Building from the ground up: exploring forensic mental health staff’s relationships with patients

Recovery-orientated care is becoming generally accepted as the best practice, and continued development in the ways it is practiced is necessary to ensure improvement of ongoing care. Forensic patients often experience double stigmatization (the dual stigma of mental illness and offending behaviour) and during admission to hospital may lose touch with their community supports. While working through their personal recovery, patients develop therapeutic relationships with their multidisciplinary team members. When positive, these relationships can enhance a patient’s recovery. Clinical staff members participated in 88 in-depth interviews, which were transcribed, reviewed, and analysed using thematic analysis. From analysing the data, main themes and subthemes emerged related to staff’s perceptions of therapeutic relationships. When developing relationships, staff need to overcome receptiveness issues by increasing trust through understanding their preconceptions, reducing stigma, sharing innocuous stories, and giving patients the time they need. The key pillar underpinning all traits ascribed to patients and staff is collaboration and approaching treatment protocols with a social approach is essential to enhancing recovery. Staff shared a holistic view of recovery that incorporated the benefits of positive relationships and the need to create a sense of home within the institution.     

Consequences of Forced Residential Relocation: Early Impacts of Urban Renewal Strategies on Forced Relocatees’ Housing Opportunities and Socioeconomic Outcomes

Policymakers have actively pursued urban renewal and dispersal programs to deconcentrate poverty in urban neighborhoods. Relocation strategies lead to new housing opportunities and may encourage employment opportunities for relocated residents if resourceful contacts and job information become more easily available after the move. This study provides an innovative evaluation of the early impacts of involuntary relocation programs in the Netherlands on the housing careers, earnings and employment rates of forced relocatees. It establishes a quasi-experimental design by employing unique longitudinal individual-level population registry data from Statistics Netherlands: forced relocatees are tracked and matched to a control group consisting of similar residents that were not forced to move. A difference-in-difference design shows that forced relocatees are living in less deprived neighborhoods after the move. However, we find no conclusive evidence that this upgrade in housing leads to more socioeconomic opportunities for the forced relocatees.     

Political economy,poverty, and polycentrism in the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation refers to altering infrastructure, institutions or ecosystems to respond to the impacts of climate change. Least developed countries often lack the requisite capacity to implement adaptation projects. The Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) is a scheme where industrialised countries have disbursed $934.5 million in voluntary contributions to support 213 adaptation projects across 51 least developed countries. But how effective are its efforts—and what sort of challenges have arisen as it implements projects? To provide some answers, this article documents the presence of four “political economy” attributes of adaptation projects—processes we have termed enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment—cutting across economic, political, ecological and social dimensions. Based on extensive field research, we find the four processes at work simultaneously in our case studies of five LDCF projects being implemented in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives and Vanuatu. The article concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the political economy of adaptation for analysts, program managers and climate researchers at large. In sum, the politics of adaptation must be taken into account so that projects can maximise their efficacy and avoid marginalising those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.