Despite Efforts, International Environmental Law is Aspirational Rather than Successful in its Contribution to the Protection of the Global Environment and in the Fight Against Climate Change

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment2 (Stockholm Conference) was the first of many international negotiations to consider the effects of anthropogenic interference with the environment, including chemical pollution and climate change. The Conference and its corresponding declaration recognised customary International Environmental Law (IEL) principles, such as the precaution and prevention principles, and has no doubt been a catalyst for an increased awareness of environmental issues throughout the globe, thus influencing domestic environmental legal systems. The UN climate regime can therefore be seen not only as a source of international law, but as an influence on national and transnational environmental regulatory systems. However, the question remains as to the actual impact, if any, IEL has had in protecting the global environment and preventing dangerous climate change

Réalisme, sociologie et concepts de relations

Le mot « relations » se réfère à de nombreux concepts qui sont parfois peu compatibles entre eux en sociologie contemporaine. Compte tenu de la brièveté de la contribution que nous offrons ici, aucun effort ne sera fait pour modifier cette situation. Je présenterai plutôt une interprétation générale, une sorte de dénominateur commun, puis j’illustrerai la manière dont j’ai cherché à utiliser ces termes dans mes propres travaux sur les stigmates et sur les inégalités en matière de santé au Royaume-Uni - dans mes écrits, les termes relations et structures sont plus ou moins traités en tant que synonymes. Je terminerai avec une réflexion sur ce que j’appelle le modèle jigsaw, un outil heuristique susceptible de faciliter l’étude sociologique des relations qui se manifestent dans le monde social que nous habitons.The word ‘relations’ stands for any number of different and sometimes barely compatible concepts in contemporary sociology. No attempt will be made in this brief contribution to tidy things up. Rather I will proffer a general interpretation, a kind of common denominator, then introduce and illustrate how I have sought to use the term in my own work on health-related stigma and health inequalities in the UK. In my writings the terms relations and structures are treated largely as synonyms. I end with a consideration of what I call the ‘jigsaw model’, a heuristic device to facilitate the sociological study of relations in the social worlds we inhabit

Juvenile Batten disease: A challenge to conventional sociological approaches of chronic illness and disability.

Demographic trends towards an ageing population and advances in the treatment of acute conditions and in the efficacy of life preserving treatments have led to an increase in the number of people living with chronic illnesses. These developments, along with the recognition of chronic illness as the most common cause of impairment in the developed world, have raised the profile of chronic illness and the associated issue of disability, making them an increasingly important aspect of the study of healthcare. This thesis explores the experiences of families of children and young adults living with juvenile Batten disease - a rare neurodegenerative chronic condition - as an exemplar of the changing nature of chronic illness and disability towards the end of the twentieth century. The ongoing debates around definitions and attitudes are examined with particular reference to the symbiotic, and often antagonistic, relationship between biomedicine and sociology in this area. The experiences of the families of children and young adults with juvenile Batten disease, and the methodological dilemmas inherent in studying a condition of this kind are used to challenge existing approaches to the field. The changing nature of the experience of chronic illness is explored through the growth in community care, self-help and wider access to information. This is related to the sociological literature on chronic illness and disability with specific reference to the role of users and experts in the research context, the place of the body within the literature, the challenge to biomedicine inherent in both literatures, and the social model of disability. It is suggested that the remit of the sociology of disability needs to be widened to address the embodied nature of disability and to better incorporate disabilities caused by chronic illnesses and rare diseases, profound multiple disabilities and degenerative conditions

The relationship between medicine and the public: the challenge of concordance

Concordance is based on the idea that patients and practitioners should work together towards an agreement on treatment choice. This requires a redefinition of the relations and encounters between doctors and their patients. This redefinition emphasizes the need for patient involvement and participation. In this article we examine concordance against the background of wider social change, structural as well as interpersonal. We focus in particular on challenges to trust, noting that the almost instinctive trust that people formerly had for professional experts has for many reasons diminished. One consequence of this, we suggest, is that concordance is being espoused at a time when its accomplishment may be particularly threatened. In fact there are strong grounds for claiming that support for the notion of concordance could possibly result in a growth of ‘hidden’ communication pathologies by means of what the social theorist Habermas (1984) has termed ‘systematically distorted communication’

Threats to embodied well-being: An exploration of how disabled people negotiate barriers in hospital settings

Taking a social model of disability approach, this article explores how disabled people negotiate barriers in the large, modern hospital settings typically found in complex healthcare systems. While there is evidence of intractable barriers in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, little is known about the actions disabled people take in the face of barriers and the immediate effects of doing so. Analysis of data from a qualitative study of disabled people’s healthcare encounters is presented. This draws on the concept of threats to embodied well-being to understand how disabled people perceive barriers and the influence this perception has on barrier negotiation. It demonstrates that some barriers are unique to healthcare and that these place disabled people in situations where their well-being is threatened. Despite these situations being inherently disempowering, disabled people are forced to take whatever action they can to protect the embodied self. We theorise that barriers are created inadvertently by the design, organisation and healthcare practices characteristics of modern hospital settings. Effective barrier removal requires understanding not only their impact on disabled people’s embodied well-being, but also the political, policy and social relations implicated in their creation