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There are increasing pressures within the higher education sector to incorporate digital pedagogies into teaching and learning, a trend amplified by recent extensive recourse to online delivery within the sector. This trend carries with it both opportunities and challenges in effectively fostering those graduate competences that a converging consensus identifies as essential for sustainability education to nurture. The challenge for educators is to design programs capable of fostering a range of competences fit for wicked sustainability problems. The principal objective of this paper is to review the literature regarding the competences that would adequately equip graduates of sustainability coursework programs with substantial online delivery components for a professional environment of uncertainty, complexity, and wicked problems. From the review of scholarship focused on competences for online experiential learning, sustainability education and wicked problems solving, we assemble a set of precepts to guide the design of effective learning outcomes, settings and pedagogies for an approach to sustainability education that better prepares students for such a challenging environment. While the precepts apply to sustainability education generally, we argue that they provide particular guidance for educators concerned with e-learning. We also present educational, social and technological enablers to underpin design, development and delivery processes.

Background It was recognised there was a gap in companionship and empathic support for certain patients in hospital approaching end of life. Aim Queenscourt in Hospital, an extension of Queenscourt Outside Volunteer Service, is launched to provide comfort and companionship for patients in hospital who are in the last hours to days of life, and whose families are absent or need support to take a short break. Method Volunteers are recruited with previous health and social care experience and who are available at very short notice to respond to patient’s changing condition. Volunteers are aligned with the hospice’s vision and values. A bespoke training programme was put in place to prepare, educate and allay any potential anxieties and fears. Results Patients eligible to benefit from service are identified by members of the Queenscourt Supportive and Specialist Palliative Care Services working in hospital. Volunteers may read quietly, provide gentle hand massage or may just simply be present. Volunteers may escalate a patient’s needs and concerns to the ward staff if unsettled. Volunteers are fully debriefed following each shift and consequently report feeling empowered and valued for having made a difference. Challenges around hospital policies and procedures were overcome by liaising between HR departments, and open communication. Conclusion Queenscourt delivers compassionate and emotional support to patients and their families across all settings. Our new volunteers in hospital are an integral part of this. By enlisting the support of volunteers, patients in hospital who are reaching the end of their lives have an empathic presence and companion by their side. We aim to support more people dying in hospital and communicate with secondary care colleagues ensuring all professional boundaries are respected. Training and support of volunteers ensures retention and continuation of a worthwhile service.

This study examines the extent to which the choice of management approach is a critical factor in enabling climate change adaptation in marine fisheries. Climate change is expected to compound many pressing issues affecting fisheries management. Good governance of fisheries, which is critical to building their adaptive capacity and social-ecological resilience, is seen as ever more important in the context of climate change. A range of fisheries management approaches have been developed and, to varying degrees, applied. Each has been described in the literature as a promising way to manage marine resources. Through literature reviews and a survey of practitioners, this study explores how theoretical properties of selected major management approaches (i.e., ecosystem-based management, adaptive management, co-management, adaptive co-management, and active adaptive management) enable climate change adaptation, and how such properties are perceived by practitioners to manifest in practice using an Australian marine fisheries context. Overall, the selected management approaches have the potential to enable climate change adaptation to varying degrees. Ecosystem-based management, in combination with adaptive management and co-management as nested management approaches, possesses the full array of adaptation capacities and attributes required for adaptation in fisheries. Distinctions between theory and practice observed in this study highlight the importance of practitioner perceptions and enabling institutional arrangements in adapting management to climate change.

For a generation, governments around the world have been committed to sustainable\ud development as a policy goal. This has been supported by an array of new policies ranging\ud from international agreements, to national strategies, environmental laws at many levels of\ud government, regional programs, and local plans. Despite these efforts, decades of scientific monitoring\ud indicate that the world is no closer to environmental sustainability and in many respects the\ud situation is getting worse. This paper argues that a significant contributing factor to this situation\ud is policy implementation failure. A systematic review of the literature reveals that the failure\ud to achieve the intended outcomes of environmental policies is due to economic, political and\ud communication factors. Conflict between the objectives of environmental policies and those focused\ud on economic development, a lack of incentives to implement environmental policies, and a failure to\ud communicate objectives to key stakeholders are all key factors that contribute to the inability to attain\ud environmental sustainability.

