Search results

Despite the common focus on studying future events, the study of risk management and foresight have developed as two segmented scientific fields. This study aims to investigate whether current risk management methodology is sufficient for long-term planning against threats from terrorism and other black swan events, and whether perspectives from foresight studies can contribute to more effective long-term security planning.

This study investigates the planning process of the rebuilding of the Norwegian Government Complex destroyed during a terrorist attack in 2011. The study examines whether security risk managers find current security risk management methodology sufficient for dealing with long-term security threats to the Norwegian Government Complex.

Current security risk management methodology for long-term security planning is insufficient to capture black swan events. Foresight perspectives could contribute by engaging tools to mitigate the risk of these events. This could lead to more robust security planning.

The main contribution of this paper is to investigate whether perspectives and methodology from foresight studies can improve current security risk management methodology for long-term planning and look for cross-fertilization between foresight and risk studies. A framework for scenario development based on security risk management methodology and foresight methodology is proposed that can help bridge the gap.

Unequal social conditions that provide people with unequal opportunities to live healthy lives are considered unjust and associated with “health inequity”. Governing power is impacting people's lives through laws, policies and professional decisions, and can be used intentionally to combat health inequity by addressing and changing people's living- and working conditions. Little attention is paid to how these ways of exercising governing power unintentionally can structure further conditions for health inequity. In this paper, the authors coin the term “governance determinants of health” (GDHs). The authors' discussion of GDHs potential impact on health inequity can help avoid the implementation of governing strategies with an adverse impact on health equality. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors identify Governance Determinants of Health, the GDHs. GDHs refer to governance strategies that structurally impact healthcare systems and health equality. The authors focus on the unintended, blind sides of GDHs that maintain or reinforce the effects of socioeconomic inequality on health.

The power to organize healthcare is manifested in distinct structural approaches such as juridification, politicalization, bureaucratization and medical standardization. The authors explore the links between different forms of governance and health inequalities.

The authors' discussion in this article is innovative as it seeks to develop a framework that targets power dynamics inherent in GHDs to help identify and avoid GDHs that may promote unequal access to healthcare and prompt health inequity. However, this framework has limitations as the real-world, blurred and intertwined aspects of governing instruments are simplified for analytical purposes. As such, it risks overestimating the boundaries between the separate instruments and reducing the complexity of how the GDHs work in practice. Consequently, this kind of theory-driven framework does not do justice to the myriad of peoples' complex empirical practices where GDHs may overlap and intertwine with each other. Nevertheless, this framework can still help assist governing authorities in imagining a direction for the impacts of GDHs on health equity, so they can take precautionary steps to avoid adverse impacts.

The authors develop and explore – and demonstrate – the relevance of a framework that can assist governing authorities in anticipating the impacts of GDHs on health inequity.

This paper is based on three social scientific studies of animal welfare and local food products in Norway, of which two focussed on sheep in particular. It addresses the widespread belief that Norwegian sheep farming is “the best” but is confronted with a meat industry that emphasises economic efficiency. A few years after a new Norwegian law on animal welfare acknowledged animals as sentient beings came into force in 2010 (LOVdata, 2009), the purpose of this paper is to better understand ongoing debates on the welfare of sheep by exploring how sheep welfare is understood and regulated in Norway.

The theoretical framework draws on convention theory, especially referring to the four “possible worlds of production” (Salais and Storper, 1993). The authors argue that animal welfare may be analysed in parallel to product quality, focussing on three major perspectives of sheep welfare: animal treatment, product quality, and an abstract conceptualisation in public discourse. The empirical analysis is based on interviews with key players in the sector and central documents.

Convention theory points to several general difficulties in reaching an agreement on what is “good quality” and welfare. First, the authors find difficulty in how to implement new regulatory conceptualisations with dominant ways of understanding welfare within the industry. Second, the idealised images of sheep welfare of an immaterial possible world dominating public discourse have very little interaction with the real world of farms and abattoirs.

This paper suggests that rather than addressing and handling the potential tension between the legal recognition of animal as sentient being and the economic demands of the industry, key actors keep the potentially conflicting understandings apart in different “worlds of production” (Salais and Storper, 1993). Nevertheless, the authors observe that interactions between possible worlds, as well as translation from one possible world to another, not only could be promising but would be fundamental to concretise improvements in the real world.

To examine the availability and quality of clinical guidelines on perioperative diabetes care in hospital units before and after a randomised clinical trial (RCT) and international accreditation.

Interventional “before‐after” study in 51 units (38 surgical and 13 anaesthetic) in nine hospitals participating in a RCT in the greater Copenhagen area; 27 of the units also underwent international accreditation.

The proportion of units with guidelines increased from 24/51 (47 percent) units before to 38/51 (75 percent) units after the trial. Among the 27 units without guidelines before the trial, significantly more accredited units compared to non‐accredited units had a guideline after the trial (9/10 (90 percent) compared to 5/17 (29 percent). The quality of the systematic development scale and the clinical scales improved significantly after the trial in both accredited units (both p<0.001) and in non‐accredited units (both p<0.02). The improvement of the systematic development scale was significantly higher in accredited than in non‐accredited units (p<0.01).

The combination of conducting both the DIPOM Trial and international accreditation led to a significant improvement of both dissemination and quality of guidelines on perioperative diabetic care.