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This paper aims to explore police perspectives on community engagement strategies within the context of crime prevention in South Africa, focusing on Johannesburg metropolitan police stations. The study’s objective is to scrutinise the effectiveness and challenges of community policing strategies.

Through a qualitative research approach, this study conducted unstructured interviews with station commanders and visible policing officers across 10 Johannesburg metropolitan police stations.

The findings reveal that community policing strategies, such as community–policing forums, sector policing, street patrollers and social media utilisation, can effectively engage communities as partners in crime prevention. However, certain challenges such as resource limitations and difficulties in policing-specific regions, were also identified.

This study contributes to the broader understanding of community–policing partnerships and the practical implications of community–policing strategies in South Africa, suggesting areas for improvement and adaptation to the unique South African context. This knowledge can help optimise efforts to foster stronger relationships between police and communities, bolster public trust and ultimately improve crime prevention outcomes.

Purpose: Urban centres have been argued to be crucial in the battle for sustainability. With more than half of the global population presently living in cities, the sustainability challenges of global warming, environmental degradation, social inequality, and economic recessions have continued to thrive. To this end, there have been efforts to revive and improve the existing physical and social structure of cities in a process known as urban regeneration. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of sustainability assessment frameworks in urban regeneration.

Approach: Aligning with the positivism philosophical position, and using document analysis as a data collection method, the study discusses the state of the art of urban regeneration and its application in recent times. The study also reviewed selected neighbourhood sustainability assessment frameworks as a tool for decision-making towards sustainability to know the extent in which they capture the goals of urban regeneration.

Findings: Findings showed that the uptake of the sustainability assessment frameworks could play a role in enhancing integration of local context, social wellbeing and economic prosperity, environmental quality, and stakeholder engagement at the neighbourhood level which are the main aspects of urban regeneration.

Theoretical and practical implications: In theory, this paper establishes the assumption that with some revisions, sustainability assessment frameworks could serve as a tool for decision-making in urban regeneration process. Practise-wise, urban regeneration at the neighbourhood level can now be measured against sustainability benchmarks and indicators.

The current study evaluated (1) characteristics of the community leadership development program associated with successful participant recruitment, (2) active ingredients that promoted fellow engagement and program completion and (3) how the program addressed blackness and racism.

Individual interviews were conducted with a representative subset of former program fellows.

Results indicated that offering training in small cohorts and matching fellows with individual mentors promoted program interest. Program strengths and unique ingredients included that the program was primarily led by people from the Black community, program malleability, and that the program was a partnership between fellows and leadership. Additionally, the program was responsive to fellows’ needs such as by adding a self-care component. Fellows also noted dedicated space and time to discuss race and racism. Results offer a unique theoretical perspective to guide leadership development away from the uniform or standardized approach and toward one that fosters diversity and equity in leadership.

Altogether, this work demonstrates how leadership development programs can be participant-informed and adapted to participants’ social and cultural needs.

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the relational work carried out in mentoring programmes and the implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

This study is based on field research of a mentoring programme bringing together senior and newly graduated workers in a large Swedish health care organisation. In total, 54 qualitative interviews with mentors, mentees, HR, managers and union representatives are included.

The findings point to the role of trust and a psychological sense of community in the socialisation work that goes on in relationships between the mentor and the mentee. This in turn leads to increased social capital in the form of learning and retaining workers. The conditions for being vulnerable and asking questions, as well as daring to be independent, are an essential and decisive part of constructing bonding within the professional group and bridging out to other professions and parts of the organisation.

The practical contribution from this study is the workplace conditions that are central to organising mentoring programmes, with implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

With its theoretical focus on social capital, the study shows the importance of relationships for learning and retaining both newly graduated and experienced employees in a context of high employee turnover. It is central to achieving strong and mutually beneficial relationships through continual and trustful interaction between actors. By using the concepts of social capital, socialisation agents and psychological sense of community, this study contributes to an understanding of mentoring and workplace learning.

Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.

International business as a field values perspectives from various contexts, but scholars from emerging markets face a number of often-unseen challenges preventing them from fully contributing to the field. This study aims to explain those challenges and what the author has done to manage them.

This is a Reflexive piece in which the author makes sense of her own experience as a scholar not only of but also in an emerging market, as well as the experiences at her school in seeking to develop a high-quality doctoral program.

When leading scholars interact, whether in writing or in person, they tend to be in academically and otherwise well-resourced locations. This is true even for the leading international business scholars of emerging markets, and it imposes time and financial costs on scholars located in emerging markets wanting to participate in such conversations. Having experienced such challenges, the author worked with colleagues to design a doctoral program that could nurture rich scholarly conversations at the school. However, there remains a clear and pervasive tension between the inclusive aspirations of the field and the tendency for cutting-edge academic conversations to be concentrated in the developed world.

The experiences of emerging market scholars remain underrepresented in the field. By drawing on her own experience, both as a scholar and the head of the doctoral program at her school, the author provides suggestions for how to think about and develop a more inclusive scholarly conversation.

