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Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community-based participatory research have different scholarly origins and norms but are united in centering communities' understandings on their terms. Combining the strengths of both, we provide a step-by-step explanation of community-based participant-observation, with examples from a study of water insecurity in colonias north of the U.S.–Mexico border. Using community-based participant-observation, researchers can facilitate the co-production of knowledge and community benefit by analyzing high-quality data that inform theory building and basic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Blue Ribbon Committee on Water Rates (BRC) set up by Los Angeles Mayor Bradley in the summer of 1991. Topics include rates were recommended by the BRC in June 1992, adopted with small changes by the City Council in December 1992, and took effect in February 1993; and similarities and, more importantly, differences with the situation of tariff setting for household water use in low and middle income countries.

Since the late 1970s, the term "colonias" (in English) has described low‐income, peri‐urban, and rural subdivisions north of the U.S.‐Mexico border. These communities are in arid and semi‐arid regions—now in a megadrought—and tend to have limited basic infrastructure, including community water service and sanitation. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how colonias residents experience unjust and inequitable dynamics that produce water insecurity in the Global North. In this review, we explain why U.S. colonias are an important example for theorizing water insecurity in the United States and beyond in the Global North. Tracing the history of water infrastructure development in U.S. colonias, we show how colonias are legally and socially defined by water insecurity. We draw on the published literature to discuss key factors that produce water insecurity in U.S. colonias: political exclusion, municipal underbounding, and failures in water quality monitoring. We show that water insecurity had led to negative outcomes—including poor water access, risks to physical health, and mental ill‐health—in U.S. colonias. We present four possible approaches to improving water security in U.S. colonias: (1) soft paths & social infrastructure for water delivery, (2) decentralized water treatment approaches, such as point‐of‐use, point‐of‐entry, and fit‐for‐purpose systems; (3) informality, including infrastructural, economic, and socio‐cultural innovations; and (4) political, policy, and law innovations and reforms. At the same time, we reflect seriously on how water security can be ethically achieved in partnership and aligning with the visions of U.S. colonias residents themselves. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water GovernanceEngineering Water > Water, Health, and Sanitation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2007.10.003 Byline: Jorge E. AraA[+ or -]a (a), Carmelo J. Leon (a), Michael W. Hanemann (b) Keywords: Decision rules; Discrete choice experiments; Emotions; Bayesian mixture modelling Abstract: The evaluation of health care programmes is commonly approached with stated preference methods such as contingent valuation or discrete choice experiments. These methods provide useful information for policy decisions involving health regulations and infrastructures for health care. However, econometric modelling of these data usually relies on a number of maintained assumptions, such as the use of the compensatory or random utility maximization rule. On the other hand, health policy issues can raise emotional concerns among individuals, which might induce other types of choice behaviour. In this paper we consider potential deviations from the general compensatory rule, and how these deviations might be explained by the emotional state of the subject. We utilized a mixture econometric model which allows for various potential decisions rules within the sample, such as the complete ignorance, conjunctive rule and satisfactory rules. The results show that deviations from the full linear compensatory decision rule are predominant, but they are significantly less observed for those subjects with a medium emotional state about the issue of caring for the health state of the elderly. The implication is that the emotional impact of health policy issues should be taken into account when making assumptions of individual choice behaviour in health valuation methods. Author Affiliation: (a) Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (b) University of California, Berkeley, USA Article History: Received 9 March 2006; Revised 4 June 2007; Accepted 1 October 2007 Article Note: (footnote) [star] The authors would like to thank the financial research support by projects BEC2000-0412, VEM2004-08558, and SEJ2005-09276 of the Spanish Ministry of Education, and useful comments by Guido Imbens, Mark Steel, Kenneth Train and Arnold Zellner and participants in the 3rd Workshop 'Advancing the Methodology of Discrete Choice Experiments in Health Economics' (Gran Canaria, July 2005). Of course, the usual disclaimer applies.

