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Climate change data and predictions for the Himalayas are very sparse and uncertain, characterized by a “Himalayan data gap” and difficulties in predicting changes due to topographic complexity. A few reliable studies and climate change models for Nepal predict considerable changes: shorter monsoon seasons, more intensive rainfall patterns, higher temperatures, and drought. These predictions are confirmed by farmers who claim that temperatures have been increasing for the past decade and wonder why the rains have “gone mad.” The number of hazard events, notably droughts, floods, and landslides are increasing and now account for approximately 100 deaths in Nepal annually. Other effects are drinking water shortages and shifting agricultural patterns, with many communities struggling to meet basic food security before climatic conditions started changing.

The aim of this paper is to examine existing gaps between current climate models and the realities of local development planning through a case study on flood risk and drinking water management for the Municipality of Dharan in Eastern Nepal. This example highlights current challenges facing local-level governments, namely, flood and landslide mitigation, providing basic amenities – especially an urgent lack of drinking water during the dry season – poor local planning capacities, and limited resources. In this context, the challenge for Nepal will be to simultaneously address increasing risks caused by hazard events alongside the omnipresent food security and drinking water issues in both urban and rural areas. Local planning is needed that integrates rural development and disaster risk reduction (DRR) with knowledge about climate change considerations. The paper concludes with a critical analysis of climate change modeling and the gap between scientific data and low-tech and low capacities of local planners to access or implement adequate adaptation measures. Recommendations include the need to bridge gaps between scientific models, the local political reality and local information needs.

The purpose of this paper is to describe empirical research intended to fill the perceived gap in practical guidance methodologies for assessing resilience.

To do so, an interdisciplinary team of researchers studied landslide risk in four different communities of Central and Eastern Nepal using a case study approach. Two case studies on flood-affected communities were developed for comparison sake in more urban areas. Methods combined qualitative participatory approaches to develop indicators of resilience as well as a household survey and focus group discussions for collecting data on the indicators.

What the research results demonstrate is a relatively straightforward and simple means for obtaining data on the state of a community's resilience as a relatively simple “snapshot” of resilience at one period in time, assuming that resilience is an outcome that can be improved over time with the “right” set of interventions.

The main limitation of this research is that it focussed mainly on outcome indicators; although some process indicators of resilience were identified (i.e. grazing management practices, skills training, organizational skills and learning through education), these need to be more comprehensive and validated through community consultations.

The paper provided data and a straightforward methodology for measuring resilience and has thus contributed to the literature on this topic, while providing practical ideas for future research on resilience building measures and indicators.

This article examines the multiple ways in which Hannah Arendt’s thought arose historically and in international context, but also how we might think about history and theory in new ways with Arendt. It is commonplace to situate Arendt’s political and historical thought as a response to totalitarianism. However, far less attention has been paid to the significance of other specifically and irreducibly international experiences and events. Virtually, all of her singular contributions to political and international thought were influenced by her lived experiences of, and historical reflections on, statelessness and exile, imperialism, transnational totalitarianism, world wars, the nuclear revolution, the founding of Israel, war crimes trials, and the war in Vietnam. Yet, we currently lack a comprehensive reconstruction of the extent to which Arendt’s thought was shaped by the fact of political multiplicity, that there are not one but many polities existing on earth and inhabiting the world. This neglect is surprising in light of the significant “international turn” in the history of thought and intellectual history, the growing interest in Arendt’s thought within international theory and, above all, Arendt’s own unwavering commitment to plurality not simply as a characteristic of individuals but as an essential and intrinsically valuable effect of distinct territorial entities. The article examines the historical and international context of Arendt’s historical method, including her critique of process- and development-oriented histories that remain current in different social science fields, setting out and evaluating her alternative approach to historical writing.

Whenever America has fought wars, civil liberties are compromised. Led by Hoover, whose career began in the Library of Congress, the FBI has historically conducted questionable surveillance, often spying illegally on American citizens. There is a history of FBI surveillance in the Academy, including surveillance in libraries. Researchers, students, and librarians have been the subjects of FBI surveillance efforts. Today, the Patriot Act has reignited concerns about FBI surveillance in academic institutions. Librarians have often led the fight against limits imposed on accessing information. This is a short history of the conflict between the Academia and FBI surveillance.

Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

Volume eight of Research in Urban Sociology focused on race and ethnicity in New York City. Our original idea when planning that volume was to contrast the ethnic landscape of New York City with that of Los Angeles, and to suggest that while the outpouring of studies from the Los Angeles School proclaims that Los Angeles is different from other cities – and thus is a signifier of the metropolis of the future – the creation of new ethnic landscapes is hardly limited to Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a rich history of both older and newer scholarship concerning ethnic communities in New York City, and we sought to update both the research and to offer a point of comparison between the studies of Los Angeles and other cities.

In a modern world increasingly perceived as uncertain, the mere purchase of a household cleaning product, or a seemingly harmless bottle of milk, conveys interrogations about potential hazards, from environmental to health impacts. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest that risk could be considered as one of the major dimensions of choice for a wide range of concerns and markets, alongside aspiration/satisfaction, and tackled efficiently by mobilizing the recent findings of cognitive sciences, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology. It is felt that consumer research could benefit more widely from psychological and evolutionary-grounded risk theories.

In this study, some 50 years of marketing management literature, as well as risk-specialized literature, was examined in an attempt to get a grasp of how risk is handled by consumer sciences and of whether they make some use of the most recent academic works on mental biases, non-mainstream decision-making processes or evolutionary roots of behavior. We then tested and formulated several hypotheses regarding risk profiles and preferences in the sector of insurance, by participating in an Axa Research Fund–Paris School of Economics research project.

It is suggested that consumer profiles could be enriched by risk-taking attitudes, that risk could be part of the “reason why” of brand positioning, and that brand, as well as public policy communication, could benefit from a targeted use of risk perception biases.

This paper proposes to apply evolutionary-based psychological concepts to build perceptual maps describing people and consumers on both aspiration and risk attitude axis, and to design communication tools according to psychological research on message framing and biases. Such an approach mobilizes not only the recent findings of cognitive sciences and neurosciences but also the understanding of the roots of risk attitudes and perception. Those maps and framing could probably be applied to many sectors, markets and public issues, from commodities to personal products and services (food, luxury goods, electronics, financial products, tourism, design or insurance).

The purpose of this paper is to present exploration of themes that interconnect six studies in environmentally and socially sustainable human development.

The article presents an overview of the papers included in this special issue.

As humanity threatens to undermine its habitat, a social economics returns to core concepts and themes that became expunged from neoclassical economics: serious examination of persons, seen as more than given points of desire; a broadened perspective on types of good, including a non‐neoclassical conception of public goods as publicly deliberated priority goods that are not well managed through free markets and “common goods” as shared bases vital for everyone; study of what commodities and goods do to and for people; a central role for public reasoning about which are public priority goods, rather than using only a technical definition of a public good; an acceptance of notions of ethical responsibility and responsibilities concerning the provision and maintenance of public priority goods determined through public reasoning; and attention to institutional formats for such deliberation. Amongst the greatest of public priority “goods” are the concepts of common good and responsibility.

The findings reinforce the agenda of socio‐economics for central attention to the mutual conditioning of economy, society, polity, and environment, including analysis of the sociocultural formation of economic actors and of ideas of “common good”.

Cross‐fertilization of theorization with cases from Costa Rica, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, Rwanda, sub‐Saharan Africa and global arenas.