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To combat climate change, protect biodiversity, maintain water quality, facilitate a just transition for workers and engage citizens and communities, a diversity of stakeholders across multiple levels work together and collaborate to co-create mutually beneficial solutions. This paper aims to illustrate how a 7.5-year collaboration between local communities, researchers, academics, companies, state agencies and policymakers is contributing to the reframing of industrial harvested peatlands to regenerative ecosystems and carbon sinks with impacts on ecological, economic, social and cultural systems.

The European Union LIFE Integrated Project, Peatlands and People, responding to Ireland’s Climate Action Plan, represents Europe’s largest rehabilitation of industrially harvested peatlands. It makes extensive use of marketing research for reframing strategies and actions by partners, collaborators and communities in the evolving context of a just transition to a carbon-neutral future.

The results highlight the ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing of peatlands from fossil fuel and waste lands to regenerative ecosystems bursting with biodiversity and climate solution opportunities. Reframing impacts requires muddling through the ebbs and flows of planned, possible and unanticipated change that can deliver benefits for peatlands and people over time.

At 3 of 7.5 years into a project, the authors are muddling through how ecological reframing impacts economic and social/cultural reframing. Further impacts, planned and unplanned, can be expected.

This paper shows how an impact planning canvas tool and impact taxonomy can be applied for social and systems change. The tools can be used throughout a project to understand, respond to and manage for unplanned events. There is constant learning, constantly going back to the impact planning canvas and checking where we are, what is needed. There is action and reaction to each other and to the diversity of stakeholders affected and being affected by the reframing work.

This paper considers how systemic change through ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing is a perfectly imperfect process of muddling through which holds the promise of environmental, economic, technological, political, social and educational impacts to benefit nature, individuals, communities, organisations and society.

Globally, urban planners and decision makers are pursuing place-based initiatives to develop and enhance urban infrastructure to optimise city performance, competitiveness and sustainability credentials. New discourses associated with big data, Building Information Modelling, SMART cities, green and biophilic thinking inform research, policy and practice agendas to varying extents. However, these discourses remain relatively isolated as much city planning is still pursued within traditional sectoral silos hindering integration. This research explores new conceptual ground at the Smart – Natural City interface within a safe interdisciplinary opportunity space. Using the city of Birmingham UK as a case study, a methodology was developed championing co-design, integration and social learning to develop a conceptual framework to navigate the challenges and opportunities at the Smart-Natural city interface. An innovation workshop and supplementary interviews drew upon the insights and experiences of 25 experts leading to the identification of five key spaces for the conceptualisation and delivery at the Smart-Natural city interface. At the core is the space for connectivity; surrounded by spaces for visioning, place-making, citizen-led participatorylearning and monitoring.The framework provides a starting point for improved discussions, understandings and negotiations to cover all components of this particular interface. Our results show the importance of using all spaces within shared narratives; moving towards ‘silver-green’ and living infrastructure and developing data in response to identified priorities. Whilst the need for vision has dominated traditional urban planning discourses we have identified the need for improved connectivity as a prerequisite. The use of all 5 characteristics collectively takes forward the literature on socio-ecological-technological relationships and heralds significant potential to inform and improve city governance frameworks, including the benefits of a transferable deliberative and co-design method that generates ownership with a real stake in the outcomes.

This paper aims to assess the impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). This paper evaluates the dynamic relationship between digital financial innovation measures and financial system development using time series data from COMESA countries for the period 1997–2019.

A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) was adopted and the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG) and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) of the model were estimated to evaluate the short- and long-run impact. In addition, the dynamic generalized method of moments (DGMM) was adopted for a robustness check. The Hausman test results show PMG to be the most consistent and efficient estimator, while the coefficient of lagged dependent variable of different GMM is less than the fixed effect coefficient, and, as such, suggests system GMM is the most suitable estimator. Data for the study were sourced from World Bank Development Indicator (WDI, 2020), World Governance Indicator (WGI, 2020) and World Bank Global Financial Development Database (GFD, 2020).

The result shows that digital financial innovation significantly impacts financial system development in the long run. As such, the evidence revealed that automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS), mobile payments (MP) and mobile banking are significant and contribute positively to financial system development in the long run, while mobile money (MM) and Internet banking (INB) are insignificant but exhibit positive and inverse relationship with financial development respectively. Further investigation revealed that institutional quality and a stable macroeconomic environment including their interactive term are significantly imperative in predicting financial system development in the COMESA region.

