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Motivation: The public needs to be better informed on the reasons for providing aid, especially that which supports the Sustainable Development Goals. How aid is framed by donors directly affects levels of public support. Purpose: The article investigates support for aid among English‐speaking Canadians, and how this varies by the framing of aid spending, socioeconomic markers, personal values and political engagement. Approach and methods: Statistical analysis is undertaken of data from a representative survey of English‐speaking Canadians on their knowledge and attitudes with respect to aid to developing countries. A particular focus of the analysis is the influence of the framing of aid spending on public support for aid spending, while controlling for the influence of socioeconomic factors. Findings: Support for increased spending rises when spending is framed relative to the size of the economy, whether in dollar or percentage terms, rather than when framed relative to government taxation or spending. Providing information on the current level of aid spending also raises support for increased aid spending. Overall, when informed about the level of aid spending, most respondents support maintaining or increasing aid. Views on aid vary little by age, education and other socioeconomic markers. People's values, however, did affect support for aid. Respondents who believe in "Canada first" were considerably more likely to support aid cuts than others. Those who see kindness as part of Canadian identity tend to favour aid, while those who see economic prosperity as part of national identity tend to want aid cuts. While voting intention does not affect views on aid, respondents who have been either politically active or involved in collective action on media/social media are a little more likely to favour increased aid. Policy implications: The findings confirm the importance of the framing of aid spending for designing and implementing programmes to inform, engage and elicit support from the public. Given how values influence public support for aid, engagement needs to be tailored to different target audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic waste (e-waste) policies have traditionally been based on extended producer responsibility (EPR) principles. In practice, EPR-based e-waste policies primarily involve the creation of regulated collection and recycling channels, with success tied to achieving high collection quotas. However, the majority of EPR programs, particularly those in the Global South, have achieved little success due to competition with the informal sector. Despite this, strikingly little is known of the scope and dynamics of informal ewaste flows and actors during the formulation of e-waste management policies. This study develops and pilots a replicable three-stage model for solid waste researchers, practitioners and policymakers to rapidly assess these informal e-waste systems. This model is demonstrated in Cuenca, Ecuador, and determined the destination of 50-80% of Cuenca's e-waste over a period of three days. The methods used and findings that emerge from this study offer a strategy to rapidly quantify and understand the dynamics of informal ewaste systems to inform EPR-based policies in ways that place informal recyclers at the core of e-waste management. This not only provides creative opportunities for formal systems to achieve e-waste collection quotas through partnerships with the informal sector, but offers a pathway to preserve the livelihoods of marginalized populations reliant on e-waste recycling and decrease environmental harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is twofold. The first is to suggest that techniques for mapping public disagreements over claims to knowledge, or controversies, can act as assistive devices for researchers in geography to move from research topics to research questions. A second purpose is to offer a recipe or "how-to" guide of specific approaches and free scholarly software that researchers without specialized coding skills can use to achieve their own controversy mapping goals. We use a case of creating a controversy map covering the issue of transboundary movements of electronic waste (e-waste) to illustrate how these approaches and software can be associated together so that other researchers may put them to use for their own controversy mapping purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing academic attention and the pressing development and environmental importance of informal e‐waste economies in the global South, there remains a dearth of reliable quantitative data to guide theory and appropriate policy responses. We illustrate this problem through a review of the thin and patchy data presented in existing studies that attempt to quantify the flows and economic impact of informal e‐waste hubs. We then describe a way forward through our analysis of a less well known e‐waste hub in south‐west Hebron, Palestine, which provides a methodological model for robust and systematic quantification. We achieved this by leveraging the relatively closed regional‐geographic nature of this hub, triangulating several approaches used in studies of the informal economy (anecdotal/ethnographic, micro‐ and macro‐level data), and contrasting data before and after a key shift in the sector. Our study shows how this hub, though barely registering in official economic and trade data, houses a large, vital and differentiated cluster of businesses, which have processed almost half of Israel's e‐waste for over a decade, and constitute an important export sector and local economic contributor. In 2015, even operating at levels 40% below those sustained over the prior decade, the hub imported and processed 16–25,000 tonnes of e‐waste, creating 381 enterprises, 1,098 jobs and US$28.5 million gross value added to the Palestinian economy. This study demonstrates methodological approaches for studying informal e‐waste flows and economies and the substantive insights these produce, and argues for the relevance of both to analogous hubs across the global South. Despite increasing academic attention and the pressing development and environmental importance of informal e‐waste hubs in the global South, there remains a dearth of careful quantitative data to guide theory and appropriate policy responses. We illustrate this problem through a review of the thin and patchy data presented in existing studies, and describe a way forward through a systematic analysis of a less known e‐waste hub in south‐west Hebron, Palestine. Our study triangulated detailed data from a stratified sample drawn from a comprehensive sampling frame of all businesses in the hub, with data collected at key input and output nodes, thereby producing a robust quantification of volumes, sources, and economic contribution of the industry, with important policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper in the International Journal of Cancer analyzed Palestinian cancer registry data in the West Bank from 1998 to 2007, showing a cluster of elevated cancer incidence in rural villages in south‐west Hebron, with a 4.10 risk ratio for childhood lymphoma (p = 0.0023). The paper called for investigation of the environmental or genetic etiologies of this cluster in an otherwise unremarkable rural area.1 Our research in these same villages shows them to be the center of an extensive informal electronic and electrical waste (e‐waste) dismantling industry in Palestine, operating for almost two decades. This entails extensive open‐burning of e‐waste components to extract valuable metals or dispose of nonvaluable waste, releasing high concentrations of hazardous contaminants, which may be an important factor in the elevated cancer incidence. We offer a first step in assessing this link. We applied a novel multitemporal object‐based method to map the prevalence and intensity of e‐waste burn sites in the entire Hebron Governorate (1,060 km2) between 1999 and 2007. A weighted standard deviation ellipse of cumulative burn activity covers a smaller area (247 km2) very closely matching the childhood lymphoma cluster: it contains 85% of the core cluster area (RR of 4.1), and falls almost entirely (95%) within the broader area of elevated risk (RR of 2.8). Extensive international evidence linking informal e‐waste processing to elevated cancer incidence and this strong spatial association of e‐waste burning activity with a distinct unexplained cancer cluster in the Palestinian context signals the urgent need for investigation and intervention. What's new? Researchers have combined field study and remote sensing analysis to identify the likely cause of an unexplained childhood cancer cluster in a rural region of the West Bank. They developed a multitemporal mapping strategy of e‐waste burn sites, demonstrating a strong spatial association between a concentrated area of e‐waste burn sites and the cancer cluster. In light of this association, they recommend stopping, assessing, and remediating environmentally harmful e‐waste burning practices and hope for future success of their method in mapping e‐waste burning activities worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes an unconventional participatory development approach carried out in an informal e‐waste hub in South‐West Hebron, an area that has collected and processed the bulk of Israeli e‐waste for over a decade. Our approach contributes to the critique and recovery of community representation in participatory development and the search for ways to facilitate representative community engagement. Specifically, we describe our use of a novel Delphi‐like method that allowed us to facilitate a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community. We show how the results yielded by this approach diverged from those that were likely to emerge from more facile forms of participation in ways that are important for other similar e‐waste hubs internationally, which face a destructive status quo on the one hand, or the economically ruinous international policies that ban e‐waste trade from "developed" to "developing" countries on the other. Despite real tensions and cleavages within the affected communities, the process described facilitated a shift from deadlocked environmental versus livelihood positions towards building capacity and regulating existing informal e‐waste trades to preserve livelihoods dependent on these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]