Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for developing climate adaptation strategies to reduce climate risk for cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has an important role in human well-being. This paper posits that cultural heritage requires an approach that recognises the uniqueness of cultural heritage. The paper draws from the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Making My City Resilient campaign and the Heart of the City Partnership in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and proposes a Cultural Heritage Adaptation Forum. The role of the forum is to develop adaptation strategies in a sustainable development context. This is an original attempt to link cultural heritage to climate risk. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from two initiatives and uses good practice established from the disaster management and climate communities and proposes a Cultural Heritage Adaptation Forum that can be used to formulate adaptation interventions for cultural heritage. The approach builds on active participation in a global overview of cultural heritage and climate risk led by UNISDR together with personal experience of implementing such strategies in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Findings – The paper finds that a model can be developed that incorporates good practice from the climate and disaster management communities. Practical implications – The paper presents a model that can be used by those stakeholders that have an interest in protecting cultural heritage form climate driven hazards. Social implications – Cultural heritage has a value for all and protecting it from climate driven hazards can impact human well-being Originality/value – The paper brings together concepts from different academic and practitioner communities. The concept outlined in the paper will be of interest to all those interested in protecting cultural heritage for climate driven hazards.
This paper examines how cultural, historical and contemporary perspectives of mental health continue to inform ways of understanding and responding to mental distress even under the biomedical gaze of the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH). Based on experiences in Malawi, the authors explore three prominent interventions (practical support, counselling and support groups) employed by village health workers within a mental health task-shifting initiative and reveal how the ancient philosophy of Umunthu with its values of interconnectedness, inclusion and inter-relationships informs and shapes the direction of these interventions. Practical support is marshalled through traditional village structures, counselling provides advice and an encouragement to hope, and support groups provide a place for emotional exchange and a forum for the enactment of values, reflection and reinforcement of Umunthu. What are pronounced as biomedical psychosocial interventions are in fact the delivery of culturally embedded therapeutic approaches. Historical and socio-political evidence is offered to explain the dominance of biomedical perspectives and the HSAs’ responses and a call is made for a transformation of MGMH to embrace rich philosophies such as Umunthu and enact respectful, inclusive and democratic values to enlist collaborations between equals to develop relevant and effective knowledge and local responses to mental distress.
A healthy global humanitarian system depends on effective partnerships. Donors, implementing actors, local organizations, and individual experts are all presented with the opportunity to partner with local actors in a beneficial manner, with the goal of best serving disaster- and/or conflict affected populations. This paper argues that lost in the current process is the mutual respect, compassion, and humility needed to establish such meaningful partnerships between the mobilizing team, or outsiders, and the local organizations and affected population, or insiders. Even with the recent emphasis on promoting the localization of aid delivery, the system has missed the mark by using semantics such as “developing local capacity,” which subtly labels the insiders as not equal to, and therefore lesser than, the outsiders. Such a relationship fails to allow those whose lives have been directly affected by disaster and conflict to have an active role in re-shaping the world around them. By relating the impact of a personal experience in Western Darfur, Sudan, and examining the experience within the partnership system approach, the author shows that outsiders who do not build adequate partnerships fail to respect the affected population, and thus fail to learn from them. What needs to be understood about such partnerships is that the affected population, used interchangeably with insiders throughout this discussion, continue to live their lives both through and beyond the crisis, while the international humanitarian actors, outsiders, come and go as is convenient for themselves and/or their organizations. While the insiders inherently live as the experts of their own lives, the outsiders continuously fail to apply the humility and mutual respect needed to partner with these experts.
Currently in the caring professions, the human condition of facing uncertainty and danger is often overlooked in the quest for measurable outcomes that prove efficiency, taking agency out of the hands of the individuals being cared for. Traits that make an ‘ideal’ practitioner include compassion, advocacy skills, and the ability to engage with people in vulnerable situations, and to establish trusting, respectful relationships. Within a system of models, quotas, and specialties, these traits are easily hindered within health care and humanitarianism. The critical examination in this article in no way rejects the valuable elements in the fields of humanitarianism and health care. Rather, it discusses how care can be re-introduced. Uncertainty and danger are part of the human experience, and caring interventions need to take that into account. This article highlights the benefits of a collaborative relationship between the person in crisis and the practitioner, instead of a paternalistic relationship in which the practitioner is viewed as the ‘expert.’ With a caring perspective, the individual who is experiencing the crisis will retain ownership of and responsibility for their life, and not rely solely on external sources of wellbeing and comfort.
Background: The objective of this scoping review is to identify and map the published evidence on death, dying and end of life experiences among refugees worldwide. This scoping review will also inform areas for potential future research in the field. Methods: We included papers that satisfied the following inclusion criteria: 1) Population of interest: Refugees worldwide and populations/individuals who were internally or externally displaced due to wars, conflicts, non-natural disasters, or emergencies 2) Setting of interest: The phase of end of life, dying and death that takes place following the refuge or displacement reported after the year 1980 3) Study design: Any study design, including but not limited to: news, editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, technical reports, primary studies, narrative reviews, systematic reviews, and policy briefs. We excluded papers that were not published in the English language; papers representing statistics of mortalities and papers focusing on the causes of death among refugees. We also excluded books and book reviews. We searched the following electronic databases:
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