Contrasting the framing of urban climate resilience

Cities worldwide face climate change and other complex challenges and strive to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that these bring. The notion of urban (climate) resilience has become highly popular in both research and practice. However, the concept is inherently malleable; it can be framed in different ways, emphasising different problems, causes, moral judgements, and solutions. This review explores contrasting ways of framing urban climate resilience and their potential consequences. It identifies four typical framings: Urban Shock-Proofing (short-term & system focus), Resilience Planning (long-term & system focus), Community Disaster Resilience (short-term & community focus), and Resilient Community Development (long-term & community focus). These framings lead to different approaches to urban resilience and climate adaptation in research, science-policy-society interactions, governance, and practical resilience-building. They also offer different synergies with wider sustainability efforts, including the SDGs. Resilience Planning is widely represented in urban climate adaptation research. However, Resilient Community Development, dealing with community self-determination, equity, and deeper long-term socio-political determinants of vulnerability, is currently underdeveloped. Expansion of current scientific and institutional toolboxes is needed to support and build community-based adaptive and transformative capacities. Explicit reflection on framing is important to facilitate collaboration among actors and across disciplinary and departmental siloes.publishedVersio

The visual framing of climate change impacts and adaptation in the IPCC assessment reports

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a key source on climate change information. How the IPCC presents and frames this climate information influences how policymakers and various stakeholders worldwide perceive climate change and make decisions accordingly. Visuals are powerful components in this communication. Here, we assess how the visuals (N = 702) in the IPCC Working Group II Assessment Reports frame climate impacts and adaptation. We find that visuals are largely framed as distant in time and space and predominantly portray the threats of climate change rather than possible goals to be achieved. Furthermore, conceptually, they are largely narrow, science-oriented instead of showing a broader multi-impact or multi-strategy evaluation of the impacts on society and necessary adaptations. They primarily depicted what the impacts and adaptations were, with minimal attention to who was impacted or needed to take adaption actions or adopt responsibility. Very few of the visuals in WG II (N = 48, 6.5%) focus on adaptation and those that did often do not show a clear theme, spatial or temporal scale. Our findings suggest that IPCC visuals (still) focus primarily on showing that climate change is real and a problem, with little solution-oriented communication. We recommend that the IPCC pays explicit attention to its visual framing and that approaches are developed to better visualise adaptation.acceptedVersio

Архів П. Мартиновича, присвячений кобзарству

Продовжуючи серію публікацій до ювілею відомого дослідника побуту, цехових звичаїв та репертуару кобзарів та лірників художника Порфирія Денисовича Мартиновича, ми пропонуємо читачам матеріали його архіву, присвячені кобзарській тематиці.This edition continues publication of the archive materials dedicated to P.D. Martynovych, who was an artist and a prominent researcher, interested in every day life and repertoire of the Ukrainian epic singers — kobzars and lirnyks. His correspondence with V.P. Horlenko (year 1886) indicates, that he was involved in the problems of the preservation of the Ukrainian traditional culture, and in the kobzars’ studies. His recordings from kobzar P. Drygavka (done in 1913) give us information about kobzars’ every day life, traditions, customs in Kharkiv region

The interaction between cultural heritage and community resilience in disaster-affected volcanic regions

Research on cultural heritage and disasters often focuses on the vulnerability of heritage and ways to disaster-proof it against geophysical, societal, and environmental hazards. However, heritage might in turn also increase the resilience of the communities in which it is present, for example by providing livelihood diversification, helping build social connections, and embedding local knowledge of past disasters. This study analysed how cultural heritage might contribute to multiple aspects of community disaster resilience. It builds on an analysis of resilience and disaster-related cultural heritage of four communities living around Besakih Temple located on Mount Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia, using a mixed-methods MDSO (Most Different Same Outcome) multi-criteria analysis based on questionnaire-guided interviews with 114 respondents. While the variation of cultural heritage across sites is as predicted by theoretical literature, resilience varies considerably across the sites, depending on the type of resilience. Heritage had most positive effect on disaster preparedness and institutional aspects of community resilience. The results highlighted that connecting ‘regular’ disaster management and planning to local cultural heritage can provide valuable synergies for community resilience. Effects on other aspects of resilience were less clear and were likely mediated by existing socio-economic vulnerabilities and the geographical isolation of some of the communities. Further research could benefit from viewing cultural heritage through a ‘community capital’ lens, including matters of equitable access, capacity-building, community-based action, and interactions between cultural capital and other capitals, such as social, economic, political, human, physical, and natural.publishedVersio

Beyond rules: How institutional cultures and climate governance interact

Institutions have a central role in climate change governance. But while there is a flourishing literature on institutions' formal rules, processes, and organizational forms, scholars lament a relative lack of attention to institutions' informal side; their cultures. It is important to study institutions' cultures because it is through culture that people relate to institutional norms and rules in taking climate action. This review uncovers what work has been done on institutional cultures and climate change, discerns common themes around which this scholarship coheres, and advances and argument for why institutional cultures matter. We employed a systematic literature review to assemble a set of 54 articles with a shared concern for how climate change and institutional cultures concurrently affect each other. The articles provided evidence of a nascent field, emerging over the past 5–10 years and fragmented across literatures. This field draws on diverse concepts of institutionalism for revealing quite different expressions of culture, and is mostly grounded in empirical studies. These disparate studies compellingly demonstrate, from different perspectives, that institutional cultures do indeed matter for implementing climate governance. Indeed, the articles converge in providing empirical evidence of eight key sites of interaction between climate change and institutional cultures: worldviews, values, logics, gender, risk acceptance, objects, power, and relationality. These eight sites are important foci for examining and effecting changes to institutions and their cultures; showing how institutional cultures shape responses to climate change, and how climate change shapes institutional cultures.publishedVersio

Denominational school identity and the formation of personal identity

Three important factors determine the institutional identity of denominational (Christian) schools: their interpretation of the religious truth claim, their conception of the nature of education, and their view of cultural differences as content of education. We investigate conceptually which of these interpretations of identity are consonant with a view of education as a place where the personal identity of students is constructed. We interpret personal identity in a narrative way, as a permanent process of reflexive construction where consistency over time is not seen as an ideal, given the plurality of postmodern culture

Identity, cultural change, and religious education

How should we deal with the process of secularisation, the plurality of cultures, and the dominance of thinking about education in terms of transmission, when religious education has to foster the development of personal identity formation of pupils? In answering this question the authors present a transactional epistemology and transformative view on (religious) education and learning which both have far-reaching consequences for our views on socialisation and individuation. In religious education the gaining of religious experiences and the cultivation of a religious attitude are seen as part of everyday life instead of only being connected to certain religious practices. The approach suggested here can stimulate the growth of the pupils' capacity to integrate different and differing perspectives - ideals, norms, values, knowledge, narratives - into their own personality