The growing Environment and Sustainability list is at the heart of our remit to publish quality scholarship that addresses global social challenges.
This list covers a broad spectrum of issues and focuses on the social justice dimensions of environmental sustainability, including in: climate change, environmental politics, developing sustainable economies, transport and sustainability and environmentalist thought and ideology.
The new open access Global Social Challenges Journal incorporates these themes to facilitate critical thinking across disciplines and fields.
Environment and Sustainability
This article explores the transformative potential of improvisational techniques in reshaping interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) learning environments offering art-based exercises and tools for this work. By integrating active research with improvisational methods from theatre and music, we propose a pedagogical shift that transcends traditional academic roles and disciplinary boundaries, fostering a culture of co-creation, mutual learning and innovation. This approach aims to tackle the inherent challenges of ITD research and thus enhance ITD research groups’ ability to address complex societal ‘Grand Challenges’. We argue that improvisation within both ITD research and educational communities serves as a crucial catalyst for nurturing trust, embracing failure as a growth opportunity, and redefining success. Embodied practices based on improvisation help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications, enabling academics to navigate the complexities of collaboration and engage in shared learning experiences. This article introduces techniques from improvisational theatre aimed at fostering trust and collaboration in transdisciplinary research and educational settings. Drawing on over 25 years of combined research experience, we show how these tools enhance mutual understanding and collective problem-solving among students and research teams. Ultimately, we advocate integrating conventional knowledge delivery models with a framework characterised by regenerative practices, care and explorative processes. This integrated approach would offer new opportunities for addressing the intertwined wicked problems our world faces today, promoting a more inclusive, participatory and creatively fulfilling academic community.
Introduction:
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is an important global health issue linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Adolescents in refugee settings face specific SRH needs and risks, and limited access to needed services. This research, therefore, aimed to develop an understanding of SRH needs of, and risks to, adolescent refugees, to inform adolescent sexual and reproductive health policies and programmes.
Methodology:
The study employed qualitative approaches. Seventeen in-depth interviews were conducted with adolescent refugees and nine key informant interviews with stakeholders, including representatives from NGOs, health facility workers and refugee leaders. We performed content and thematic analysis drawing on the ecological systems theory framework.
Findings:
Reproductive health issues presented by adolescent refugees included menstruation supplies, reproductive health education and contraception. Participants reported several reproductive health risk factors that include risky sexual relationships, child abuse in homes, early marriage, teenage pregnancies and forced marriage, and sexual and gender-based violence.
Conclusion:
The findings highlight significant gaps in adolescent refugees’ knowledge and access to SRH services. These gaps are shaped by cultural norms, limited service availability, and lack of targeted SRH education for young people in refugee settings.
Recommendation:
Targeted training is vital to guaranteeing efficient delivery of SRH services; with humanitarian organisations ensuring their personnel is appropriately trained to support adolescent refugees and their SRH needs. Culturally appropriate services are required to ensure greater buy-in and build trusting relationships with the population.
Diverse approaches to climate information services are emerging as impacts escalate in an urbanising globe. However, the climate information services involving cities are mainly collaborations with actors from science, multilateral, national and municipal authorities. There are limited efforts to build on knowledge from residents in local communities about risk and response options, to steer collaborations on climate information services. This article examines visual ethnography as an enabler of climate information services that connect societal and scientific objectives at local scales in cities. Based on case study findings from Kampala city in Uganda, local-level framings of climate risks and responses were grouped into exploratory and intersectional framings. The exploratory framings are risks and response options directly linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11 and 13 on cities and climate change respectively, while depicting some degree of contradiction. Intersectional framings are risks and response options demonstrating the interrelatedness of climate issues across different SDGs. Local communities do take on scientific information on impacts and adaptation barriers but also connect risks and responses to experiences of tested options, which sometimes only emerge during the process of visual ethnography and are not initially identified. Visual ethnography can be an important source of information not only on stressors experienced and priority actions by local communities, but can also be a climate solutions imagery, that contains positive adaptation stories with opportunities for enriching and complementing scientific inquiry on responses.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
Territorial inequalities in access to care and the lack of health practitioners represent one of the important challenges health systems are facing worldwide. Territorial management seems to be the discipline to address these concerns in a holistic and interdisciplinary way, specifically via the concept of lived territory. Territorial management and health geography share the same vision on the definition of the lived territory, namely a territory which is a social construction, dynamic and shaped by its users. However, territorial management lacks tools to define the lived territory, whereas the ‘relative flows’ method in health geography identifies users’ real healthcare consumption on the territory, offering an operational tool for stakeholders, including healthcare professionals and local decision makers. Focusing on the intersection of management and health geography, this study is looking to address the question: to what extent would the inter- and transdisciplinary approach enable an effective response to the difficulties of access to care in the territory?