Given the growing awareness of the implications of climate change impacts for the coastal zone and adjacent marine areas and the urgency implied in dealing with these impacts, publication of this c...

Background Our hospice currently runs a programme of day therapy for patient with any life-limiting illness. We have previously undertaken a fatigue, anxiety and breathlessness pilot for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and work collaboratively with our acute and community trusts supporting a weekly multi-disciplinary team (MDT) meeting to identify patients admitted to hospital potentially in the last year of life, to promote advance care planning discussions. There is an ever increasing emphasis on care which is individualised to patients and their condition(s). Aims To develop a tailored approach to the support of patients with specific conditions, initially focussing on end stage respiratory diseases, and to demonstrate that this enhances the benefits for patients and their families. The programme 12 month pilot 10 week programme of care Initial assessment by a member of the hospice palliative care team Weekly review by a senior nurse Nurse-led follow up clinic, one month after completion with a telephone consultation three months later Education and self-management fundamental to the programme. Weekly education sessions for patients and their family/carers, covering management of fatigue, anxiety, breathlessness, nutrition and a session titled ‘understanding your lungs’ to enhance understanding of diagnosis Monthly collaborative MDT with acute and community colleagues. Evaluation The evaluation of this programme will be undertaken throughout and includes: Impact on symptom control and quality of life using the Outcome Assessment and Complexity Collaborative toolkit Evaluation of education including confidence managing symptoms (patient and family/carers) Number of admissions in the 12 months prior to, during and up to six months after commencing the programme Number of patients on supportive care registers pre and post programme Achieving preferred place of death. Conclusion Following evaluation of this new approach, we hope to explore if it is applicable to patients suffering other conditions and with robust outcome data, provide evidence for on-going funding.

A diagnostic approach to climate change adaptation for fisheries is proposed to define potential climate adaptation pathways in well-managed fisheries. Traditional climate vulnerability and risk assessments tend to focus on biophysical threats and opportunities and thereby what needs to be done to adapt to climate change. Our diagnostic approach moves from such analysis to focus on how the processes of adaptation and development of adaptive capacity can be structured to achieve desired outcomes. Using a well-grounded framework, the diagnostic approach moves from system description to characterization of challenges and opportunities, through two stages of analysis and validation, to the definition and embedding of adaptation options and pathways. The framework can include all contextually relevant variables and accommodate evaluation of adaptation outcomes and comparisons across scales and contexts. Such an approach can serve as a basis for enabling stakeholders to identify challenges and opportunities, and to explore and prioritize options for development and implementation of legitimate adaptation pathways.

This paper explores the utility of qualitative scenario approaches to examine the potential impacts of climate change on marine biodiversity conservation on the east coast of Australia. This region is large and diverse, with considerable variation in marine biodiversity and, concomitantly, considerable diversity in the likely impacts from climate change. The results reinforce a number of key points. Engaging with stakeholders in scenario planning provides not only a focus to discuss the future in a disciplined way, but also provides ongoing reference points for contemporary decision making and planning. The paper illustrates how qualitative scenario planning provides opportunities to address the challenges of marine biodiversity conservation in a changing environment.

Planning education involves engaging students in many ‘wicked’ planning problems of which climate change is a particularly testing example. This paper demonstrates that by thinking about climate change problems for urban and regional places, educators are reminded about the importance of some more generic but essential capabilities required of planners in dealing with a range of challenging problems. Based on the experience of reviewing and ‘renovating’ the University of Tasmania's planning programme to embed education for climate change adaptation, this paper: (i) reflects on such a process; (ii) describes the application of specific pedagogical values and approaches to the education of planners for climate change adaptation in the university's planning programme; and (iii) demonstrates how their application can facilitate improvement in education for other core planning capabilities. Among the pedagogical approaches embraced are: problem-based learning, adaptive learning and self-reflection, net...

