Eastern Australian farmers managing and thinking differently: Innovative adaptation cycles

The uncertainty of climate change is a significant challenge prompting Australian farmers to create different thinking and different management systems that ensure sustained farm business viability and continuity, particularly in extreme environments. The purpose of this study was to explore the conditions and adaptive processes for managing farm resilience and cyclic adaptation pathways, in response to climate change. A positive deviance sample of farmers was interviewed, and data was collected from a cohort of twenty-two climate change innovators across Eastern Australia. Grounded theory analysis of data identified three processes and two transactional maps of climate change adaptation, in this under studied farmer cohort. The development of the transactional maps found the resilience and preparedness processes as adaptive learning responses to the stressors of climate change. The processes of managing the business and resources were identified as markers of preparedness and resilience that ensured business viability and continuity. Farmers prepared for climate change through transforming make-over processes as an adaptive learning response to climate challenges. Mapping the cycle of adaptation identified the processes of socio-cognitive agency, learning from feedback and consequences, and contextual variables as critical elements of adaptation. The intervening socio-ecological processes of intelligence gathering and influencing, and socio-cognitive precursors, were found to regulate the adaptation cycle. The cycle was found to have both incremental and transformative transmission processes, and intervening processes of climate and contextual variables. The changing patterns and extremes of climate change were found to impact the growing season, and its potential, as unique variables that demand farm adaptation. Ultimately, this study identified potential points of influence for leveraging preparedness behaviours

Out of Practice: The Twenty-First-Century Legal Profession

Lawyering has changed dramatically in the past century, but scholarly and regulatory models have failed to keep pace. Because these models focus exclusively on the practice of law as defined by the profession, they ignore many types of work that today\u27s lawyers perform and many sources of ethical tension they encounter. To address these shortcomings, I examine significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century social dynamics that are fundamentally altering contemporary lawyers\u27 work by broadening and blurring the boundary between law and business. Within the resulting boundary zone, a growing number of lawyers occupy roles for which legal training is valuable but licensure is not required. I argue that the ambiguity surrounding these roles—regarding what constitutes legal practice, what roles lawyers play, and what professional obligations attach—creates opportunities for abuse by individual lawyers and for ethical arbitrage by sophisticated corporate clients. The proliferation of these roles gives rise to key ethical tensions, ignored by existing models of the profession, that threaten to extinguish the profession\u27s public-facing orientation in favor of its private interests. I conclude that we cannot effectively understand and regulate the twenty-firstcentury legal profession until we move beyond the rigid constraints of existing models and begin to study the full range of roles and work settings—both in and out of practice—that today\u27s lawyers occupy

From skepticism to mutual support: towards a structural change in the relations between participatory budgeting and the information and communication technologies?

Until three years ago, ICT Technologies represented a main “subordinate clause” within the “grammar” of Participatory Budgeting (PB), the tool made famous by the experience of Porto Alegre and today expanded to more than 1400 cities across the planet. In fact, PB – born to enhance deliberation and exchanges among citizens and local institutions – has long looked at ICTS as a sort of “pollution factor” which could be useful to foster transparency and to support the spreading of information but could also lead to a lowering in quality of public discussion, turning its “instantaneity” into “immediatism,” and its “time-saving accessibility” into “reductionism” and laziness in facing the complexity of public decision-making through citizens’ participation. At the same time, ICTs often regarded Participatory Budgeting as a tool that was too-complex and too-charged with ideology to cooperate with. But in the last three years, the barriers which prevented ICTs and Participatory Budgeting to establish a constructive dialogue started to shrink thanks to several experiences which demonstrated that technologies can help overcome some “cognitive injustices” if not just used as a means to “make simpler” the organization of participatory processes and to bring “larger numbers” of intervenients to the process. In fact, ICTs could be valorized as a space adding “diversity” to the processes and increasing outreach capacity. Paradoxically, the experiences helping to overcome the mutual skepticism between ICTs and PB did not come from the centre of the Global North, but were implemented in peripheral or semiperipheral countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic and Portugal in Europe), sometimes in cities where the “digital divide” is still high (at least in terms of Internet connections) and a significant part of the population lives in informal settlements and/or areas with low indicators of “connection.” Somehow, these experiences were able to demystify the “scary monolithicism” of ICTs, showing that some instruments (like mobile phones, and especially the use of SMS text messaging) could grant a higher degree of connectivity, diffusion and accountability, while other dimensions (which could risk jeopardizing social inclusion) could be minimized through creativity. The paper tries to depict a possible panorama of collaboration for the near future, starting from descriptions of some of the above mentioned “turning-point” experiences – both in the Global North as well as in the Global South

Increasing Institutional Asset Owner Capital into Mixed Income Housing in the US

In this Dissertation manuscript, I present a framework that assesses certain characteristics considered by an Institutional Asset Owner (IAO) when considering allocating capital into Mixed-Income Rental Multifamily (MIH) Housing in the United States (US). An Institutional Asset Owner (IAO) firm, as defined by this manuscript include Life Insurance Companies, Pension Funds, Endowments, Registered Investment Advisors, and Real Estate Fund Operators. US Institutional Asset Owners (IAOs) account for trillions in investable cash that must be deployed on an annual basis into various investment opportunities including stocks, bonds, real estate, and other asset classes for the benefit of its participants and clients. This level of investable capital available annually can make significant inroads in the production and preservation of affordable housing in the US while simultaneously helping municipalities reduce rent burdens for their most vulnerable residents with the addition of more affordable and essential housing. This study will benefit US Institutional Asset Owners (IAOs), nonprofits, municipalities, developers, intermediaries, and residents. For decades, an Institutional Asset Owner (IAO) looking to diversify its vast investment portfolio has purchased multifamily properties in the United States. Utilizing private-sector research data and a survey, this study highlights perceptions, intentions, and willingness of an Institutional Asset Owner (IAO) to invest in Mixed-Income Housing (MIH). For the main study, we tested the research model (Figure 2) via two separate survey instruments that included a total of 59 completed survey responses. The results for both studies indicated a conclusive effect for the independent variables on the dependent variable in the research model (Figure 2) including significant support for the following independent variables: risk-adjusted returns, investment vehicles, geographic diversification, policy, and incentives. The survey results revealed that Environmental Social Governance (ESG) moderates the relationships amongst risk-adjusted returns, investment vehicles, geographic diversification, investment scale, and the dependent variable, Institutional Asset Owner capital into Mixed-Income Housing (IAOMIH). In addition, the survey results revealed that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strongly moderates the relationship between incentives and the dependent variable, Institutional Asset Owner capital into Mixed-Income Housing (IAOMIH)

Prime property institutions for a subprime era: Toward innovative models of homeownership

This Article breaks new ground toward contractual and institutional innovation in models of homeownership, equity building, and mortgage enforcement. Inspired by recent developments in the affordable housing sector and other types of public financing schemes, we suggest extending institutional and financial strategies such as time- and place-based division of property rights, conditional subsidies, and credit mediation to alleviate the systemic risks of mortgage foreclosure. Two new solutions offer a broad theoretical basis for such developments in the economic and legal institution of homeownership: a for-profit shared equity scheme led by local governments alongside a private market shared equity model, one of "bootstrapping home buying with purchase options".property, homeownership, mortgage, finance, local government, subsidy, tax.

Beyond Cultural Instrumentality: Exploring the Concept of Total Diaspora Cultural Capital for Sustainability

In this article, we critique and extend Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to develop the new concept of total diaspora cultural capital. We build on the limitations of cultural capital, which in the Bourdieu theory centre on materiality and class perpetuation. The article builds on an extensive review of the literature, using the PRISMA framework. We also use the findings of previous research to illustrate this argument. We differentiate between four types of organisations or groups that articulate various levels of cultural capital to build a body of evidence that establishes total diaspora cultural capital (type D groups) as a bounded collective identity creation encapsulating three main dimensions: appropriation, customisation and deployment. Total diaspora cultural capital is perceived as fitting the post-colonial global context through the acknowledgement that diasporas and hosts make the modern world, being agents who create and disseminate culture and economic sustainability through reciprocal appropriation of cultural assets. The research is the first to conceptualise the notion of total diaspora cultural capital. This research significantly extends Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, which fails to capture the multiple contours of evolving sustainability perspectives. Total diaspora cultural capital creates bounded cultural capital that strengthens the agility of diaspora businesses

From Gladiators to Problem-Solvers: Connecting Conversations About Women, the Academy, and the Legal Profession

The UHF band between 470-790 MHz, currently occupied by digital ter- restrial TV (DTT) distribution in Europe, is widely regarded as a premium spectrum band for providing mobile coverage. With the exponential increase in wireless data traffic in recent years, there has been growing interests in gaining access to this spectrum band for wireless broadband services. The secondary access in TV White Space is considered as one cost-effective way to reuse the spectrum unoccupied by the primary DTT network. On the other hand, the declining influence of DTT and the converging trends of video con- sumption on TV and mobile platforms are new incentives for the regulator to reconsider the optimal utilization of the UHF broadcast band. The proposal to re-farm the UHF band for a converged content distribution network was born under theses circumstances. This thesis intends to develop a methodology for evaluating the technical performance of these options for utilizing UHF broadcast band and quantify- ing their gains in terms of achievable extra capacity and spectrum savings. For the secondary access in TV white space, our study indicates a considerable po- tential for low power secondary, which is mostly limited by the adjacent chan- nel interference generated from the densely deployed secondary devices due to the cumulative effect of multichannel interference. On the other hand, this potential does not translate directly into capacity for a WiFi-like secondary system based on CSMA/CA protocol, as the network congestion and self- interference within the secondary system has a greater impact on the network throughput than the primary interference constraint. Our study on the cellular content distribution network reveals more po- tential benefits for re-farming the UHF broadcast band and reallocating it for a converged platform. This platform is based on cellular infrastructure and can provide TV service with the same level of quality requirement as DTT by delivering the video content via either broadcast or unicast as the situa- tion dictates. We have developed a resource manage framework to minimize its spectrum requirement for providing TV service and identified a significant amount of spectrum that can be reused by the converged platform to provide extra mobile broadband capacity in urban and sparsely populated rural areas. Overall, we have arrived at the conclusion that the concept of cellular con- tent distribution in a re-farmed UHF band shows a more promising prospect than the secondary access in TV white space in the long run. Nevertheless, low power secondary is still considered as a flexible and low-cost way to exploit the underutilized spectrum in the short term, despite its uncertainty in future availability. On the other hand, the re-farming of UHF broadcast band is a long and difficult regulation process with substantial opposition from the in- cumbent.The results from this study could serve as input for future regulatory decisions on the UHF band allocation and cost-benefit analysis for deploying new systems to access this spectrum band. QC 20140609EU FP7 QUASAREU FP7 METI

From Gladiators to Problem-Solvers: Connecting Conversations About Women, the Academy, and the Legal Profession

Dissatisfaction permeates the public and professional discourse about lawyers and legal education. Diverse communities within and outside the profession are engaged in multiple conversations critiquing legal education and the profession itself. These conversations, though linked in subject matter and orientation, often proceed on separate tracks. One set of conversations explicitly focuses on women and people of color, centering on their marginalization and underrepresentation in positions of power. Those concerned about race and gender exclusion often participate in separate communities of discourse. Indeed, the symposium that spawned this article framed the inquiry about higher education in terms of gender. This exclusive focus on gender created a recurring tension in writing this article that stems from the incompleteness of gender as a critical framework. This tension, resolved unsatisfactorily by focusing on gender but continually noting the relevance of the analysis to race and class, exemplifies the failure of existing inquiry to bridge the concerns of women and people of color about law, legal education, and the legal profession. A second conversation questions the appropriateness of the values and goals of the prevailing legal educational mission. Some critics charge that traditional legal education trains lawyers to focus on the short-term, purely economic interests of those in power at the expense of thorough analysis and clients’ long term interests, and without regard to the impact on third parties and the community. Other critics focus on legal education’s preoccupation with rigorous, analytical reasoning and its failure to prepare future lawyers to meet the multifaceted, transactional nature of legal practice. Yet another conversation critiques the prevailing model of legal professionalism perpetuated by the traditional law school curriculum. These critiques are both instrumental, in their questioning whether the model of the legal profession embraced by law schools adequately prepares lawyers and the legal profession to deal effectively with the challenges of the twenty-first century workplace, and normative, in their examining whether reigning models of legal professionalism are morally and ethically justifiable. This article suggests that these conversations are related, indeed, interdependent. It builds from the critique of the gladiator model as a dominant, organizing framework of legal education and lawyers’ roles to find a synergy between the goals of those seeking to include women and those seeking to revitalize the profession to meet the demands of the twenty-first century. It explores the outlines of a problem-solving orientation to lawyering and legal education that has potential to address and create a dynamic between the concerns of women and the need to reclaim the soul of the legal profession. A move from gladiator to problem-solver may brighten both the future of the legal profession and the future of women and other underrepresented groups in the legal profession