Interdisciplinary problem-solving: Next steps in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 7.6-million-hectare region in the Central Rocky Mountains of the United States, is used to illustrate both the challenges and means to improve problem solving in the natural resources arena. The challenges in this world-famous region are contextual (rapid change, growth, pluralism, complexity, state/federal conflicts, and lack of a common perspective), institutional (multiple organizations with overlapping authority and control and disparate mandates, uneven leadership, lack of creativity in problem solving, and resistance to change), and human (diverse perspectives and values and epistemological limitations). To overcome these challenges, an interdisciplinary method that integrates knowledge to improve policy making is briefly described. It provides a framework with a comprehensive set of categories to use in investigating and analyzing problems and inventing alternatives for substantive, process, and structural improvements. Five programs or interventions, all of which are based on this method, are suggested to address the challenges facing Greater Yellowstone: (1) workshops for capacity building, (2) leadership, staff development, and student internships, (3) case analyses and appraisals for policy learning, (4) problem-solving exercises and decision seminars, and (5) prototyping exercises to improve interdisciplinary and interagency coordination. These are described, examples given, and benefits outlined.     

(Re)entry from the Bottom Up: Case Study of a Critical Approach to Assisting Women Coming Home from Prison

Despite decades of critical reframings, policy and practice on prisoner (re)entry often remains situated within a framework of individual responsibility that fails to acknowledge the structural drivers of criminalization. Attending to individual symptoms rather than root social, political and economic causes, such approaches may ultimately reinforce the inequalities and injustices that fuel imprisonment. This article presents a case study of an alternative approach. It examines A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization in South Los Angeles, California, that offers housing and support to women coming home from prison through a critical and holistic framework—one that attends simultaneously to the physical, mental and social contexts that shape lived experiences before, during and after prison. Drawing from 7 years of observation and participation, supplemented by ten in-depth interviews, I argue that a critical, holistic approach can have a significant positive impact for people returning home from prison.     

Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy

Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins – for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health – not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is ‘chopped out’ of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human–nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.     

A NATIONWIDE SURVEY OF MANDATORY PARENT EDUCATION*

In an effort to take positive steps toward coping with problems for families and children created by high levels of separation and divorce, ever increasing civil caseloads and the exposure of children to interparental conflict, court‐affiliated educational programs have emerged in the United States for parents separating from their spouse or partner or going through a divorce. This article will provide an overview of the creation of such programs and their development, which includes a discussion regarding the numerous states currently mandating parents to attend. It will summarize some of the research which has been conducted as to the efficacy of the programs and will provide the results of our nationwide research for each state's parent education status. There is a discussion of domestic violence issues and sensitivities in the context of parent education programs and possible future directions for mandatory parent education.     

Distributive Justice Norms and Family Work: What Is Perceived as Ideal,What Is Applied,and What Predicts Perceived Fairness?

Members of married couples rated how ideal communal, exchange, and equality rules were for their marriages. They also reported on whether they and their spouses followed each norm in general in their marriages and in the domains of housework and child care. Both men and women considered a communal norm to be more ideal than the other norms and reported that they and their spouse followed a communal norm to a greater extent than an exchange or equality rule, both in general and in the domains of housework and child care. In addition, links between reports of actual division of labor in each domain, as well as reports of norm use, and perceived fairness of the division of family work were examined. Greater inequalities in the division of labor were linked to decreased perceptions of fairness. Controlling for reports of division of labor, women's reports of the self and of the spouse following a communal norm were linked with increased perceptions of fairness as were women's reports of the spouse following an equality rule. In contrast, and again after controlling for reports of division of labor, women's reports of the self following an exchange rule and men's reports of the self and of the spouse following an exchange rule were associated with greater perceived unfairness of the division of family work.