Researchers recommend a cohesive and conscious policy that would checkmate the divergence in the short run and suggest a common regional innovative financial strategy that could be pursued to incentivize technology transfer needed to promote financial system development in the long run. More so, plausible product and process innovations may be adapted to complement innovative institutions in the different components of the COMESA financial system.

Digital financial innovation services if well managed increase the inherent benefits in financial system development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents new background information on digital financial innovation that may stimulate the development of the financial system, particularly in the COMESA region. It also exposes the relevance of digital financial innovation, institutional quality and stable macroeconomic environment as well as their interactive effect on COMESA financial system development.

The current paper is part of a larger scoping review project investigating the intersection of leader(ship) identity development and meaning-making. In this review, we analyzed 100 articles to determine the current extent of literature that covers the intersection of leader(ship) identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

A review of the extant literature is included, and a conceptual model is suggested for further exploration into this critical and under-researched domain.

More research is needed at the intersection of leadership identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

As this area of study has expanded, scholars have noted an absence of research on the effect of multiple social identities, especially marginalized identities, on meaning-making and leadership identity construction.

Although supporting and assessing the non-academic “impact” of research are not entirely new developments in higher education, academics and research institutions are under increasing pressure to produce work that has a measurable influence outside the academy. With a view to supporting the solution of complex societal issues with evidence and expertise, and against the background of increased emphasis on impact in the United Kingdom's 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and a proliferation of impact guides and tools, this article offers a simple, easy to remember framework for designing impactful research. We call this framework “The 7Cs of Impact” – Context, Communities, Constituencies, Challenge, Channels, Communication and Capture.

Drawing on core elements of the Policy Institute at King's College London's Impact by Design training course and the authors' practical experience in supporting and delivering impact, this paper outlines how this framework can help address key aspects across the lifecycle of a research project and plan, from identifying the intended impact of research and writing it into grants and proposals, to engaging project stakeholders and assessing whether the project has had the desired impact.

While preparations for current and future REF submissions may benefit from using this framework, this paper sets out the “7Cs” with a more holistic view of impact in mind, seeking to aid researchers in identifying, capturing, and communicating how research projects can and do contribute to the improvement in society.

In this article, we offer a contribution to the ongoing study of food by advancing a conceptual framework and interdisciplinary research agenda – what we term “food system resilience”. In recent years, the concept of resilience has been extensively used in a variety of fields, but not always consistently or holistically. Here we aim to theorise systematically resilience as an analytical concept as it applies to food systems research. To do this, we engage with and seek to extend current understandings of resilience across different disciplines. Accordingly, we begin by exploring the different ways in which the concept of resilience is understood and used in current academic and practitioner literatures – both as a general concept and as applied specifically to food systems research. We show that the social-ecological perspective, rooted in an appreciation of the complexity of systems, carries significant analytical potential. We first underline what we mean by the food system and relate our understanding of this term to those commonly found in the extant food studies literature. We then apply our conception to the specific case of the UK. Here we distinguish between four subsystems at which our “resilient food systems” can be applied. These are, namely, the agro-food system; the value chain; the retail-consumption nexus; and the governance and regulatory framework. On the basis of this conceptualisation we provide an interdisciplinary research agenda, using the case of the UK to illustrate the sorts of research questions and innovative methodologies that our food systems resilience approach is designed to promote.

This chapter explores the approaches to digital representation of Australian Aboriginal art and visitor engagement in museum exhibition spaces from a digital design perspective. It discusses recent developments in the fields of digital representation of Aboriginal art, immersive exhibition design and visitor engagement. Through a case study of an immersive exhibition on Australian Aboriginal art in the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, this chapter identifies how Aboriginal art can be digitally represented by appropriate immersive technologies ranging from augmented realities [ARs] and virtual realities [VRs] to mixed reality [MRs] and extended reality [XRs] for enhancing visitors’ immersive digital experience. According to the analysis, the digital representation of Aboriginal artworks needs to be conducted practically, cognitively and ontologically based on understanding Australian Aboriginal history and culture. Visitors can engage with Aboriginal art stories meaningfully through immersive exhibitions through this holistic approach.