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This work critiques the situation of the ecological and cultural heritage in many coastal territories and analyses how current land planning methodologies are responding to it. The study builds a new integrated approach founded on ecocultural values and local knowledge as resources for an effective territorial planning and sustainable development.

The proposed framework was developed through: (1) analysing coastal planning needs and problems in European coastal areas; (2) identifying ecocultural values, including local knowledge, in such areas; (3) selecting best approaches and tools in spatial planning; (4) applying the selected planning approaches to use ecocultural values as resources for spatial planning and sustainable development; and (5) validating the final methodology.

A dynamic approach for maritime-land planning was developed projecting coastal waters and river basins as strategic drivers for sustainable development, based on the natural capacity of water to shape and integrate the ecological and cultural territory. A participatory governance planning methodology supports the new articulations of space based on ecocultural value chains and networks as synergistic vectors, focusing on local knowledge as psychosocial capital for a collective mapping of cultural, historical, social, economic and ecological values into ecocultural littoral plans.

The results show the potentials of combining new approaches applying cultural and ecological heritage into an effective strategy of integration between society and territory as a powerful driver for effective sustainable planning and development.

In this chapter, we report findings from a three-year, survey- and interview-based study involving 538 families bringing up children with disabilities in Alberta, Canada. The focus of the study was on the everyday challenge and accomplishment of sustaining a routine of daily life. The families who participated in this study were diverse, yet they struggled with many of the same questions and challenges. Four over-arching and inter-related challenges emerged from our analysis of the interview data. These are difficulty balancing the competing needs and wants of their children; tension between wanting to protect and wanting to integrate their child and family into the community; conflict between earning and care giving activities; and, trouble accessing and navigating supports and services. This chapter includes a small sample of illustrative family stories. The study findings suggest that parents are striving but struggle to meet normative expectations, that is, to simultaneously do all they can to help their disabled child and create a routine that balances the needs and interests of all their children. One conclusion is that service systems and professionals can help and or hinder families as they strive to create and maintain a daily routine that is fitted to the local ecology and family resource-base, and congruent with their values and goals, and with the needs, interests, and competencies of family members.

Pressing sustainability issues face the 21st century, as identified by the Millennium Development Goals and its post initiatives, and ethical principles related to fairness, equity, and justice are increasingly important to address climate change and resource scarcities. Yet, such ethical dimensions remain surprisingly little addressed in the tourism literature. Ecofeminist critique offers insights into this gap, identifying historical antecedents in patriarchal, Enlightenment-driven discourses of science where positivistic approaches facilitate the control and use of nature and women. This chapter draws from this critique to propose a preliminary, justice-oriented framework to resituate sustainable tourism within an embodied paradigm that covers intangibles such as emotions, feelings, and an ethic of care.

Institutional economics at the societal level focuses on the examination of interpersonal and impersonal economic, political and social institutions within a given polity and how such institutions might change and evolve over time. Such examination is critical to both international business scholars and practitioners if they are to successfully navigate variations in the rules of the game in international trade and commerce. Whilst institutional economics offers an immense body of literature on institutions, it offers surprisingly few theoretical or conceptual tools for empirical analysis. This chapter discusses five extant frameworks and proposes an ontological theoretical framework developed from interdisciplinary sources to underpin extant frameworks and thereby guide international business researchers in designing more effective research instruments for examining institutional change across and between cultures.

This chapter discusses the unique role that public libraries can play to (re)build our Republic by centering the lived experiences and voices of marginalized communities. As robust sites for out-of-school time learning and community-based information spaces, public libraries have long played a key role in promoting the health and well-being of our nation’s democracy. Public libraries’ inclusivity efforts, though, have not always been evenly balanced, and these efforts have often been underdeveloped, poorly articulated, and undervalued by other key civic actors. Bringing together a Learning Sciences scholar of youth development and civic engagement, Library and Information Sciences scholar on free speech, and an Assistant Director of a public library in the Southeast, this chapter will offer interdisciplinary research-practice insights into both the challenges and opportunities that exist for public libraries as they grapple with the serious question of how to serve the public in the complex reality that is this third decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this chapter explores questions like: how can public libraries balance the constraints of the status quo to hear, share, and amplify the voices of marginalized communities? And in what ways can library staff encourage opportunities that bridge librarians’ expertise and libraries’ resources with the lived realities and needs of marginalized communities? In this chapter, the authors expand upon these questions and collectively dream about the ways in which public libraries might be reimagined to more authentically and equitably serve the many faces of the contemporary American public.

