Profiling the victims: public awareness of pollution-related harm in China

This article aims to identify factors which influence public awareness of health or economic harm from pollution in China. Based on an analysis of the China General Social Survey (CGSS) carried out nationwide by Renmin University and HKUST in 2006, it focuses on awareness of pollution-related harm or self-identification as a pollution victim. The analysis tests three groups of hypotheses about how self-identified victims differ from others: first, in terms of the environmental conditions they experience, such as the actual level of pollution and types of neighbourhoods they inhabit; second, in terms of resources including material and information resources, time, social capital and political experience; and third, in terms of political attitudes. The conclusion discusses implications for the politics of public participation in environmental governance in China

The management of coral reef resource systems

Coral reefs, Resource management, Conferences

Empowering looked after children

Children’s rights include the right to participation in decisions made about them. For looked after children, this right is enshrined in the Children Act, 1989. This article reports the results of a study of children’s views about their experience of being looked after and the degree of power they felt they had to influence decision making. Their main areas of criticism were frequent changes of social worker, lack of an effective voice at reviews, lack of confidentiality and, linked to this, lack of a confidante. The findings are discussed in relation to recent policy changes. Specifically, the Looked After Children documentation and the Quality Protects Initiative by setting out uniform objectives and performance criteria seem to restrict the freedom of local authority management and of social workers to respond to individual children’s preferences or to give weight to what the children themselves consider to be in their best interest

Predictors of support for state for state social welfare provision in Russia and China

This article analyses the determinants of support for state social welfare provision in Russia and China on the basis of a four-stage recursive model using two waves of the World Values Survey. It hypothesises that support is a function of economic self –interest, tapped by subjective economic satisfaction and relative income; ideology including beliefs about market fairness and inequality aversion; as well as temporal context. It finds that subjective economic satisfaction reduces support; inequality aversion is a positive influence, while beliefs about market fairness matter in different ways. Support increased over the period spanning the 2008 global financial crisis

Improving practice : child protection as a systems problem

This paper argues for treating the task of improving the child protection services as a systems problem, and for adopting the system-focused approach to investigating errors that has been developed in areas of medicine and engineering where safety is a high priority. It outlines how this approach differs from the traditional way of examining errors and how it leads to different types of solutions. Traditional inquiries tend to stop once human error has been found whereas a systems approach treats human error as the starting point and examines the whole context in which the operator was working to see how this impacted on their ability to perform well. The article outlines some factors that seem particularly problematic and worthy of closer analysis in current child protection services. A better understanding of the factors that are adversely effecting practitioners’ level of performance offers the potential for identifying more effective solutions. These typically take the form of modifying the tasks so that they make more realistic and feasible demands on human cognitive and emotional abilities

The socio-political bases of willingness to join environmental NGOs in China: a study in social cohesion

This article examines willingness to join China’s emerging green movement through an analysis of data from the China General Social Survey of 2006. A question asked about environmental NGO membership shows that whilst only one per cent of respondents claim to be members of an environmental NGO, more than three fifths say they would like to join one in future if there is an opportunity, slightly less than one fifth reject the idea, and the remainder are don’t knows. The paper tests explanations of willingness to join based on instrumentality, ideology, social identity and social capital networks. It finds that instrumental considerations dominate, although ideology, identity and networks contribute incrementally. The conclusion considers the usefulness of willingness to join as an indicator of social cohesion within the framework of a wider effort to evaluate social quality