Multi-level Advocacy for Nutrition

Over the past decade, nutrition has received strong global attention as a development problem. Concerted efforts by international donors, philanthropical foundations, national and international non-government organisations and civil society have pushed nutrition further up global and national policy agendas. This has led to growing convergence on goals, strategies and interventions to tackle undernutrition, seeking to support country-owned, country-led strategies for addressing undernutrition. Policy advocacy has played a critical role in getting to this stage; it has raised awareness among key stakeholders of the underlying and immediate causes (direct and indirect) of malnutrition and its human, economic and other consequences. Advocacy is hence seen as essential for strengthening and supporting actions towards sustained political commitment, and effective multi-stakeholder and multi-level governance for nutrition. Domestic advocacy initiatives – including those related to international campaigns such as Scaling Up Nutrition (http://scalingupnutrition.org) and the 1,000 Days Partnership (www.thousanddays.org/) – have tended to focus on policymaking at international and national levels. This has also characterised many studies of nutrition and health advocacy. Pelletier et al. (2013) study national-level nutrition advocacy to present a useful set of ‘principles and practices of nutrition advocacy’. However, they do not set out to discuss advocacy or the potential catalytic role of civil society at the subnational level. Indeed, few studies have looked at nutrition advocacy beyond the international and national levels. This sharply contrasts with parallel nutrition debates, which underline that policy implementation dynamics mediate the outcomes of nutrition policy initiatives, and thus require greater analysis. This demands an analytical shift away from capital cities and the hubbub of central government administrations, donors, international and domestic pressure groups and national media to the realities, practices and political economies at subnational level.UK Department for International DevelopmentThe material has been funded by UK aid from the UK Government, however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government’s official policies

Success Attributions and More: Multidimensional Extensions of the Sexual Attribution Bias to Failure Attributions, Social Emotions, and the Desire for Social Interaction

According to the recently discovered sexual attribution bias (SAB), young adults attribute the success of same-aged, same-sex attractive stimulus persons in a more derogative way than the success of less attractive same-sex persons, whereas this pattern is reversed for members of the opposite sex. Because this bias has so far only been investigated with respect to attributions in success scenarios, two studies examined its potential transferability to other psychological variables and settings: Study 1 (N = 419)demonstrated analogous biases for emotions and the desire for social interaction, and Study 2 (N = 509) revealed that the SAB can also be extended to failure scenarios

Exploring the drivers of malnutrition in West Africa from health and social science perspectives : a comparative methodological review

West Africa has a high burden of malnutrition and the drivers are often complex, highly context-specific, and cut across individual, social, political and environmental domains. Public health research most often considers immediate individual health and diet drivers, at the expense of wider considerations that may fall outside of a health agenda. The objective of this systematic mapping review is to map the broad drivers of malnutrition in West Africa, from public health and social science perspectives, and to evaluate the additional value of an interdisciplinary approach. Evidence was gathered from one public health (MEDLINE) and one social science (International Bibliography of Social Science) database using a detailed search syntax tailored to each disciplinary configuration. Literature was screened against pre-determined eligibility criteria and extracted from abstracts. Studies published in English or French between January 2010 and April 2018 were considered for inclusion. Driver categories (immediate, underlying and basic drivers) were coded against the UNICEF conceptual framework of malnutrition. A total of 358 studies were included; 237 were retrieved from the public health database and 124 from the social science database, 3 studies were included in both. The public health and social science literature document different drivers, with MEDLINE most often reporting immediate drivers of malnutrition and the International Bibliography of Social Science database reporting underlying and basic drivers. The combined literature offers more balanced representation across categories. An interdisciplinary approach proved successful in achieving complementarity in search results while upholding rigorous methods. We recommend that interdisciplinary approaches are utilised to bridge recognised gaps between defined disciplines

Climate action or delay: the dynamics of competing narratives in the UK political sphere and the influence of climate protest

