A biodiversity jigsaw: A review of current New Zealand legislation and initiatives

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the current legislation and initiatives surrounding biodiversity management, protection and sustainable use related to the New Zealand local government sector. Design/methodology/approach: This paper takes the form of an archival review of the academic databases, legislation and biodiversity related websites to ascertain the current legislation and initiatives in place in New Zealand surrounding biodiversity. Findings: The paper found biodiversity to be managed through a combination of legislation, national policies, strategies, trusts and contestable funds. The majority of biodiversity protection on private land is the responsibility of the 78 local authorities that comprise the local government sector through their administration of the Resource Management Act 1991. Despite the legislative requirement to protect and manage biodiversity the paper confirmed that no statutory framework currently exists to guide biodiversity reporting. Research limitations/implications: This study is limited to New Zealand biodiversity related legislation and initiatives. As such it may not necessarily be applicable to any other jurisdictions. Practical implications:This review illustrates the difficulty that exists in navigating the disjointed legislation and other initiatives relating to biodiversity. This currently hinders the development of framework for reporting on biodiversity by local government. However the development of such a framework is crucial to the conservation and sustainable use of New Zealand’s unique biodiversity for the benefit of current and future generations. Originality/value: This paper adds to the limited literature in the field of biodiversity reporting and extends it to the local government sector in New Zealand

Incorporating indigenous values in corporate social responsibility reports

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to show how a major state-owned enterprise in New Zealand uses its annual report to promote the image of an organisation concerned with the local community including Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, Māori values and their relationship with the environment. Design/methodology/approach – This longitudinal single case study of Mighty River Power Limited spans the period 2000 to 2009. It involves detailed examination of the narrative disclosures contained in the annual reports, including photographs, over the period of the study to determine whether Mighty River Power used the annual report to present a favourable image to the organisation’s stakeholders. Indigenous partnerships between the organisation and Māori trusts were also investigated to determine how these contributed to the corporate identity promoted in the annual reports. Findings – The analysis found that annual report was used to promote the image of an organisation upholding the Māori value of kaitiakitanga as part of its social responsibility to the local community and environment. Māori partnerships and community environmental group sponsorship were featured extensively in the images and narratives, with specific reference to indigenous values. Originality/value – This paper builds upon previous literature in the field of corporate social responsibility in annual reports and extends it to the state-owned enterprise sector in New Zealand, focusing specifically on the relationship between the entity and the indigenous community in which it operates

Children's Schooling in Developing-Country Slums: A Comparison of Egypt and India

This paper explores the implications of urban poverty for children’s educational attainment, a central measure of human capital that has a well-documented and pervasive influence on later-life demographic and labor force behavior. We compare levels of children’s schooling in Cairo and urban Egypt with those of Allahabad, India, a rapidly growing city of some 1.1 million persons in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, looking for poverty effects at both household and neighborhood levels.

An investigation of methods for enriching a print text for use with visually-handicapped students

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Supervision of Maori doctoral students: A descriptive report

This report follows up a previous paper that outlined the goals and plans of a research project that focused on both theoretical and cultural questions regarding the supervisory process for Māori doctoral students (McKinley, Grant, Middleton, Irwin, & Williams, 2007). The major goal of the project is to enhance understanding of the teaching and learning process of supervision for students and supervisors, particularly around issues of culture that arise in research methodologies and practices. This paper reports on the completed project by providing further operational background, design features, the nature of the student and supervisor samples and a summary of interview findings. The results show that there are indeed distinctive issues arising within the supervision of Māori doctoral students. Some of these are to do with both pleasures and challenges found in the supervision relationship, while others relate to the kinds of projects the students undertake. Many projects for example, push at the disciplinary boundaries of Western knowledge and are often rooted in a political desire to enhance the everyday lives of Māori. Yet others are connected to identity formation processes that concern many Māori during their years as doctoral students. A central message for supervisors from this work is that the supervision of Māori doctoral students may require unfamiliar forms of engagement but that these are likely to be deeply rewarding in many different ways

