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Teacher Education has been transforming throughout the world to cater to the emerging needs of quality education. Significant developments have taken place nationally and internationally in political, economic, and cultural fields, influencing education in general and teacher education in particular. The quality of education depends to a great extent on the quality of teachers. And, the quality of teachers depends on the way they are educated and trained. Pakistan has a vast education sector and a huge teaching force but teacher education in the country has not been keeping pace with modernization and development globally. Teacher education curricula, dissemination, evaluation and implementation revolved around traditional models for decades. However, there has been a growing realization to reform the teacher education system lately. The education policy (2009) of Pakistan indicates such realization on the part of the stakeholders. This chapter reports on an important teacher education reform program, which is based on collaboration between the government of Pakistan and the USAID. The Teacher Education Project (TEP), assisted by USAID, is a reform initiative that aimed at restructuring and modernizing teacher education in Pakistan. This chapter aims to provide insights into the objectives, importance and achievements of the project in terms of shaping the future direction of teacher education in Pakistan. It reports on the substantial structural and policy changes that took place in teacher education under the project. This chapter also highlights the possible challenges in the way of useful implementation and sustainability of this and similar education reform initiatives in Pakistan.

The current study aims to use bioecological theory to examine the effects of different contextual factors such as husbands’ desire for children, visit by a family planning worker, media messages, and province level on women’s use of contraception in Pakistan. Two cross-sectional data sets were taken from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (PDHS), conducted in 2006–07 and 2012–13, which included 3,811 and 4,871 currently married, lower socioeconomic status (SES) women aged 15–49 years, respectively. Using logistic regression, the results showed that women’s perception of a husband’s desire for children and visit by family planning workers were significant predictors of women’s use of contraception in both periods (i.e. PDHS 2006–07 and PDHS, 2012–13). Specifically, those women who had a desire for children similar to their husband were more likely to use contraception than those who either were not sure about their husband’s desire for children or whose desire for children was less or more than their husband. Moreover, those women who had at least one visit from a family planning worker during the 12 months prior to the survey were more likely to use contraception than their counterparts.

This chapter offers a comprehensive review the literature on authentic leadership (AL). The authors employ a bibliometric approach to identify, classify, visualise and synthesise relevant scholarly publications and the work of a core group of interdisciplinary scholars who are key contributors to the research on AL. They review 264 journal articles, adopting a clustering technique to assess the central themes of AL scholarship. They identify five distinct thematic clusters: authenticity in the context of leadership; structure of AL; social perspectives on AL; dynamism of AL; and value perceptions of AL. Velt and Sinkovics assert that these clusters will help scholars of AL to understand the dominant streams in the literature and provide a foundation for future research.

The restrictive measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to everything across the world. The global crisis hit every sphere of life. The mobility restrictive nature of the pandemic was a major blow to the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. For a country like Pakistan, with an unstable economy and struggling tourism, the pandemic served as ground zero. This chapter critically examines tourism dimensions in Pakistan and how it sustained the impact of various crises. It pays attention to the concepts of vulnerability, social and community resilience, and adaptive capacity to provide a theoretical understanding of the revival of tourism in Pakistan. It also considers the impact of COVID-led measures on the tourism industry and corresponding initiatives of the government. The chapter concludes by arguing that Pakistan should carefully monitor and assess the current debates on tourism policies and practices. The chapter suggests that the national tourism strategy should incorporate a mechanism that can address tourism in crises in addition to addressing the environmental, socio-cultural and economic impact of tourism.

Considering the dearth of industry-specific empirical research exploring sustainability reporting in the context of developing countries, this chapter aims to critically examine the extent and the nature of sustainability information disclosure of environmentally polluting industries in India.

Data are collected from business responsibility reports (BRRs), sustainability reports, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports and integrated reports of all 57 energy and mining companies included in NIFTY500 Index at National Stock Exchange of India for the year 2017–2018 and 2018–2019. Content analysis is used to examine the sustainability disclosure practices and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistical analysis is performed to test the difference across various dimensions of sustainability reporting of companies.

The results indicate low environmental reporting of the key indicators by energy and mining companies in India. It is found that state-owned companies have better social reporting practices against private sector companies. The findings also indicate that Global reporting initiative (GRI) based reporting have better sustainability disclosure practices and companies reporting based on BRR lack quantitative information disclosure.

