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Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.

Political transition to democracy is hampered by human rights abuses by the military junta against ethnic minorities that constitute a third of the country's population. Human rights violations are unprecedented in terms of human suffering, extra judicial killings, torture, forced labour and displacement, rape and rapine. The situation has further deteriorated due to a bloody conflict between the armed opposition groups from ethnic minority states and central authorities. Armed opposition groups are demanding a greater autonomy, which the military government has been denying. Although the military government signed over a dozen cease-fires with armed groups, there has been no real progress to reach a permanent political solution. As a result, human rights abuses are on the increase, especially in Shan, Kayin (Karen), Kayah (Karenni), and Mon minority states where the military junta's army is engaged in counter-insurgency operations against armed groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role faculty learning communities (FLCs), a common ADVANCE intervention, play in retention and advancement; and the ways in which FLC spaces foster professional interactions that are transformative and support the careers of women, underrepresented minority (URM) and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty in research universities.

The authors employed a mixed methods case study approach set at a large, research-intensive institution, which had received an NSF ADVANCE grant to focus on issues of gender equity in the retention and advancement of STEM faculty. Land Grant University implemented retention and advancement efforts campus-wide rather than only in STEM areas, including five FLCs for women, URM faculty and NTT faculty. The primary sources of data were retention and promotion data of all faculty at the institution (including the FLC participants) and participant observations of the five FLCs for five years.

The analysis of retention and advancement data showed that participation in FLCs positively impacted retention and promotion of participants. The analysis of participant observations allowed the authors to gain insights into what was happening in FLCs that differed from faculty’s experiences in home departments. The authors found that FLCs created third spaces that allowed individuals to face and transgress the most damaging aspects of organizational culture and dwell, at least for some time, in a space of different possibilities.

The authors suggest additional studies be conducted on FLCs and their success in improving retention and advancement among women, URM and NTT faculty. While the authors believe there is a clear professional growth and satisfaction benefit to FLCs regardless of their effect on retention and advancement, NSF and NIH programs focused on increasing the diversity of faculty need to know they are getting the return they seek on their investment and this line of research can provide such evidence as well as enhance the rigor of such programs by improving program elements.

FLCs offer higher education institutions a unique opportunity to critically reflect and understand organizational conditions that are not inclusive for groups of faculty. Professional interactions among colleagues are a critical place where academic and cultural capital is built and exchanged. The authors know from the authors’ own research here, and from much previous social science research that women, URM and NTT faculty often experience exclusionary and isolating professional interactions. FLCs should be created and maintained alongside other more structural and cultural interventions to improve equity for all faculty.

The study’s contribution to the literature is unique, as only a few studies have tracked the subsequent success of participants in mentoring or networking programs. Furthermore, the study reveals benefits of FLCs across different career stages, identity groups and position types (women, URM and NTT) and suggests the investment that many NSF-funded ADVANCE programs have made in funding FLCs has the potential to produce a positive return (e.g. more women and URM faculty retained).

The purpose of this paper is to explain why corruption is a serious problem in Myanmar and why the anti-corruption measures initiated by its military government are ineffective.

The paper describes Myanmar’s unfavourable policy context and analyses the perceived extent and causes of corruption in Myanmar before evaluating the effectiveness of its anti-corruption measures.

Myanmar’s location in a bad neighbourhood surrounded by corrupt countries, its vulnerability to the natural resource curse and ethnic conflict, as well as more than five decades of ineffective military rule have hindered its anti-corruption efforts. Corruption remains a serious problem in Myanmar because of the military regime’s lack of political will and failure to address these causes: low salaries; red tape; weak rule of law; and cultural factors. The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC)’s performance during its first two years cannot be assessed because of the lack of information on its budget, personnel and activities. As the ACC is led by two former military generals, it is not perceived to be independent, and has been criticised for focusing on investigating corruption cases and corruption prevention at the expense of corruption education.

This paper will be of interest to those policy-makers, scholars and anti-corruption practitioners, who are interested in learning about the causes of rampant corruption in Myanmar and why the anti-corruption measures initiated have failed to curb it.

In Burma, sacred giving (dana) is a principal obligation for all Buddhist practitioners. This paper evaluates the practical and cultural underpinnings of donation practices. Dana redistributes resources, it operates as a system for the production of status distinctions and patron-client ties, and as a means to fulfilling proximate soteriological goals and sacred relations. Elaborating on distinctions Godelier draws between “ideology” and “mentalite,” I argue that sacred giving – especially as it is articulated in native theories about intention – participate in a “politics of sincerity” that impact the political legitimacy projects of the military junta.

The higher education (HE) sector in Myanmar is currently in a fragile, backward-looking state. Its fragility is due to the 2021 coup with its consequent civil disobedience movement, continued conflict between the military and people’s defence force, the junta’s spurious delivery of a post-Covid and post-coup education system, and the junta’s apparent abandoning of the previous civilian government’s progress with the National Education Strategic Plan. It is backward-looking because the current junta, like previous juntas in Myanmar, use education as a tool for military propaganda and to populate the education system with civil servants that are loyal, or at least supine, to the military. The task of this chapter is to provide an overview of HE in Myanmar and how its current condition aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4.3. This task is contextualised by considering the role of universities in the history of socio-political uprisings in Myanmar. Universities as theatres of communicative action have been and continue to be spaces of public resistance. This resistance and its accompanying vertical tension continue to shape the physical constitution of universities and the delivery of HE in Myanmar.

There is currently a great deal of attention in psychometric and statistical methods on ensuring measurement invariance when examining measures across time or populations. When measurement invariance is established, changes in scores over time or across groups can be attributed to changes in the construct rather than changes in reaction to or interpretation of the measurement instrument. When measurement in not invariant, it is possible that measured differences are due to the measurement instrument itself and not to the underlying phenomenon of interest. This chapter discusses the importance of establishing measurement invariance specifically in postsecondary settings, where it is anticipated that individuals' perspectives will change over time as a function of their higher education experiences. Using examples from several measures commonly used in higher education research, the concepts and processes underlying tests of measurement invariance are explained and analyses are interpreted using data from a US-based longitudinal study on bioscience PhD students. These measures include sense of belonging over time and across groups, mental well-being over time, and perceived mentorship quality over time. The chapter ends with a discussion about the implications of longitudinal and group measurement invariance as an important conceptual property for moving forward equitable, reproducible, and generalizable quantitative research in higher education. Invariance methods may further be relevant for addressing criticisms about quantitative analyses being biased toward majority populations that have been discussed by critical theorists engaging quantitative research strategies.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.