contribute towards water resilience in the real world context. An Environmental Impact Assessment application of the in-situ upgrade of the Monwabisi Park Informal Settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, is analysed based on three themes of how contributions towards water resilience relevant to informal urban settings could be implemented, namely: (1) addressing the relationship between the ecological and social elements of the environment, (2) engaging with aspects of future threats of drought and the need to plan ahead and (3) supporting the Cape Town Resilience Strategy and Water Strategy with implementation to further achieve water resilience. The shortcomings of the case study revealed that the Environmental Impact Assessment addressed pragmatic issues relating to the decision-making attributes of the tool rather than substantive water resilience matters. Social and ecological elements were not treated as one system and planning ahead failed to incorporate relevant water resilience imperatives, even though the opportunities to do so exists through need and desirability criteria, which requires the tool to use forward planning policy and frameworks to inform development projects. Despite these two shortcomings, EIAs hold potential to align with and strengthen environmental governance plans, policies or programmes. This was found to be possible through mandated procedures and normative outcomes such as public participation, environmental education and community involvement, conserving and diversifying sources of water and environmental monitoring. These synergies between Environmental Impact Assessment and the Cape Town Resilience Strategy and Water Strategy provide entry points for Environmental Impact Assessments to contribute towards water resilience. However, the potential contribution of Environmental Impact Assessments to water resilience in informal settlements remains highly contingent on addressing systemic vulnerabilities exhibited in the social-ecological context and adequate preparation for future shocks and stressors
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
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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