Marine ecosystems are subject to a range of likely impacts from drivers of environmental change, including human-induced climate change that is warming sea surface temperatures, altering ocean chemistry and affecting run-off of land-based pollutants and sediments. Such transformations will challenge the adequacy of governance and management regimes for conserving marine biodiversity. Assessment of the fitness of current governance and management regimes to meet the challenges, including their adaptive capacity, can be established through an understanding of what is required for an effective response. We provide such a foundation by identifying governance and management requirements that would support the resilience of marine biodiversity and ecosystems and associated social–ecological systems. The requirements were established through an expert panel methodology in conjunction with an analysis of relevant literature. We explain the relevance of these requirements to marine biodiversity conservation in a changing climate under the following themes: systems understanding, networks and learning; values and world views; institutional forms; leadership and resources; engagement and decision making; cohesion and direction; and governance quality. Informing institutional and management design using these requirements will enable the development of regimes more suited to meeting the fundamental challenges that unanticipated, abrupt and turbulent change poses for the conservation of marine biodiversity and the resilience of associated social–ecological systems. Such a governance and management regime would be more effective in managing social–ecological resilience because it has the capacity and flexibility to deal with change, founded on learning, diversity and ethics.

In the context of accelerated global change, the concept of resilience, with its roots in ecological theory and complex adaptive systems, has emerged as the favored framework for understanding and responding to the dynamics of change. Its transfer from ecological to social contexts, however, has led to the concept being interpreted in multiple ways across numerous disciplines causing significant challenges for its practical application. The aim of this paper is to improve conceptual clarity within resilience thinking so that resilience can be interpreted and articulated in ways that enhance its utility and explanatory power, not only theoretically but also operationally. We argue that the current confusion and ambiguity within resilience thinking is problematic for operationalizing the concept within policy making. To achieve our aim, we interrogate resilience interpretations used within a number of academic and practice domains in the forefront of contending with the disruptive and sometimes catastrophic effects of global change (primarily due to climate change) on ecological and human-nature systems. We demonstrate evolution and convergence among disciplines in the interpretations and theoretical underpinnings of resilience and in engagement with cross-scale considerations. From our analysis, we identify core conceptual elements to be considered in policy responses if resilience is to fulfill its potential in improving decision making for change. We offer an original classification of resilience definitions in current use and a typology of resilience interpretations. We conclude that resilience thinking must be open to alternative traditions and interpretations if it is to become a theoretically and operationally powerful paradigm.

The broad autism phenotype (BAP) refers to the phenotypic expression of an underlying genetic liability to autism, manifest in non-autistic relatives. This study examined the relationship among the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ), Social Responsiveness Scale: Adult Research Version (SRS:ARV), and Family History Interview (FHI) in a large, multi-site study of 1,650 simplex families (Simons Simplex Collection). Correlations between the BAPQ and SRS:ARV Total scores were moderate, and correlations between FHI ratings and SRS:ARV and BAPQ were significant but weak. Overall, the results suggested that BAP traits occur at low rates in simplex families, and rates vary significantly depending upon the measure utilized. Implications include the need for multiple informants, and the assessment of distinct BAP traits in large-scale genetic studies of individuals with ASD.

Sustainable natural resource use and management make novel demands on governance arrangements, the design of which requires normative guidance. Although governance principles have been developed for diverse contexts, their availability for sustainable natural resource governance is so far limited. In response, we present a suite of governance principles for natural resource governance that, while developed in an Australian multilevel context, has general applicability and significance at local, subnational, and national scales. The principles can be used to direct the design of governance institutions that are legitimate, transparent, accountable, inclusive, and fair and that also exhibit functional and structural integration, capability, and adaptability. Together, they can also serve as a platform for developing governance monitoring and evaluation instruments, crucial for both self-assessment and external audit purposes.

In this paper we explore hybridity in Australian natural resource governance, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of neoliberalism. We develop an understanding of this governance regime as an assemblage of subjects, ethics, ends and techniques that constitute a hybrid of practices directed by three mentalities of government: neoliberalism, localism and ecocentrism. This three-way parentage engenders particularly complex internal dynamics – tensions and congruencies, grounds for contest and opportunities for collaboration – that shape and transform the regime. Our analysis clarifies the formative roles of the three logics and in so doing offers a new perspective of tripartite governance dynamics. We conclude by showing how the co-existing mentalities compete to establish NRM policy that is in accord with their respective ends and ethics, subjectify problems and other actors to fit with their own agendas, and attempt to secure primacy for those technologies congruent with their logics. At the same time, as mutually constitutive forces of the regime, they exhibit varying degrees of adaptivity as they co-opt or accommodate technologies favoured by their competitors.