This research is based on a case study of the French region Centre-Val de Loire. The findings of the study emphasise an added value of the inter- and transdisciplinary approach in operationalisation of territorial management discipline. The lived territory concept appears a most appropriate grid in the evaluation of inequalities in access to care and thus an effective tool to mobilise the involvement of healthcare stakeholders in a new territorial organisation centred on user needs in care.
When analysing recurrent global social problems, new theories and concepts often emerge. This is the outcome of not only needing a vocabulary to identify and document problems as they unfold, but to label the specific problem as one in need of solving. Once a term is developed and popularised it allows scholars, lawyers and human rights advocates to demand answers or redress from those responsible for generating such societal ills. Examples of this include the development of scholarly and legal concepts like genocide, ecocide and scholasticide. This article proposes we establish a new concept: medelacide. Medelacide describes the intentional and systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure. After outlining a clear sociological and legal rationale for why developing this concept is necessary, I show how other concepts that address widespread human rights issues should inform our development of medelacide as an identifiable act. After providing a preliminary way to conceptualise medelacide, I offer a demonstrative case study. The case study illustrates how the act of medelacide may be identified during the first year of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, Palestine. It documents how the Israeli military’s mode of assault demonstrated a pattern of intentional and systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, from October 2023 to October 2024. I conclude by offering comments on why medelacide is worth considering as a stand-alone concept, as well as one that can inform studies and analyses of structural and long-term social problems.
Actors working on global climate and sustainability challenges are faced with two competing imperatives: first, there is an ever-expanding body of knowledge, networks and initiatives generating new insights that should be shared. Second, we see a growing recognition that fly-in, fly-out conferencing practices are an insufficient and unsustainable model for learning, boundary crossing and collaboration towards sustainability transformations. Against this backdrop, we argue that knowledge exchange for societal transformations needs to consider three interrelated dimensions: (1) equity and inclusion – access to and representation in both process and content for all, (2) low carbon – limits the ecological burden produced by the exchange, and (3) impact – outcomes at individual and collective levels that enhance our ability to act. How we navigate the tensions that may emerge from these dimensions is a matter of pressing importance. This research article examines the potential of multi-sited dialogues as an approach to co-producing transdisciplinary solutions by using the three dimensions as the analytical framework. We report on a series of dialogue-focused conference sessions convened at three international conferences in 2023. Our findings describe the contributions that the multi-sited dialogue process brought to knowledge co-production across space and time, and the contribution of facilitation practices to the outcomes of these dialogues. We also introduce and discuss the set of principles for transforming sustainable conferencing practices that were co-produced over the three dialogues.
This article explores the pedagogical affect of water in a place of water stress and illustrates its entanglement with dynamics of power and control. The current climate crisis is rendering already drought-prone regions ever drier, and it is often the already socially and economically disadvantaged who experience the most immediate impacts. In this article, we describe the experiences of residents in one township in South Africa’s Cape Flats to explore how water literacies have developed and been reinforced by a prolonged period of water scarcity. By analysing assemblages of images and accompanying texts produced through a PhotoVoice process undertaken by co-researchers in this settlement, we show how water’s presence as an always imminent absence has profound pedagogical impact. We also explore how water manages to escape and flow outside of attempts to control and constrain it. Finally, we speculate on the implications for place-based water literacies and the pedagogies at work in other places of water stress.
Transdisciplinarity is all the rage!
This spirited statement, or announcement even, rings true of the contemporary intellectual landscape. The amalgamated term/concept proposes a means to breakdown traditional boundaries, encourage collaboration outside of staid academic spaces and in doing so become a key driver for innovation. Many have bought into this promise. However, amidst the fervour for the promise of fluidity of knowledge and interdisciplinary exchange lies a productive tension between the principles of transness and the inherent fixity of traditional disciplinary structures. Etymologically, they sit on opposites ends of a spectrum indicating flux and fixity. What kind of union does this term portend? What is liminal, or overlooked in the composition these opposing forces?
Our provocation aims to take on a playful troubling in what observe as a limitation of the scope of transdisciplinary work. Drawing on critical perspectives from trans and queer studies, discipline-making and un-disciplining and the energies that heralded the birth of transdisciplinarity, our provocation plays with the tacit ways in which power structures, historical legacies, and implicit biases continue to operate spaces that claim transdisciplinarity. We aim to argue for a more thorough understanding of the interplay between fixity and fluidity, highlighting how acknowledging these dynamics can lead to an expanded palette of work that can leap beyond the current practices of engaged scholarship towards the speculative and outrageous. Through a series of conversations with texts, theorists and activists, our contribution will work to make productive mischief from the periphery.
