‘Ethical’, but Gender-Biased?

The migration of healthcare professionals from developing to developed countries, often aided by recruitment agencies, is a phenomenon of great international concern, as reflected in the construction of numerous ethical recruitment codes, which aim to govern the process. In an attempt to provide an overview of the situation, dealing specifically with the migration of nurses, as well as a critical and gender sensitive analysis of the codes, this paper follows three broad steps: first, it reviews the literature dedicated to the migration of nurses from developing to developed countries, adding a gendered account to more conventional push-pull explanations; second, it delineates the positive and negative effects that nurse migration has at the stakeholders levels of the individual, institutional, national and international level, paying particular attention to the role of gender; and third, it reviews and compares numerous codes for the ethical recruitment of nurses, highlighting the gendered rationale and consequences they may have. In showing that nurse migration is a gendered phenomenon, the paper questions whether the codes, written in gender neutral language, will come to bear unintended consequences that will effectively work to uphold gender stereotypes and inequalities.

An Inquiry of Changes in Environmental Governance by Community-driven Process

Urban environmental depletion has been a critical problem among industrialized-transformed societies, especially at the local level where administrative authorities’ capacity lags behind changes. Derived from governance concept, the idea of civil society inclusion is highlighted. Focusing on an agglomerated case study, Bang Plee Community in Thailand, this research investigates on a non-state sector, 201-Community organization, as an agent for changes to improve urban environments on solid waste collection. Two roles are contested: as an agent for neighborhood internal change and as an intermediary toward governance changes in state-civil society interaction. By employing longitudinal analysis via a project intervention as research experiment, the outcomes of both roles are detected portrayed in three spheres: state, state-civil society interaction, and civil society sphere. It discovers in the research regarding agglomerated context that as an internal changes for environmental betterment, 201-Community organization operation brings on waste reduction at the minimal level. Community-based organization as an agent for changes – despite capacity input it still limited in efficiency and effectiveness – can mobilize fruitfully only at the individual and network level of civil society sectors, while fails managing at the organizational level. The positive outcomes result by economic waste incentive associated with a limited-bonded group rather than the rise of awareness at large. As an intermediary agent for shared governance, the community-based organization cannot bring on mutual dialogue with state as much as cannot change the state’s operation arena of solid waste management. The findings confine the shared governance concept that it does not applicable in agglomerated locality as an effective outcome, both in terms of being instrumental toward civil society inclusion and being provocative of internal change. Shared environmental governance as summarized in this research can last merely a community development action. It distances significantly from civil society inclusion and empowerment. However, the research proposes that community-based environmental management and shared governance toward civil society inclusion in urban environmental improvement are still an expectable option and reachable if their factors and conditions of key success and failure are intersected with a particular context. Further studies demand more precise on scale, scope, and theses factors of environmental management operation operated by civil society sectors.

The role of organic farming for food security: local nexus with a global view

A convergence of factors has made food security one of the most important global issues. It has been the core concept of the Milan Expo 2015, whose title, Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life, embodied the challenge to provide the world’s growing population with a sustainable, secure supply of safe, nutritious, and affordable high-quality food using less land with lower inputs. Meeting the food security agenda using current agricultural production techniques cannot be achieved without serious degradation to the environment, including soil degradation, loss of biodiversity and climate change. Organic farming is seen as a solution to the challenge of sustainable food production, as it provides more nutritious food, with less or no pesticide residues and lower use of inputs. A limit of organic farming is its restricted capability of producing food compared to conventional agriculture, thus being an inefficient approach to food production and to food security. The authors maintain, on the basis of a scientific literature review, that organic soils tend to retain the physical, chemical and biological properties over the long term, while maintaining stable levels of productivity and thereby ensuring long-term food production and safety. Furthermore, the productivity gap of organic crops may be worked out by further investment in research and in particular into diversification techniques. Moreover, strong scientific evidence indicates that organic agricultural systems deliver greater ecosystem services and social benefits.

Multi-Scale Governance of Sustainable Natural Resource Use—Challenges and Opportunities for Monitoring and Institutional Development at the National and Global Level

In a globalized economy, the use of natural resources is determined by the demand of modern production and consumption systems, and by infrastructure development. Sustainable natural resource use will require good governance and management based on sound scientific information, data and indicators. There is a rich literature on natural resource management, yet the national and global scale and macro-economic policy making has been underrepresented. We provide an overview of the scholarly literature on multi-scale governance of natural resources, focusing on the information required by relevant actors from local to global scale. Global natural resource use is largely determined by national, regional, and local policies. We observe that in recent decades, the development of public policies of natural resource use has been fostered by an “inspiration cycle” between the research, policy and statistics community, fostering social learning. Effective natural resource policies require adequate monitoring tools, in particular indicators for the use of materials, energy, land, and water as well as waste and GHG emissions of national economies. We summarize the state-of-the-art of the application of accounting methods and data sources for national material flow accounts and indicators, including territorial and product-life-cycle based approaches. We show how accounts on natural resource use can inform the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argue that information on natural resource use, and in particular footprint indicators, will be indispensable for a consistent implementation of the SDGs. We recognize that improving the knowledge base for global natural resource use will require further institutional development including at national and international levels, for which we outline options.