The region has become a significant scale of governance for the implementation of public policy, including natural resource management (NRM). A community-based regional NRM governance model has bee...

Davidson J. and Lockwood M. Partnerships as instruments of good regional governance: innovation for sustainability in Tasmania?, Regional Studies. In Australia and elsewhere, partnerships among various levels of government, business/industry, non-government organizations and communities have become a key strategy in rejuvenating regional economies and improving environmental, social and community outcomes. In time, partnerships may prove to be a crucial innovation in regional governance. However, concerns have been raised that in practice, partnerships may do little to advance regional sustainability, particularly where economic success rather than sustainable development remains the dominant agenda. This paper reports on research into the partnership arrangements of a regional authority in the Australian state of Tasmania and evaluates their potential to foster good regional governance and thus regional sustainability by analysing qualitative research material against three criteria for good governance –...

In this paper, we map the gendered contours of contemporary water management in order to demonstrate that regimes for individual ownership of water rights, markets, and the productive use of water simply reinscribe and simultaneously submerge in their apparent gender-neutrality a normative masculinity that underpins economic globalization and fortifies existing power relations. Not only do such arrangements disadvantage reproductive values and non-consumptive users; more generally, they also lack the capacity to ensure water’s sustainable development. Consequently, new management institutions for sustainability are demanded and, in making a case for equity-enhancing and adaptive institutions that better reflect water’s materiality, its multiple values and emerging water scarcity, we argue the need to invoke the conserving and ecologically protective feminine principle. To support our reasoning, we analyse water reform processes instituted in Australia and specifically by the State of Tasmania, referring to the latter jurisdiction to illustrate the gendered nature of resource management and to underscore tensions between economic globalization and sustainability, concluding that the tensions between the two agendas are probably irresolvable. We position our work in the borderlands among gender studies, feminist geography and philosophy, and political ecology, drawing together insights about the construction of resource management, the possibilities of the feminine care ethic, and ideas about the characteristics of institutional systems that could ensure equitable allocation and sustainable use of the planet’s resources.

In Western democracies, rising levels of political alienation have prompted concerned political authorities to improve the quality of citizenship by such means as civic education. As well, the several international conventions underpinning the sustainable development discourse mandate participation to empower people in their own development. Active citizenship and the participation fundamental to it can be problematic for island communities with a history of economic and political dependence, since there exist a number of structural and agentic barriers to its practice and to the exercise of ecological responsibility through participation. Both the barriers to and the prospects for ecological sustainability are elaborated in this study of aspects of community, participation, citizenship and ecological literacy among the communities of the Huon Valley region of southern Tasmania.

In the eighteenth century, the economic problem was reformulated according to a particular set of politico-economic components, in which the pursuit of individual freedom was elevated to an ethical and political ideal. Subsequent developments of this individualist philosophy together with the achievements of technological progress now appear as a threat to future existence. Extensive environmental degradation and persistent global inequalities of wealth demand a new reformulation of the economic problem. Sustainable development has emerged as the most recent economic strategy for addressing concerns about ecological integrity and social justice. Although there is a recognized continuum of understanding about the concept - from conservative to radical - it has been argued that only the radical version of sustainable development embodies the ethical capacity to address these concerns. Simultaneously the perennial existential question "How should we live?" has been raised anew along with the novel ethico-moral question: "How should we arrange our systems of production and consumption to ensure the sustainability of the Earth under conditions of conspicuous and pressing environmentally limiting conditions?" Moreover, the strong normative dimension embodied in the radical version of sustainability represents a challenge to liberal democracy and its understanding of individual and collective goods. I argue that the radical approach has the capacity to relieve what is an inherently acute tension of modern life and to reconcile individual autonomy with the wider social and ecological good.