The findings of the present chapter have several implications for policymakers, investors, regulators and management of these high environmental and social impact companies in India. The findings which coincide with the key areas of sustainability disclosure can be used for improving sustainability disclosure practices by the various stakeholders.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the nature and extent of sustainability performance disclosure of the companies from polluting industries in India. This chapter also contributes to the existing sustainability reporting literature by providing evidence on industry-specific disclosure in the context of a developing country.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

The identities of Muslim women tend to be essentialized into binaries of what she is and what she ought to be (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016). For far too long Muslim women’s voices in North America have been marginalized by hegemonic Orientalist (Said, 1978) and traditionalist (Clarke, 2003) Islamic discourses. When it comes to issues of agency, empowerment, and self-expression, it is either imposed by Western ideals or regulated by traditionalist politics of Islam (Zine, 2006). As such, Muslim women activists must engage and negotiate within the dual and narrow oppressions of Orientalist and traditionalist Islamic representations of her (Khan, 1998; Zine, 2006). Given the scarcity of space provided in print media (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016; Golnaraghi & Mills, 2013) for Muslim women to construct, appropriate, and remake their own identities, some have turned to social media to challenge these dichotomies through activism and resistance. Such a space is necessary in order to recover, resurface, and reauthorize the hybrid voices, experiences, and identities of the Muslim woman on their own terms in order to challenge hegemonic discourse. Highlighting the nuances of feminist activism, particularly that of Muslim postcolonial feminists that can make a difference to Critical Management Studies (CMS) as a community concerned with social justice and challenging marginalization and oppression. The “Somewhere in America #Mipsterz” (Muslim hipsters) video launched in 2013, the site for our critical discourse analysis, is one case where this resistance can be seen, showcasing fashionable veiled Muslim women artistically expressing themselves to the beats of Jay Z.

The COVID-19 crisis has forced the majority of higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide to transition to distance education. All countries have faced several challenges, such as the deteriorating economy, poor ICT infrastructure, and insufficient training, in their transition to distance education, with the severity of these challenges being remarkable for developing countries. This chapter aims to investigate tertiary students’ perceptions, attitudes, experiences, and expectations of their higher education journey amid COVID-19 across four developing countries: Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh through an online questionnaire that was administered in each of these countries. This study found that many of the stances, attitudes, concerns, and challenges related to online learning experiences and the emergency status of higher education were common amongst the Lebanese, Afghani, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi participants. The participants across the four countries favored the physical classroom over online learning and identified the disadvantages of distance education that included lack of ICT skills, poor infrastructure, and insufficient training. The few differences that were identified across participants from these countries were mainly attributed to differences in contexts, including socio-economic and political contexts. These findings voice the concerns of one of the key stakeholders, tertiary students, that address the transition to distance education during emergency times and call for immediate intervention from decision and policy-makers.

Hisbah is one of the distinguished institutions that had emerged since the early days of the Islamic empire. Based on its cardinal duty to enjoin good and prohibit evil, over time, its functions gradually expanded, and its responsibilities increasingly grew. In light of the contemporary trend in establishing institutional framework for consumer protection, entrusting an agency with multifarious tasks may not be the best and effective way in handling consumer protection issues. Thus, this chapter attempts to explore the new paradigm of hisbah as a consumer protection institution in Malaysia with a special reference to the Islamic consumer credit industry. While utilising the doctrinal legal research methodology, relevant sources of law have been examined and analysed. This research finds that the classical hisbah institution provides a good reference point in establishing regulatory agency and dispute management body. Nevertheless, some modifications are required to remain relevant especially in terms of specialisation of role and function. Likewise, it is viewed that adjustment of the hisbah institution is also necessary regarding the characteristic of the muhtasib (ombudsman).

Sustainable energy like renewable energy plays a critical role in achieving sustainable development goals including energy security in emerging economics. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) constitutes about 23% of the world’s GDP, 40% of the world’s population and 36% share of the supply of primary energy in the world. Obviously the Bloc has tremendous potential in influencing the global sustainable clean energy transition with the advantages like lowering the costs of renewable, boosting employment in the sector of green energy, enhancement of energy security and improvement of local air quality. Despite the existence of varieties of renewable energy resources in the BRICS economies, renewable energy resources are found underdeveloped. The major objectives of this chapter are to assess progress of different forms of energy especially renewable energy, impact of development of renewable energy on carbon emission and policy issues in renewable energy development in the context of sustainable energy development of BRICS countries.