This study aims to explore how indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage preservation and ethnic identity influence the production of traditional ikat textiles in northeast Thailand.

A qualitative research method used an ethnographic perspective with a realistic design. Purposive sampling was used to conduct 30 in-depth ethnographic interviews with members of Phu Thai ikat textile groups in Kalasin province. Interview transcripts were studied using thick descriptive analysis (themes, categorisation, coding and keywords).

The ethnographic study shows that natural dyeing, traditional crafts, materials, designs and patterns are used in Phu Thai ikat textile weaving. The results reveal that indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage preservation and ethnic identity are relevant to traditional ikat textiles.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study uniquely focuses on a deeper theoretical understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage preservation, to sustain traditional ikat textiles.

This chapter reviews qualitative research on parenting children with disabilities published over the last 50 years to explore whether shifts in academic discourse and changes in professional training have affected research on parenting and/or the experiences of parents who are the subject of such research.

An extensive literature search was conducted, and 78 peer-reviewed, qualitative studies on the experience of parenting a child with a disability were included in the sample. Themes were extracted from the reviewed literature and compared across decades.

The findings of the present review suggest that some aspects of the parenting experience have changed very little. In particular, parents continue to experience negative reactions such as stress and anomie, especially early in their children’s lives, and socially imposed barriers such as unhelpful professionals, and a lack of needed services continue to create problems and inspire an entrepreneurial response. In addition, stigmatizing encounters with others continue to be a common occurrence. In contrast to earlier decades, studies conducted in more recent years have begun to use the social model of disability as an analytic frame and also increasingly report that parents are questioning and challenging the concept of “normal” itself.

Additional improvements are needed in professional education and services to reduce the negative reactions experienced by parents of children with disabilities.

The findings of this meta-analysis can serve as a guide to future research on parenting children with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a critical analysis to address cultural metaphors – a much overlooked aspect of cross-cultural studies. Mainstream cultural metaphors (e.g. the iceberg, the software of the mind, the onion, and the distance) are not only limited in number, but are also overwhelmingly based on the static paradigm – as opposed to the dynamic paradigm that is often sidelined in academic discourse.

The paper introduces the Diagram of Diversity Pathways – an interdisciplinary framework that sheds some light on how the inherent meaning and heuristic orientation of static cultural metaphors may stand at odds with evidence from the newly emerged field of neurobiology.

The implications of these metaphors are called into question, namely, culture is all about differences; values are stable; values guide behaviors; and values are seen as binaries.

The paper suggests that theorists and practitioners should pay more attention to the contribution and scholarly work of the dynamic paradigm since there appears to be substantial compatibility between them.

The matching of neurobiology and dynamic paradigm brings into focus alternative metaphors which not only offer insightful perspectives but also may open doors to perceive culture in a new way. Furthermore, cultural metaphors deserve more academic scrutiny because metaphors and theory development can have a symbiotic existence.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the development of a biodiversity reporting and evaluation framework. The application of the framework to an exemplar organisation identifies biodiversity-related annual report disclosures and analyses changes in the nature and levels of these over time. Finally, the paper aims to establish whether the disclosures made by the exemplar are consistent with a deep ecological perspective, as exemplified by New Zealand conservation legislation.

Viewing the framework developed by the paper through a deep ecological lens, the study involves a detailed content analysis of the biodiversity disclosures contained within the annual reports of a conservation organisation over a 23-year period. Using the framework developed in this paper, the biodiversity-related text units were identified and allocated to one of three major categories, 13 subcategories, and then into deep, intermediate and shallow ecology.

Biodiversity disclosures enable stakeholders to determine the goals, assess their implementation, and evaluate the performance of an organisation. Applying the framework to the exemplar revealed the majority of annual report disclosures focused on presenting performance/implementation information. The study also found that the majority of disclosures reflect a deep ecological approach. A deep/shallow ecological tension was apparent in a number of disclosures, especially those relating to the exploitation of the conservation estate.

This paper is the first to develop a framework that can be used as both a biodiversity reporting assessment tool and a reporting guide. The framework will be particularly useful for those studying reporting by conservation departments and stakeholders of organisations whose operations impact biodiversity.