Chris Corrin (ed.), Women in a Violent World: Feminist Analyses and Resistance Across Europe (Edinburgh University Press) Edinburgh, 1996 (reviewed by Julie Davidson). Karen J. Warren and Duane L. Cady (eds), Bringing Peace Home: Feminism, Violence and Nature (Indiana University Press) Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996 (reviewed by Elaine Stratford). Karen J. Warren (ed.), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Indiana University Press) Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997 (reviewed by Mary Jenkins).

Technology-enabled intervention has the potential to individualize and improve outcomes of traditional intervention. Specifically, virtual reality (VR) technology has been proposed in the virtual training of core social and communication skills that are impaired in individuals with autism. Various studies have demonstrated that children with autism have slow and atypical processing of emotional faces, which could be due to their atypical underlying neural structure. Emotional face recognition is considered among the core building blocks of social communication and early impairment in this skill has consequence on later complex language and communication skills. This work proposed a VR-based facial emotion recognition mechanism in the presence of contextual storytelling. Results from a usability study support the idea that individuals with autism may employ different facial processing strategies. The results are discussed in the context of the applicability of multimodal processing to enable adaptive VR-based systems in delivering individualized intervention.

We seek to contribute to the scholarship on operationalizing resilience concepts via a working resilience indicator framework. Although it requires further refinement, this practical framework provides a useful baseline for generating awareness and understanding of the complexity and diversity of variables that impinge on resilience. It has potential value for the evaluation, benchmarking, monitoring, and reporting of marine system resilience. The necessity for such a framework is a consequence of the levels of complexity and uncertainty associated with climate change and other global change stressors in marine social-ecological systems, and the problems involved in assessing their resilience. There is a need for: (1) methodologies that bring together knowledge from diverse sources and disciplines to investigate the complexity and uncertainty of interactions between climate, ocean, and human systems and (2) frameworks to facilitate the evaluation and monitoring of the social-ecological resilience of marine-dependent sectors. Accordingly, our main objective is to demonstrate the virtues of combining a case study methodology with complex adaptive systems approaches as a means to improve understanding of the multifaceted dynamics of marine sectors experiencing climate change. The resilience indicator framework, the main product of the methodology, is developed using four case studies across key Australian marine biodiversity and resource sectors already experiencing impacts from climate and other global changes. It comprises a set of resilience dimensions with a candidate set of abstract and concrete resilience indicators. Its design ensures an integrated approach to resilience evaluation. © 2013 by the author(s).

With Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prevalence estimates for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 9.1 per 1,000 (1 in 110), identification and effective treatment of ASD is often characterized as a public health emergency. Emerging technology, especially robotic technology, has been shown to be appealing to these children and such interest can be harnessed to address the limitations while providing intervention services to young children with ASD. Generally the spectrum nature of autism calls for intensive, individualized intervention. However, existing robot-mediated systems tend to have limited adaptive capability that limits individualization. Our current work seeks to bridge this gap by developing a novel adaptive and individualized robot-mediated technology for children with ASD. The system is composed of a humanoid robot with its vision being augmented by several wall-mounted cameras for real-time head tracking using a distributed architecture. Based on the cues from the child's head movement, the robot intelligently adapts itself in an individualized manner to promote joint attention. The developed system is validated with two typically developing children. The validation results of the head tracker and the closed-loop nature of interaction are presented.

In their design or implementation, many natural resource management (NRM) programs ignore critical socio-cultural dimensions of the challenge to advance sustainability. Building on particular ideas about culture and human ecosystems, we combine the strengths of the capital assets model of sustainability and the idea of intercultural borderlands to respond to this gap. To advance our thesis about the utility of these tools, we critically reviewed and analysed a cross-disciplinary literature relating to the socio-cultural dimensions of NRM. This paper stems from that labour and examines particular tensions that arise in land management as a result of Australians' specific colonial and postcolonial legacies. These tensions--related to ethnicity, gender, population, age and health--are among the threads in the larger tapestry that comprises the socio-cultural dimensions of NRM. For the Australian case, they are central, longstanding and persistent, and thus worthy of analysis; and they are applicable in general terms to other places with similar histories of settlement and land use.