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Flooding is a frequent problem in the United Kingdom, with 1.8 million people living in homes that are likely to flood at least once in 75 years (Sayers, Horritt, Penning-Rowsell, & McKenzie, 2015). In 2015, the River Am burst its banks, resulting in up to 1 metre of flooding in Ambridge and causing significant damage and disruption to the village. A ‘4Ps’ approach is proposed to predict, prevent, protect from and prepare for flooding. Applying this model to evidence from Ambridge allows strategies for a flood resilient community to be explored.

The COVID-19 pandemic stressed the health care sector's longstanding pain points, including the poor quality of frontline work and the staffing challenges that result from it. This has renewed interest in technology-centered approaches to achieving not only the “Triple Aim” of reducing costs while raising access and quality but also the “Quadruple Aim” of doing so without further squeezing wages and abrading job quality for frontline workers.

How can we leverage technology toward the achievement of the Quadruple Aim? I view this as a “grand challenge” for health care managers and policymakers. Those looking for guidance will find that most analyses of the workforce impact of technological change consider broad classes of technology such as computers or robots outside of any particular industry context. Further, they typically predict changes in work or labor market outcomes will come about at some ill-defined point in the medium to long run. This decontextualization and detemporization proves markedly problematic in the health care sector: the nonmarket, institutional factors driving technology adoption and implementation loom especially large in frontline care delivery, and managers and policymakers understandably must consider a well-defined, near-term, i.e., 5–10-year, time horizon.

This study is predicated on interviews with hospital and home health agency administrators, union representatives, health care information technology (IT) experts and consultants, and technology developers. I detail the near-term drivers and anticipated workforce impact of technological changes in frontline care delivery. With my emergent prescriptions for managers and policymakers, I hope to guide sectoral actors in using technology to address the “grand challenge” inherent to achieving the Quadruple Aim.

This chapter explored the community resilience among the river bank erosion affected people of the coastal area in Bangladesh. This chapter particularly looked at the affected people’s opinions and participation in the governmental organization (GO) and non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) relief and recovery process. This study employed a mixed-method approach, where a multimethod data collection procedure was used and data were from three Upazilas (sub-divisions) of the Bhola District in Bangladesh. Quantitative data were collected using a structured interview schedule from 371 household heads, while the qualitative data were generated from 30 relevant participants through in-depth case interviews, focus group discussions and key informants’ interviews. Results showed that a higher number of affected people did not get government relief and services though they were happy with the government’s permanent measures, that is, building embankment. The affected people gave a negative impression about the GO and NGOs’ initiatives in the recovery process such as awareness building, needs assessment and formation of community-based organizations. Most of the affected households did not participate in the decision-making process of the recovery and construction planning and programmes that were controlled by the local power politics. Findings would be an important guideline to the policy-makers, disaster managers and development practitioners.

A series of changes have taken place over the past 20 years that have transformed the face of rural Greece. At the heart of these changes have been the rural farm household and the European agricultural and rural development policies.The processes of de-agriculturalization and rural restructuring in the early 1990s have been accompanied by ‘rurbanization’ and socio-economic integration of rural populations. These interrelated processes have internally transformed the rural areas, thus forming a ‘new rurality’ characterized by contraction of agriculture, expansion of tourism and construction, increased pluriactivity, increased employment of international migrant labour and the reorganization of farm family labour and operation. However, in the environment of economic crisis, the conditions of the ‘new rurality’ have been affected by falling incomes, contraction of public services and by a ‘back to the land’ movement. This ‘reverse mobility’ has the elements of both modernity and tradition: engagement with new methods of organization and work and rediscovery of traditional crops, products and cultures.The chapter will discuss the characteristics and dynamics of the changing physiognomy of rural Greece in the past 20 years focusing upon three paths: the de-agriculturalization of the countryside, the perplexity of rural mobilities and rural resilience during the economic crisis. The chapter moves from a theoretical analysis of these paths to a detailed account of secondary sources on the transformation of agriculture and the countryside in Greece before it discusses the implications of the crisis upon the population movements and the ‘rediscovery’ of the economic, social and cultural values of rurality.

This chapter explores the impact of the pandemic on Islamic commercial finance and Islamic social finance in a comprehensive manner. The chapter reveals that COVID-19 has provided more opportunities to Islamic social finance than Islamic commercial finance. The beauty of Islamic finance in this regard is reflected as the perception that Islamic finance does not achieve its objective as being a social finance is proved to be false as Islamic finance not only promotes profit maximization, but it has also the potential to achieve social objectives. Islamic commercial finance developments could be slower, but it is anticipated that Islamic social modes of financing will be used widely even by multilateral agencies to assist the communities who need help in this pandemic. The most important lesson one could learn from this pandemic in relation to Islamic finance is that Islamic finance is truly different from conventional finance and as such, it needs a unique legal, regulatory and governance framework to display the true potential of it.

Radical feminist theory and practice has actively questioned power relationships between men, women and people of color as a cornerstone of capitalist development since the 1970s while demonstrating the differential impact of such inequality generating structures and relationships on lives and bodies. Their argument about the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor-power both achieved through the dispossession of the female and (colonial) body and the expropriation of their work (Federici, 2004) is acutely relevant to the analysis of the consequences of the unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Yet, the crisis can be a motivating force for changing the established power relations. Using three different case studies of female initiatives aiming to counteract the imposition of neoliberal attack on their livelihoods in crisis-stricken Greece, the chapter examines how the existing experience of feminist thinking and activism from within and outside of academia, can contribute to the cultivation of affective embodied relations, and building upon the idea of “feminist solidarity” (Mohanty, 2003), in addressing the challenges of the crisis and post-crisis policies.

Why do emotions matter? Across the centuries the same answer has been returned; they are the salt of life without which it would lack savour. Thus, St Augustine asked rhetorically if we would not consider a general apatheia to be the worst of human and moral defects. Today, Elster repeats this refrain: “simply, emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter. Creatures without emotion would have no reason for living nor, for that matter, for committing suicide. Emotions are the stuff of life” (Elster, 1999, p. 403). However, it is a different question to ask about their purpose in relation to other things and other doings, but a necessary one because salt has to flavour something else. The answer developed here is that emotions are commentaries on our concerns. Emotions are about something and those somethings are the things we care about most or cannot but care about to some extent. As commentaries, emotions tell us how much we care and how we are doing in relation to concerns which are not reducible to our feelings about them.