I. INTRODUCTION II. WESTERN WATER PROJECTS ARE HIGHLY VULNERABLE TO GLOBAL WARMING III. ADAPTATION WILL BE DIFFICULT, AT BEST A. Infrastructure constraints B. Institutional constraints IV. THE APPEAL OF STABILITY [...]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2004.11.005 Byline: Gautam Sethi (a), Christopher Costello (b), Anthony Fisher (c), Michael Hanemann (c), Larry Karp (c) Abstract: Among others who point to environmental variability and managerial uncertainty as causes of fishery collapse, Roughgarden and Smith (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 93 (1996) 5078) argue that three sources of uncertainty are important for fisheries management: variability in fish dynamics, inaccurate stock size estimates, and inaccurate implementation of harvest quotas. We develop a bioeconomic model with these three sources of uncertainty, and solve for optimal escapement based on measurements of fish stock in a discrete-time model. Among other results we find: (1) when uncertainties are high, we generally reject the constant-escapement rule advocated in much of the existing literature, (2) inaccurate stock estimation affects policy in a fundamentally different way than the other sources of uncertainty, and (3) the optimal policy leads to significantly higher commercial profits and lower extinction risk than the optimal constant-escapement policy (by 42% and 56%, respectively). Author Affiliation: (a) Bard Center for Environmental Policy, Bard College,Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504, USA (b) Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (c) Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley, USA Article History: Received 21 December 2001

Many aspects of asthma—in particular the relationship between beliefs, averting behaviors, and symptoms—are not directly observable from market data. An approach that combines observable market data with nonmarket valuation to gather data on unobservable aspects of the illness can improve efforts to quantify the burden of asthma if it accounts for the endogeneity in the system. Such approaches are used in the valuation of recreation but have not been widely used to value the burden of a chronic illness. We estimate parents' willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce their child's asthma symptoms using a three‐equation model that combines revealed preference, contingent valuation, and burden of asthma, increasing the efficiency of estimation and correcting for endogeneity. WTP for a device that reduces a child's asthma symptoms by 50% is $125/month (s.d. $20). Parents' valuations are driven by beliefs about asthma and by their degree of worry about asthma between episodes. There is a nonlinear relationship between the number of days with symptoms and WTP per symptom day. The experience of living with asthma affects families' responses to a contingent valuation scenario, because it influences willingness to spend money to manage the illness and their subjective perceptions and beliefs about the illness itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water is rising on the policy agenda as population growth and climate change intensify scarcity, shocks, and access inequalities. The conventional economic policy recommendations—privatization, pricing, and property rights—have struggled due to a failure to account adequately for the politics of water and the associated distributional conflicts. We identify distinctive social and physical characteristics of water supply and demand, and explore their implications for three central areas of water policy: financing infrastructure, pricing, and property rights reform. Growing dependence on groundwater and non-networked water supplies exacerbates these challenges and reinforces the need to rethink the economics of water and tackle the political challenges head on. Meeting the water sustainable development goals would require institutional and technological innovations to supply, allocate, and manage water, as well as a sustained political and financial commitment to address those who might be left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the connection between water marketing and the modification of property rights to water in Australia, highlighting the Australian's distinctiveness through a contrast with water rights in the western US (especially California). Australia started out the same as California, but in the 1880s it abandoned California's system and adopted a new approach, ending the common law property right to water and creating a statutory right that could be modified by administrative fiat. This shifted the arena for dispute resolution from courts to parliaments. It eliminated the seniority inherent in appropriative water rights and it sidelined issues of third-party impacts. Another difference was the tight control of irrigation institutions by state governments and the national government's willingness to intervene in state and local water management. Australian water reform was wrapped in politics. When there were successes, this is because the politics were managed adroitly; when political challenges proved insurmountable, reform stalled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Plasmacytomas are monoclonal proliferations of plasma cells that typically affect the intramedullary axial skeleton. Imaging findings of an extramedullary plasmacytoma on radiograph and computed tomography can be nonspecific and can resemble other entities such as lymphoma, metastases, chondrosarcomas, or giant cell tumors. Case Report: A 60-year-old female with a medical history of partial complex seizures, hypertension, diabetes, glaucoma, and hyperlipidemia presented with complaints of superficial abdominal pain associated with erythema and swelling for 3 weeks. Computed tomography of her abdomen at time of presentation revealed a 5.8 × 2.7-cm irregularly marginated soft-tissue density just below the umbilicus with an adjacent defect in the midline rectus abdominis. The final pathologic diagnosis was extramedullary plasmacytoma. Treatment during the next year included local radiation, systemic chemotherapy, and an autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplant. Three years after initial diagnosis, the patient presented to the emergency department, and testing revealed new plasmacytomas. The decision was made to proceed with palliative care. Conclusion: This case is a unique example of a patient with an extramedullary plasmacytoma with no diagnostic signs of multiple myeloma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]