The world over is becoming urbanized, and people are migrating to cities in large numbers in search of opportunities. The increased urbanization has posed challenges such as congestion, rising crime, and growing urban poverty. The governments respond by providing amenities such as schools, hospitals, and housing to meet to increase in demand for these facilities. However, there is a need for the provision of facilities that meets the expectations of the people, particularly on the proximity of amenities and bundles of utility-bearing housing characteristics. In an attempt to address the challenge mentioned, the study estimated the hedonic characteristics influencing the willingness to accept and willingness to pay for housing facilities in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Using a multiple linear regression model and artificial neural network, the study found out that properties with a bathroom, garage and large floor size have a higher value compared to properties without these facilities.When making decisions to acquire a property, buyers consider the availability of discounts and the prevailing property price. Overall, willingness to pay and accept decisions are mainly determined by location and the price at which homogeneous neighborhood properties were sold. Therefore, the study recommends that urban town planners and other housing authorities prioritize the construction of properties with larger floor areas, parking bays, and bathrooms using a cost-effective mechanism that makes the properties affordable to residents.

Background: The prevalence of obesity in English adults and children has reached critical levels. Obesity is determined by a wide range of factors including the environment and actions to reduce obesity prevalence requires a whole systems approach. The spatial planning system empowers local authorities to manage land use and development decisions to tackle obesogenic environments.

Methods: This research aimed to better understand what and how planning powers are being utilised by local authorities to help tackle population obesity. It reviewed literature on the six planning healthy weight environments themes. It identified what powers exist within the planning system to address these themes. It collated professionals’ perspectives on the barriers and opportunities through focus groups within local authorities and semi-structured interviews with national stakeholders.

Results: The research complements current research on the association between the environment and obesity outcomes, though methods employed by researchers in the literature were inconsistent. It identified three categories of planning powers available to both require and encourage those with responsibilities for and involvement in planning healthy weight environments. Through direct engagement with practitioners, it highlighted challenges in promoting healthy weight environments, including wider systems barriers such as conflicting policy priorities, lack of policy prescription and alignment at local levels, and impact from reduced professional and institutional capacity in local government.

Conclusions: The conclusions support a small but increasing body of research which suggests that policy makers need to ensure barriers are removed before planning powers can be effectively used to promote healthy weight environments as part of a whole systems approach. The research is timely with continuing policy and guidance focus on tackling obesity prevalence from national government departments and their agencies. This research was conducted as part of a Master of Research at Leeds Beckett University associated with a national whole-systems to obesity programme.

Public realm urban regeneration projects aim to provide facilities for the common good such as improved road systems, public parks, museums and cultural institutions. Driven by political priorities, the expected benefits for society comprise of the proposed regeneration outcomes articulated in a masterplan vision. As a philosophical concept, common good in the context of urban regeneration is explored in this study to understand the expectations for major, long-term regeneration projects and the intended project objectives. In the approach to governance, there should be a relationship between monitoring indicators adopted by the regeneration project as part of the governance framework and their alignment with the common good. These concepts are analysed through a case study of the development and reporting of benchmark indicators established at the start of a major 20-year urban redevelopment in 2010. The monitoring and enhancement concept implemented required indicators to be developed and embedded in the regeneration process to, not only monitor, but also enhance sustainability. The longitudinal case study, at the interim point 10 years since the establishment of these indicators, will evaluate the sustainability of the urban regeneration and evaluate current evidence for the common good. The indicators were developed following the principles of a theme orientated framework in line with the UK and Scottish Government approach at that time. The process of indicator development was iterative, refined and finalised through working closely with local authority, Scottish Enterprise and partnership stakeholders (civic oriented organisations) to capture evidence of progress towards the masterplan vision. Ten years on, conclusions examine whether these indicators could be used a proxy for common good. The conclusion will identify the extent to which we would need to revise indicators to address any gaps to become a more accurate measure of common good.

In this study, the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction for Botswana is examined using the annual data from 1990 to 2021. The study was motivated by the need to establish if access to electricity could be a panacea on poverty reduction in Botswana. Given that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals deadline is fast approaching, and Botswana being one of the signatories, is expected to end poverty in all its forms – Goal 1. Establishing the role that electrification plays in poverty alleviation, helps in refocusing Botswana’s poverty alleviation strategies on factors that have high impact on poverty. The main objective of this study, therefore, is to investigate the relationship between poverty alleviation and access to electricity in Botswana.

The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to investigate the nature of the relations. Two poverty proxies were used in this study namely, household consumption expenditure and life expectancy.

The study found access to electricity to reduce poverty in the long run and in the short run, regardless of the poverty measure used. Thus, access to electricity plays an important role in poverty alleviation and Botswana is recommended to continue with the rural and urban electrification initiatives.

The study explores the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction in Botswana, a departure from the current studies that examined the same relationship using energy consumption in general. This is on the back of increasing dependence of economic activities on electricity as a major source of energy.