Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women's land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women's land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women's equal access to land. This paper draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and 'technologies of the self', this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals' marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to 'demand their rights'. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women's and men's positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic law and a desire to 'change with the times'. While the effects of 'reverse' discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, 'counter' discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women's land inheritance.

Associations between interpretation bias and depression in adolescents

Interpretation biases have been shown to play a role in adult depression and are a target in cognitive behavioural therapy. Adolescence is a key risk period for the development of depression and a period of rapid cognitive and emotional development but little research has investigated the relationship between interpretation biases and depression in adolescents. This study adapted a measure of interpretation bias, the Ambiguous Scenarios Test for Depression, for adolescents and evaluated its reliability and validity. A community sample of 206 young people aged 12 to 18 years completed a validated measure of depression symptoms (Mood and Feelings Questionnaires) and the adapted Ambiguous Scenarios Test. The Ambiguous Scenarios Test for Depression in Adolescents had good internal consistency and split half reliability. Depression symptoms were associated with participants’ ratings of the valence of ambiguous situations and with interpretation biases. Importantly, symptoms of depression and anxiety were independently associated with interpretation bias. This research suggests that interpretation biases can be measured in this age group, that negative interpretation biases exist in adolescents and that these are associated with depression symptoms.

The calculative turn in land value capture: lessons from the English planning system

For over three decades, negotiated planning obligations have been the primary form of land value capture in England. Diffusing and evolving over the last decade, a significant policy innovation has been the use of financial calculations to estimate the extent to which policies on planning obligations for actual, proposed development projects and in plan making affect the financial viability of development. This paper assesses the extent to which the use of financial appraisals has provided a robust, just and practical procedure to support land value capture. It is concluded that development viability appraisals are saturated with intrinsic uncertainty and that land value capture that is based on such calculations is, to some extent, capricious. In addition, clear incentives for developers and land owners to bias viability calculations, the economic dependence of many viability consultants on developers and land owners, a lack of transparency, contested or ambiguous guidance and the opportunities created by input uncertainty for bias are further failings. It is argued that how viability calculations are applied has been, is being and will continue to be shaped by power relations.

Two Faces of AIDS in Hong Kong: Culture and the Construction of the `AIDS Celebrity'

Since the first reported case of HIV infection in Hong Kong in 1985, only two HIV-positive individuals in the territory have voluntarily made public their seropositivity: a British dentist named Mike Sinclair, who disclosed his condition to the media in 1992 and died in 1995, and J.J. Chan, a local Chinese disc-jockey, who came forward in 1995 and died just a few months later. When they made their revelations, both became instant media personalities and were invited by the Hong Kong Government to act as spokespeople for AIDS awareness and prevention. Mike Sinclair worked as an education officer for the Hong Kong AIDS Foundation, and J.J. Chan appeared in Government television commercials about AIDS. This article explores how the public identities of these two figures were constructed in the cultural context of Hong Kong where both Eastern and Western values exist side by side and interact. It argues that the construction of `AIDS celebrities' is a kind of `identity project' negotiated among the players involved: the media, the Government, the public, and the person with AIDS (PWA) himself, each bringing to the construction their own `theories' regarding the self and communication. When the players in the construction hold shared assumptions about the nature of the self and the role of communication in enacting it, harmonious discourses arise, but when cultural models among the players differ, contradictory or ambiguous constructions result. The effect of culture on the way `AIDS celebrities' are constructed has implications for the way societies view the issue of AIDS and treat those who have it. It also helps reveal possible sites of difficulty when individuals of different cultures communicate about the issue.

New use of global warming potentials to compare cumulative and short-lived climate pollutants

Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have requested guidance on common greenhouse gas metrics in accounting for Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to emission reductions1. Metric choice can affect the relative emphasis placed on reductions of ‘cumulative climate pollutants’ such as carbon dioxide versus ‘short-lived climate pollutants’ (SLCPs), including methane and black carbon2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Here we show that the widely used 100-year global warming potential (GWP100) effectively measures the relative impact of both cumulative pollutants and SLCPs on realized warming 20–40 years after the time of emission. If the overall goal of climate policy is to limit peak warming, GWP100 therefore overstates the importance of current SLCP emissions unless stringent and immediate reductions of all climate pollutants result in temperatures nearing their peak soon after mid-century7, 8, 9, 10, which may be necessary to limit warming to “well below 2 °C” (ref. 1). The GWP100 can be used to approximately equate a one-off pulse emission of a cumulative pollutant and an indefinitely sustained change in the rate of emission of an SLCP11, 12, 13. The climate implications of traditional CO2-equivalent targets are ambiguous unless contributions from cumulative pollutants and SLCPs are specified separately.