Conflict, Resistance and Alliances in a Multi-Governance Setting: Reshaping Realities in the Andhra Pradesh Irrigation Reforms \ud

In this article, we will explore how local politics of policy, in the interaction with governance mechanisms, have produced specific polity outcomes in the irrigation sector of Andhra Pradesh. The water sector of Andhra Pradesh, which has been struggling within inefficiency, poor performance, deterioration, and lack of participation as elsewhere in India, has undergone substantial reforms aiming at Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM). Previous research has indicated how reform policy choices were contested and mediated by relevant actors and how this affected the outcome in key areas of irrigation management. This is referred to as the politics of policy. We will look at multi-level governance in a situation where different tiers represent different institutional basis, and argue that the politics of policy at multiple levels of governance can be perceived as a form of support and/or resilience by actors to new governance mechanisms/arrangement

Social work education in South Asia: diverse, dynamic and disjointed?

Social work, claiming to be a global profession, is struggling for its legitimate identity in South Asia. South Asia is home to over one-fifth of the world’s population, making the region one of the most populous and culturally, economically, socially and politically diverse geographical regions. Like the variations across the region, there exist key differences in the growth, establishment, nature and practice of social work education which is dynamic, diverse but also disjointed. Imparting social work education in countries of South Asia is a challenging task due to political instabilities, multicultural issues and low professional recognition. Using a comparative approach, this chapter analyses the initiation, growth and knowledge base of social work programs and addresses key epistemological challenges. By doing so, it suggests revisiting social work curricula and teaching practices in the region. Divided in to five sections, this chapter provides a regional view of the status of social work education and argues for crafting indigenous social work knowledge and practices, teaching and practice innovations, and human resource development of social work educators and students in this vast and diverse region

Atmospheric retrieval of exoplanets

Exoplanetary atmospheric retrieval refers to the inference of atmospheric properties of an exoplanet given an observed spectrum. The atmospheric properties include the chemical compositions, temperature profiles, clouds/hazes, and energy circulation. These properties, in turn, can provide key insights into the atmospheric physicochemical processes of exoplanets as well as their formation mechanisms. Major advancements in atmospheric retrieval have been made in the last decade, thanks to a combination of state-of-the-art spectroscopic observations and advanced atmospheric modeling and statistical inference methods. These developments have already resulted in key constraints on the atmospheric H2O abundances, temperature profiles, and other properties for several exoplanets. Upcoming facilities such as the JWST will further advance this area. The present chapter is a pedagogical review of this exciting frontier of exoplanetary science. The principles of atmospheric retrievals of exoplanets are discussed in detail, including parametric models and statistical inference methods, along with a review of key results in the field. Some of the main challenges in retrievals with current observations are discussed along with new directions and the future landscape

Towards Chemical Constraints on Hot Jupiter Migration

The origin of hot Jupiters -- gas giant exoplanets orbiting very close to their host stars -- is a long-standing puzzle. Planet formation theories suggest that such planets are unlikely to have formed in-situ but instead may have formed at large orbital separations beyond the snow line and migrated inward to their present orbits. Two competing hypotheses suggest that the planets migrated either through interaction with the protoplanetary disk during their formation, or by disk-free mechanisms such as gravitational interactions with a third body. Observations of eccentricities and spin-orbit misalignments of hot Jupiter systems have been unable to differentiate between the two hypotheses. In the present work, we suggest that chemical depletions in hot Jupiter atmospheres might be able to constrain their migration mechanisms. We find that sub-solar carbon and oxygen abundances in Jovian-mass hot Jupiters around Sun-like stars are hard to explain by disk migration. Instead, such abundances are more readily explained by giant planets forming at large orbital separations, either by core accretion or gravitational instability, and migrating to close-in orbits via disk-free mechanisms involving dynamical encounters. Such planets also contain solar or super-solar C/O ratios. On the contrary, hot Jupiters with super-solar O and C abundances can be explained by a variety of formation-migration pathways which, however, lead to solar or sub-solar C/O ratios. Current estimates of low oxygen abundances in hot Jupiter atmospheres may be indicative of disk-free migration mechanisms. We discuss open questions in this area which future studies will need to investigate.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter