Rethinking the marketing of World Heritage Sites: Giving the past a sustainable future

Despite significant global prestige and a strong brand presence, UNESCO World Heritage Sites remain underfunded with many unable to self-sustain. Increasing government budget constraints have further restricted funds and UNESCO's “World Heritage Fund”—UNESCO's sole source of financial assistance available to sites—has fallen to approximately $3M USD per annum. Few sites are able to fully offset these budget constraints through tourist revenue alone, and those able to do so often require additional repairs due to damage from visitors exceeding the site's capacity. Although this situation is widely acknowledged within the heritage literature, few papers have proposed long-term strategic solutions beyond marketing and management plans for individual sites. The authors address this pressing issue by questioning whether World Heritage Sites in general are currently being marketed in an optimized manner and proposing a new framework for creating stronger and more appropriate relationships between visitors and sites using Berthon et al.'s the Aesthetics and Ontology model. The authors argue that clarifying and optimizing the marketing of World Heritage through this lens with its focus on the consumption experience of visitors and other stakeholders will yield positive results for both the management of the sites and for their impact on surrounding communities. Furthermore, the authors recommend that policies surrounding the management of these valuable resources and sources of tourist revenue be modified to reflect these findings.     

Social Alienation and Estrangement in Four Stories by Palestinian Writer cAlā Ḥlayḥal

This article examines the novella al-Sīrk (2001) and three short stories (?Zawjī Sā'iq Bā?', 2008, ‘Ta^cāyush’, 2008 and ‘al-Sajjāda’, 2003) by contemporary Palestinian writer ^cAlā ?lay?al (Ala Hlehel). These texts manifest a preoccupation with the breakdown of human relationships and related themes of failed communication and miscommunication between people. These themes articulate the alienation, isolation and estrangement of individuals from one another, from community and society. The purpose of the present study is an analysis of the portrayal of social decay, alienation and estrangement in these texts, revealing structural expressions of degeneration, as well as a deterioration of interpersonal relations articulated by stymied communication, miscommunication and neglect, often expressed textually through irony and hypocrisy. These particular works were chosen because of their preoccupation with the themes at hand, and also because these are masterfully written stories in their own right deserving critical analysis. While ?lay?al's stories resound with the theme of alienation which has marked Palestinian literature from its formative stages onwards, they reject a staunchly committed stance and do not issue moral imperatives or political slogans. The nuances of these texts are examined in light of other works of Palestinian literature, and especially considering the intertextual references therein.     

Did California Paid Family Leave Impact Infant Health?

The effects of paid parental leave policies on infant health have yet to be established. In this paper we investigate these effects by exploiting the introduction of California Paid Family Leave (PFL), the first program in the U.S. that specifically provides working parents with paid time off for bonding with a newborn. We measure health using the full census of infant hospitalizations in California and a set of control states, and implement a differences‐in‐differences approach. Our results suggest a decline in infant admissions, which is concentrated among those causes that are potentially affected by closer childcare (and to a lesser extent breastfeeding). Other admissions that are unlikely to be affected by parental leave do not exhibit the same pattern.     

Recent Iowa trends in sudden unexpected infant deaths: the importance of public health collaboration with medical examiners' offices

During the winter in 2008, Iowa experienced an increase in sudden unexplained infant deaths (SUIDs). SUIDs and infectious causes of infant deaths generally average 3 monthly (SD = 1.0) in Iowa. However, in January 2008, 9 infant deaths were reported to the Iowa Department of Public Health and the Iowa Office of the State Medical Examiner. Between January and March of 2008, joint investigation of 22 SUIDs was conducted. The investigations required the involvement of multiple medical examiners from various jurisdictions, testing for pathogens at the University Hygienic Laboratory, epidemiologic support from the Iowa Department of Public Health, and consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The preliminary hypotheses for the increase in the infant mortality included viral respiratory disease and/or possible novel respiratory viral infections being the cause. Collaboration between public health and the medical examiner offices resulted in timely assessment of the cases. While no single causative agent was responsible for the increase seen in the number of infant deaths, respiratory pathogens played a role in the deaths of 15 of 22 children.     

The Meta-industrial Class and Why We Need It

The paper suggests that the appropriate 'agents of history' in an era of globalisation and ecological crisis are 'meta-industrial' workers. This hitherto nameless class carries out hands-on reproductive labours at the interface of 'humanity' and 'nature' using 'holding skills', a grounded epistemology and ethic consonant with genuine democracy and local sustainability. Pointing to the unexamined neo-liberal assumptions of many environmental philosophers, the author suggests that only an 'embodied materialist' epistemology and ethic can do justice to class, race, gender, and species diversity.     

The Effects of Performance Information on Public Resource Allocations: A Study of Chile's Performance-Based Budgeting System

ABSTRACT

This article reports the findings of a mixed-methods study of the effects of performance-related considerations on the allocation of public resources in Chile. The study considered aspects and stages of the budgetary process that most previous research on the relationship between performance assessments and the budget has tended to disregard. By virtue of this distinctive approach, the study identified many instances of performance considerations' influence that many other studies would have failed to capture. Because of its strictly exploratory character, the study could not establish how typical the different types of effects identified are. But it suggests that the effects most neglected in the literature may account for a great portion, if not for most, of the performance assessments' impact on the quality of public spending.