It is often argued that political will is needed to make progress on responding to the climate crisis. Political will needs a narrative though, substantiating why political intervention is needed. This paper examines the dynamics of key competing climate policy narratives in the political sphere – normative, i.e. morally underpinned pro-climate action, denial and delay of climate action and other, mostly exclusively economic or technical arguments for climate action – using data of parliamentary debates in the UK between 2017 and 2022 and interviews with politicians and civil servants for complementary computational, time-series and qualitative analyses. We investigate the role played by major external events, focussing on pro-action climate protests, in shaping these competing dynamics, which ultimately underpin climate policy decisions. We find an increase in normative pro-climate arguments used in parliament in 2018/2019 during major climate protests, which become the dominant argument line. And while this increase slowed down during the COVID-19 pandemic, it nevertheless consolidated, reinvigorated by COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, which was also accompanied by resumed climate protests. Analysis suggests moreover that the normative pro-climate action and the denial/delay narratives are coupled. We also find considerable differences between the two major UK parties. The governing Conservatives are split between the pro-climate action and delay/denial camps, paralysing any policy progress, with latest dynamics suggesting delay arguments becoming more dominant. Labour, on the other hand, embraces the normative pro-climate action narrative, though even here delay arguments are occasionally employed. Our interviews with politicians and civil servants confirm our computational analysis that suggests there was a shift in 2018/2019 with an increase of normative pro-climate action narrative. They confirm that flagship UK climate policies, such as the net zero by 2050 legislation passed in June 2019 and Labour’s Green New Deal launch in March 2019, were aided by climate protests

Causal learning across culture and socioeconomic status

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in Head Start programs, and middle-class children from the United States participated in a causal learning task (N = 435). Consistent with previous studies, children learned both specific causal relations and more abstract causal principles across culture and socioeconomic status (SES). The Peruvian children and adults generally performed like middle-class U.S. children and adults, but the low-SES U.S. children showed some differences

Amateur gold farming in China: “Chinese ingenuity,” independence and critique

Informed by a mix of theoretical sources and interviews with middle-class Chinese amateur gold farmers, this article argues that within China, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer might function as focus for reflection on Chineseness and China’s role in an increasingly interconnected world, rather than as a carrier of third-world stereotype as it tends to do in the West. The concept of shanzhai—often associated with sometimes comical, sometimes innovative Chinese copying of foreign con- sumer goods—is employed as a key analytical tool and helps highlight the themes of “Chinese ingenuity,” independence (from game operators and to some extent also parents), and critique (of games)

Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91932/1/cultural_preferences.pd

Covered in stigma? The impact of differing levels of Islamic head‐covering on explicit and implicit biases toward Muslim women

Given the prominence of Muslim veils—in particular the hijab and full‐face veil—in public discourse concerning the place of Muslims in Western society, we examined their impact on non‐Muslims’ responses at both explicit and implicit levels. Results revealed that responses were more negative toward any veil compared with no veil, and more negative toward the full‐face veil relative to the hijab: for emotions felt toward veiled women (Study 1), for non‐affective attitudinal responses (Study 2), and for implicit negative attitudes revealed through response latency measures (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, we manipulated the perceived reasons for wearing a veil, finding that exposure to positive reasons for wearing a veil led to better predicted and imagined contact (Study 4). Practical and theoretical implications are discussed

Assessment of cognitive self-statements during marital problem solving: A comparison of two methods

Twenty maritally distressed couples (DC) and 20 nondistressed couples (NDC) were recruited and asked to undertake 10 minutes of problem-solving discussions, which were videotaped. Each individual partner’s cognitive self-statements during the interaction were assessed using two methods: video-assisted recall (VR) and thought listing (TL). Reported cognitions from each method were content- analysed and classified into five categories: partner- referent positive, partner- referent negative, self-referent positive, self- referent negative, and other. Proportions of reported cognitions falling into each category were analysed in two separate two-way MANOVAs (marital distress/ nondistress x sex) for the VR and TL measures. Results of each MANOVA indicated a highly significant effect of marital distress on cognitions, and a significant effect of sex on the VR but not the TL measure. Discriminant analyses showed that the VR and TL methods both discriminated between DC and NDC groups. Post hoc univariate ANOVAs indicated that DC had significantly higher proportions of negative partner- referent cognitions, and lower proportions of positive partner- referent cognitions, than NDC while problem solving. The relative merits of each cognitive assessment method, and their potential use in increasing marital therapy effectiveness, are discussed