Design and Evaluation of a Peptidyl Fluorescent Chemosensor for Divalent Zinc

The rapid analysis of trace metal cations for environmental and biomedical applications is particularly demanding since it requires the specific recognition of a particular element in the presence of numerous closely related species. While remarkable progress has been achieved for inorganic analytes, such as Ca^(2+), there is still a significant need for the genesis of new fluorosensors. In light of the selectivity and avidity with which proteins bind divalent metal cations, we have chosen to use a polypeptide architecture as the framework for metal ion recognition.In addition, our ability to manipulate synthetic polypeptides allows the coordinated integration of fluorescent reporters for signal transduction within a metal-binding peptidyl construct. Herein we report the design, synthesis, and evaluation of a selective fluorescent chemosensor, sensitive to nanomolar concentrations of Zn^(2+)

State Policy, Livelihood Protection and Gender on Canada's East Coast

This paper looks at the interactions between environmental and industrial restructuring within the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery and regime shifts in three main policy areas related to fisheries. Our focus is the gendered consequences of interactive restructuring across policy areas for the ability of women and men in fisheries households in Newfoundland and Labrador to make a living. The three main policy areas include fisheries management policy, Employment Insurance policy and policy related to the regulation of occupational health and workers compensation. We document important similarities in the overall pattern and outcomes of regime shift within these three policy areas and point to ways these changes have interacted with resource degradation and industrial restructuring to influence the lives and livelihoods of fishery dependent people.Cette étude porte sur l’interaction entre la restructuration environnementale et industrielle dans le secteur des pêches de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, et les changements de régime survenus dans trois secteurs de dépenses importants des pêches. L’étude concerne les répercussions pour les sexes de la restructuration interactive dans les secteurs de dépenses sur la capacité des femmes et des hommes des ménages de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador qui vivent de la pêche de gagner leur vie. Les trois principaux secteurs de dépenses comprennent la politique sur la gestion des pêches, la politique sur l’assurance-emploi et la politique sur la réglementation de la santé au travail et la rémunération des travailleurs. L’étude fait état des ressemblances importantes dans la structure générale et les résultats des changements de régime dans ces trois secteurs de dépenses et indique des façons dont ces changements ont interagi avec le dépérissement des ressources et la restructuration industrielle pour influer sur la vie et le gagne-pain des personnes tributaires de la pêche

Investing in Well-being: An Analytical Framework

The NZ Treasury is currently engaged in a project to identify cost-effective interventions to improve outcomes for children and young adults in order to maximise the value of government expenditures across the social sector. The central aim of this paper is to provide an empirically-robust framework to compare intervention across a range of social sectors. There are two key components to the framework. The first is a life-course view of child development that emphasises that experiences and influences in childhood can affect well-being throughout life. The second component involves viewing social expenditures as investments addressed at achieving particular outcomes, typically directed at enhancing well-being. The paper presents evidence from a review of the literature on how the process and experiences of childhood have a later impact on wellbeing; how child development and outcomes are influenced by individual, family and communal factors and how risk and resilience can be used to indicate that an individual is at increased or decreased risk of negative outcomes. Case studies of youth suicide, teenage pregnancy, educational underachievement and youth inactivity provide evidence about what interventions work using key empirical findings from the literature.Well-being; social investment; life-course; child development; child and adult outcomes; portfolio; intervention

Exploring the Role of Vitamin D. Comments on Fleury et al. Sun Exposure and Its Effects on Human Health: mechanisms through Which Sun Exposure Could Reduce the Risk of Developing Obesity and Cardiometabolic Dysfunction

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Challenging issues: doctoral supervision in post-colonial sites

The supervision of indigenous doctoral students in Aotearoa/New Zealand occurs in a post-colonial context marked by ongoing struggles over identity and belonging. In addition to stories concerning the pleasures taken in this relation, students and supervisors recount the challenges they experience. While some challenges are normal in any doctoral supervision, others are distinctively connected to the identities of the students as indigenous (Maori) and supervisors as settlers (non-Maori). Such challenges not only reveal unfinished tensions that structure settler-indigene (or coloniser-colonised) relations, but also raise questions concerning the implication of doctoral education in identity formation. This article draws on recent interviews with Maori doctoral students and their supervisors to identify several “challenging matters” and to explore their significance for supervision in post-colonial sites