Pathways to permanence in England and Norway: A critical analysis of documents and data

The English language term ‘permanence’ is increasingly used in high income countries as a ‘short-hand’ translation for a complex set of aims around providing stability and family membership for children who need child welfare services and out-of-home care. From a scrutiny of legislative provisions, court judgments, government documents and a public opinion survey on child placement options, the paper draws out similarities and differences in understandings of the place of ‘permanence’ within the child welfare discourse in Norway and England. The main differences are that in England the components of permanence are explicitly set out in legislation, statutory guidance and advisory documents whilst in Norway the terms ‘stability’ and ‘continuity’ are used in a more limited number of policy documents in the context of a wide array of services available for children and families. The paper then draws on these sources, and on administrative data on children in care, to tease out possible explanations for the similarities and differences identified. We hypothesise that both long-standing policies and recent changes can be explained by differences in public and political understandings of child welfare and the balance between universal services and those targeted on parents and children identified as vulnerable and in need of specialist services

Rights-based Approaches and Bilateral Aid Agencies: More Than a Metaphor?

It could be argued that the rights based approach … is no more than ametaphor; a concept that catalyses a set of values into a phrase that many people can adopt and adapt. It is a general statement in favour of equitable development, involving widespread participation of those with no direct control of, or access to, the power of the state … If we still take rights as a legal concept then much of what passes as rights based is unlikely to be successful because there are often no state bodies committed to meeting the obligations implied. There is also a sense in that the “emperor has no clothes ” as there are too many people arguing about the details of what a rights approach should be and how it should be operationalised.Meanwhile, this is happening in the absence of any clear idea of what it is they are engaging with. (Pratt 2003: 2)

Dynasties and destiny On the roles of altruism and impatience in the evolution of consumption and bequests

'Die Studie untersucht die gemeinsame Rolle von Altruismus und Ungeduld sowie den Einfluss der Evolution waehrend der Bildung von langfristigen Zeitpraeferenzen und waehrend der Bestimmung des optimalen Grads an Konsum und Vermaechtnis. Die Autoren zeigen, wie Konsumpfade von Dynastien mit Altruismus und Ungeduld verknuepft sind, und folgern daraus, dass laenger lebende Dynastien einen hoeheren Grad an Altruismus und ein geringeres Ausmass an Ungeduld aufweisen als kurzlebige Dynastien.' (Autorenreferat)'The authors study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. They show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience, and they reason that long-lived dynasties will be characterized by a higher degree of altruism and a lower degree of impatience than short-lived dynasties.' (author's abstract)German title: Dynastien und Schicksal: die Bedeutung von Altruismus und Ungeduld in der Evolution von Konsum und VermaechtnisAvailable from http://www.zef.de/download/zef dp/Zef-dp43.pdf / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

What Are the Different Measures of Mobility Telling Us About Surface Transportation CO 2

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread reductions in mobility and induced observable changes in atmospheric emissions. Recent work has employed novel mobility data sets as a proxy for trace gas emissions from traffic by scaling CO(2) emissions linearly with those near‐real‐time mobility data. Yet, there has been little work evaluating these emission numbers. Here, we systematically compare these mobility data sets to traffic data from local governments in seven diverse urban and national/state regions to characterize the magnitude of errors that result from using the mobility data. We observe differences in excess of 60% between these mobility data sets and local traffic data. We could not find a general functional relationship between the mobility data and traffic flow over all the regions and observe higher deviations from using such general relationships than the original data. Finally, we give an overview of the potential errors that come from estimating CO(2) emissions using (mobility or traffic) activity data. Future work should be cautious while using these mobility metrics for emission estimates