Overcoming marginality on the margins: mapping, logging, and coca in the Amazon borderlands

textThe ecologically and culturally rich Amazonian border zones are increasingly targeted for development and the exploitation of natural resources, even as these zones often double as existing or proposed sites for the conservation of biodiversity and protection of indigenous lands. Governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations alike project their goals from central offices onto borderland landscapes assumed to be empty of local people but full of valuable resources, biodiversity or development potential. Simultaneously, loggers, miners, drug traffickers, and others operate illegally or quasi-legally within these border zones and, in the absence of a strong governmental presence, cultivate the borderland's reputation as a violent hinterland. Within this complex borderland reality, the local people (indigenous and non-indigenous), largely invisible to authorities, struggle to survive with subsistence strategies while either negotiating with illegal interlopers to supplement their income or resisting them for their very survival. The resulting landscape is a tangle of overlapping and competing concessions, conservation units, and indigenous territories whose contestation and resulting confusion advances the agenda of illegal extractivists and drug traffickers. This study highlights the continued importance of fieldwork in geography. Here, field-based research provides insight into the poorly understood borderlands of Peru and Brazil. Research used a combination of participatory methods, Geographic Information Systems, ethnography, document research, and remote sensing to analyze mapping, logging, and coca cultivation within four borderland watersheds. These data were combined with regional data on coca eradication, resource concessions, conservation units, and indigenous territories from both Brazil and Peru. Field-based results demonstrate these borderlands to be highly contested and poorly mapped with an exploitative and poorly managed timber industry and a dynamic front of coca cultivation contributing to social disruption and environmental degradation. More fieldwork is needed to generate the geographic information necessary for sustainable development and conservation planning and to help local people defend their territory from illegal operators and the imposition of state resource concessions. Ecological Economic Zoning is recommended as a participatory policy framework to improve geographic information and long term planning.Geography and the Environmen

Predicted Velocity and Density Structure of the Exhuming Papua New Guinea Ultrahigh‐Pressure Terrane

New electron backscatter diffraction measurements show that the Papua New Guinea (PNG) ultrahigh‐pressure (UHP) terrane is dominated by rocks with weakly oriented quartz and feldspar and less abundant strongly oriented hornblende, clinopyroxene, and mica. Velocities measured at high pressures (600 MPa) show that VP is 5.8–6.3 km/s for gneiss samples, 6.5–7.7 km/s for amphibolite, and 7.7–8.2 km/s for eclogite and VS is 3.4–3.9 km/s for gneiss, 4.0–4.4 km/s for amphibolite, and 4.5–4.6 km/s for eclogite. Velocities and anisotropies calculated from mineral crystal preferred orientations (CPOs) are equivalent to within 5% of the measured values. The highest seismic anisotropy for the PNG terrane is in amphibolite at 8% and 7% for VP and VS, respectively. Calculations of seismic velocities at depth based on predicted mineral assemblages indicate that the exhuming UHP terrane is of dominantly mafic composition below ∼20 km depth. Anisotropy in the PNG terrane is expected to be quite low and is controlled by the orientation of the foliation. If observable, changes in anisotropy across the exhuming body may be used to differentiate among the different proposed mechanisms of UHP exhumation

A guide to systems-level, participatory, theory-informed implementation research in global health

Implementation research is a multidisciplinary field that addresses the complex phenomenon of how context influences our ability to deliver evidence-informed healthcare. There is increasing realisation of the importance of applying robust implementation research to scale-up life-saving interventions that meet health-related sustainable development goals. However, the lack of high-quality implementation research is impeding our ability to meet these targets, globally. Within implementation research, theory refers to the proposed hypothesis and/or explanation of how an intervention is expected to interact with the local context and actors to bring about change. Although there is increasing interest in applying theory to understand how and why implementation programmes work in real-world settings, global health actors still tend to favour impact evaluations conducted in controlled environments. This may, in part, be due to the relative novelty as well as methodological complexity of implementation research and the need to draw on divergent disciplines, including epidemiology, implementation science and social sciences. Because of this, implementation research is faced with a particular set of challenges about how to reconcile different ways of thinking and constructing knowledge about healthcare interventions. To help translate some of the ambiguity surrounding how divergent theoretical approaches and methods contribute to implementation research, we draw on our multidisciplinary expertise in the field, particularly in global health. We offer an overview of the different theoretical approaches and describe how they are applied to continuously select, monitor and evaluate implementation strategies throughout the different phases of implementation research. In doing so, we offer a relatively brief, user-focused guide to help global health actors implement and report on evaluation of evidence-based and scalable interventions, programmes and practices.Policy Analysi

Protocol for intervention development to improve adolescent perinatal mental health in Kenya and Mozambique: The INSPIRE project

Introduction Mental health interventions have traditionally been developed by clinicians and researchers without the meaningful engagement and partnership with those who would receive, deliver, and fund them. Recent progress has highlighted the importance of the co-design of interventions, through stakeholder participation, as a means of increasing the integration of mental health interventions into existing health, education, and social care systems. This protocol describes the pre-implementation phase of the INSPIRE (Innovative approaches to adolescent perinatal wellbeing) project which aims to identify challenges, and design and test interventions to promote mental wellbeing and good mental health of adolescent girls during pregnancy and the year after birth with local stakeholders in Kenya and Mozambique. Methods A participatory approach that blends human-centred design, systems thinking, and implementation science methods will be used to engage adolescents (aged 15–19 years), their families, and other stakeholders who can influence implementation efforts, in planning and preparing interventions. First, an understanding of context, barriers, and opportunities related to adolescent perinatal mental health will be elicited through individual interviews, focus group discussions, and observations. This will be complemented by a scoping review of relevant interventions. The research team will identify contextual insights relating to adolescent and system characteristics, strengths, and challenges. These will be shared with and refined by stakeholders. Thematic analysis will be conducted to describe the experiences of adolescent girls, and barriers and enablers to maintaining good mental health. The former will be triangulated with the Context and Implementation of Complex Intervention (CICI) framework. Causal loop diagrams will be developed to illustrate the individual and system-level variables which influence adolescent perinatal mental health. Stakeholder workshops will be used to identify priorities, brainstorm potential interventions, develop a program theory, and prototype an intervention and implementation strategies. Intervention acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility will be assessed, and a theory of change map finalized. Results To date the study has recruited 169 participants to complete individual interviews, focus group discussions and observation activities. Conclusions It is anticipated that the use of a participatory and systematic approach to the development of an intervention to improve mental health, will improve its perceived appropriateness, acceptability, and feasibility among key stakeholders. This may, in turn, significantly improve its availability, uptake, and sustainability