Reducing Poverty among Arab and Muslim Women: The Case of Arab Women in Israel

The international experience suggests that work is the best way of lifting families out of poverty. Thus, this paper assumes that one crucial policy, among many others, aimed at poverty reduction is to increase the women’s participation in the labour market and their access to decent work. This issue is critical among Arab and Muslim women around the world in general and among Arab women in Israel since the participation rate of women in the labour market is quite low and about 55% of the Arab families live under the poverty line. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the reasons behind the low rate of Arab female participation in the labor market, and based on that to propose a framework for increasing their participation rate and reducing poverty among them and their households. An empirical study, based on 574 personal interviews, was conducted among unemployed Arab women in Israel. This paper identified four major domains that affect the level of employment participation: the socio-cultural domain, the ethno-political domain, the personal domain, and the spatial domain. Eventually, the paper proposes interference policies based on these domains in order to reduce poverty among Arab minority women in Israel

Towards a Sustainability Education Framework: Challenges, Concepts and Strategies—The Contribution from Urban Planning Perspectives

Education for sustainability is becoming a critical component in achieving a sustainable life and protecting our planet and human habitats. However, a review of the sustainability literature reveals a great deal of confusion and misinterpretation regarding the concepts, themes, and goals of education for sustainability. Education for sustainability, including the themes that should be derived and taught, lacks an interdisciplinary conceptual framework. In addition, the literature of education for sustainability mostly lacks the aspects of urban and community planning and the significant contribution of the planning profession. This paper proposes a new conceptual framework, Sustainability Education Framework, which is composed of concepts that derived from different disciplines. At the heart of the conceptual framework rests the normative category and its concepts. The epistemological foundation of the conceptual framework of education for sustainability is based on the unresolved paradox between ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’

Building a Conceptual Framework: Philosophy, Definitions, and Procedure

In this paper the author proposes a new qualitative method for building conceptual frameworks for phenomena that are linked to multidisciplinary bodies of knowledge. First, he redefines the key terms of concept, conceptual framework , and conceptual framework analysis . Concept has some components that define it. A conceptual framework is defined as a network or a “plane” of linked concepts. Conceptual framework analysis offers a procedure of theorization for building conceptual frameworks based on grounded theory method. The advantages of conceptual framework analysis are its flexibility , its capacity for modification , and its emphasis on understanding instead of prediction

An Assessment Framework for Cities Coping with Climate Change: The Case of New York City and its PlaNYC 2030

Climate change and its resulting uncertainties challenge the concepts, procedures, and scope of conventional approaches to planning, creating a need to rethink and revise current planning methods. This paper proposes a new conceptual framework for assessing city plans based on the idea of sustainability and planning countering climate change. It applies this framework to assess the recent master plan for the city of New York City: PlaNYC 2030. The framework consists of eight concepts that were identified through conceptual analyses of the planning and interdisciplinary literature on sustainability and climate change. Using the proposed conceptual framework to evaluate PlaNYC 2030 reveals some of the merits of the Plan. PlaNYC promotes greater compactness and density, enhanced mixed land use, sustainable transportation, greening, and renewal and utilization of underused land. With regard to the concept of uncertainty, it addresses future uncertainties related to climate change with institutional measures only. From the perspective of ecological economics, the Plan creates a number of mechanisms to promote its climate change goals and to create a cleaner environment for economic investment. It offers an ambitious vision of reducing emissions by 30% and creating a “greener, greater New York,” and links this vision with the international agenda for climate change. On the other hand, the assessment reveals that PlaNYC did not make a radical shift toward planning for climate change and adaptation. It inadequately addresses social planning issues that are crucial to New York City. NYC is “socially differentiated” in terms of the capacity of communities to meet climate change uncertainties, and the Plan fails to address the issues facing vulnerable communities due to climate change. The Plan calls for an integrative approach to climate change on the institutional level, but it fails to effectively integrate civil society, communities, and grassroots organizations into the process. The lack of a systematic procedure for public participation throughout the city’s neighborhoods and among different social groupings and other stakeholders is a critical shortcoming, particularly during the current age of climate change uncertainty. Practically, the proposed conceptual framework of evaluate appears to be an effective and constructive means of illuminating the Plan’s strengths and weaknesses, and appears to be an easy-to-grasp evaluation method, and should be easily understood and applied by scholars, practitioners and policy makers

A knowledge map for describing variegated and conflict domains of sustainable development

This paper aims to draw a knowledge map of the fragmented and multidisciplinary literature of sustainable development. Through the process of metaphor making, the study identifies seven metaphors that together construct this map. Each metaphor represents a specific domain in this map. The metaphor of ethical paradox signifies the ethical domain; the material domain is represented through the metaphor of natural capital, the social domain through the metaphor of fairness, the spatial domain through the eco-form metaphor, the political domain through the global discourse metaphor, the management domain through the integrative management metaphor, and the visionary domain through the utopian metaphor. The strength of this approach lies with its comprehensive representation of the complex sustainable development world. Its main weakness relies on the accurate representation of this map.

Social Sustainability: A New Conceptual Framework

There is a lack of theoretical and empirical studies regarding social sustainability. The literature reveals that the “social” was integrated late into debates on sustainable development. This paper aims to fill this gap and proposes a new conceptual framework of social sustainability. We suggest that risk is a constitutive concept of sustainability and that the contemporary conditions of risk resulting primarily from climate change and its ensuing uncertainties pose serious social, spatial, structural, and physical threats to contemporary human societies and their living spaces. Within the framework of sustainability, we propose that social sustainability strives to confront risk while addressing social concerns. Although we agree that without socially oriented practices, efforts to achieve sustainability will be undermined, as too many gaps exist in practice and theory. Thus, we propose a comprehensive Conceptual Framework of Social Sustainability, which is composed of four interrelated concepts of socially oriented practices, where each concept has a distinctive function in the framework and incorporates major social aspects. The concept of Equity encompasses three dimensions: recognition, which “revalues unjustly devalued identities”, redistribution, which suggests that the remedy for injustice is some form of economic restructuring, and parity of participation, which promotes substantive public involvement in the production of space. These efforts may, in turn, reduce alienation and enhance civility and a sense of community and place attachment. The concept of Safety is the ontological foundation of sustainability in general and social sustainability in particular. The concept refers to the right to not only be safe but adopt all measures of adaptation and security to prevent future casualties and physical harm. The concept of Eco-prosumption refers to modes of producing and gaining values in socially and environmentally responsible ways. The concept of Urban Forms represents the physical dimensions of socially desired urban and community physical forms. Eventually, a desired physical form should promote a sense of community, safety, health, and place attachment, among other environmental objectives