Call for transparency of COVID-19 models.

The EU Response to COVID-19: From Reactive Policies to Strategic Decision-Making.

In the context of numerous economic, political, social and environmental crises, the role of companies regarding social and environmental responsibility is one of the topics on the agenda of many interest groups, responsibility and sustainability becoming key aspects of doing business globally. Thus, as a result of the pressures exerted by various stakeholders on companies regarding the reporting of non-financial information, more and more entities have made sustained efforts to include CSR practices in their business strategies. In this sense, both at the business environment and at the academic level, the question of the impact that the adoption of CSR practices has on the performance and sustainability of businesses in various social and economic contexts has been raised. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of CSR policies and practices in maintaining the performance and sustainability of SME activity in times of crisis. In order to achieve the proposed goal, two main objectives were drawn, namely: O1 – Identification of the effects of CSR policies and practices at the level of SMEs; O2 – Evaluation of the sustainability of SME businesses in the field of food industry under the effect of multiple crises. Keywords: Crisis, CSR Practices, Performance, Smes, Sustainability

In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.

The (post)colonial logics of speed and convenience are manifest in many of today’s infrastructural projects, creating what we consider to be ‘fast infrastructures’. These infrastructures create ease for some and harm for others while exacerbating social and environmental crises around the world. Addressing these crises requires, we argue, a slowing down. Enter the role of ‘slow infrastructures’. In this paper, we highlight two forms of slow infrastructure that provide possibilities for rearranging our infrastructural orientations: composting and rainwater harvesting. Drawing on fieldwork conducted throughout 2018 and 2019 in Kochi, Kerala, this research asserts that in order to do infrastructure differently, an unworking of convenience and speed is required. This unworking can be achieved through an attunement to multi-species and more-than-human relations, matched with a distributed ethic of maintenance and care. Our ethnographic examples, one from a hospital and another from a hotel, suggest that slow infrastructures can meaningfully offset the threat of disfunction and ‘urban failure’ that confronts cities increasingly marked by turbulence and uncertainty. While these examples draw from the tropics of urban South India, they offer lessons helpful to unworking the harm caused by fast infrastructures in other parts of the globe.

Based on the past lessons of history, public policy priorities during times of crisis should aim at strengthening social welfare and mental health services, monitoring risks and symptoms over critical time periods, and should pay special attention to high-risk and vulnerable groups and render assistance in priority areas of need. Governments play a critical role in providing social protection but face competing demands for funding (Marmot and Bell, BMJ, 338:858–860 b1314, 2009). The onus is on health and social policy advocates to lobby for political action to strengthen and maintain safety nets. Resource allocation needs to be prioritized to make healthcare more affordable, and social and healthcare financing needs to be diversified for this purpose. Investment in prevention and early detection and treatment of illness is good public policy in times of economic crisis, and an urgent priority is the strengthening of mental health services in anticipation of the increased demand (Phua and Kua, Asia Pacific Psychiatry, 1(2):55–57, 2009). Economic crises should provide opportunities and the imperative to implement evidence-based health policies, to protect and expand public health budgets in order to avoid longer-term social and economic costs.

Understanding Global Crises is an innovative and interdisciplinary text that investigates the key contemporary economic, social, and environmental crises and demonstrates their deep interconnection. Contributing to the discussion of large-scale crises, this book provides a conceptual framework to understand the current global landscape. Essential cascading crises topics, such as economic collapse, climate change, racial injustice, domestic violence, and epistemic oppression, are explored in order to equip readers with the clarity to understand global crises, assess policy interventions, and analyze social responses. To achieve future resilience, the book shows that society must recognize various forms of inequality and make policy changes. Each chapter showcases an international case study, covering real-life examples of topics such as climate disinformation, vaccine distribution disparities, environmental racism, and socioeconomic deprivation. Other features of the book include key terms, suggested further reading, and discussion questions, as well as online supplements comprising PowerPoint slides and an instructor’s guide. Understanding Global Crises will be a valuable text to support courses in economics, environmental studies, political science, public health, and social policy.

The police function in times of crisis: lessons from the Covid-19 crisis This article is a contemplative reflection on a research paper we previously wrote on police street work during the Covid-19 crisis, which we believe cannot be separated from the nature of our complex risk society. During the Covid-19 crisis, police officers on the street had to enforce nationally promulgated precautions aimed at preventing the risk of the spread of the coronavirus. This changed the profile of police street work, which became more concerned with everyday social intercourse, rather than the social domain that police officers normally focus on in their function of maintaining law and order and providing assistance. Because of this, police officers were confronted with the broader social effects of the ‘Covid-19 measures’ the national government had lost sight of. This regularly led to ethical dilemmas, such as the question of whether it was right to act against people who had engaged in behavior that was before (and after) the Covid-19 crisis not worthy of punishment. We draw two broad lessons regarding the function of the police in times of crisis from this. First, it is important not to position the police one-dimensionally as a sword force that enforces national measures, but as an enforcement agency that helps society to get through a crisis. Local custom work, under the authority of the mayor, is in line with this. Second, there needs to be explicit discussion within the police about the ethical dilemmas involved in maintaining precautionary measures.

In this chapter, I explore the role of critique in teaching and teacher education in an era of ongoing socio-political, economic, and environmental crises. While critique remains essential for addressing injustice and enabling transformative possibilities, certain tendencies within it – particularly those that reduce complexity, rely on binary logics, or privilege moral certainty – may inadvertently limit the very emancipatory aims they seek to promote. Rather than rejecting critique, I argue for the need to revisit what it means to engage critically within teacher education. Drawing on Adorno’s negative dialectics and Thiele’s concept of affirmation, I advocate for a generative critical praxis, one that is grounded in ethical reflexivity, affective attunement, and a sustained openness to complexity. I discuss how critique can become more responsive by foregrounding the emotional and political entanglements of teaching and teacher education, especially in times of crisis.

Modernity is often understood as a time of crisis. Health, humanitarian, economic, and environmental crises are just some crises characterizing the present. This special issue investigates these interwoven crises by investigating the subject in crisis, as making sense of how our worlds are changing requires interrogating how we ourselves are changing. How can we apprehend the subject and forms of subjectivities implied when evoking specific crises responses? In this introduction, we suggest reading current crises as expressions, effects, and accelerations of a longstanding epistemological crisis sustaining the modern articulation of subjectivity. To trace the subjectivity/crisis link we mobilize Derrida's notion of aporia, which exposes the unresolvable tension(s) at the foundation of concepts, to survey how subjectivity has been examined in political theory and international relations (IR) and to posit the continued necessity of immanent critiques of modern subjectivity. We conclude by setting out the individual contributions to this special issue.

Corporate social irresponsibility may, indeed, be one of the “grand challenges” of international business and management research. Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) is broadly assumed to lead to performance decline and reputational damage for those firms involved in acts of wrongdoing. The overview of extant research presented in this chapter illustrates how and why these assumptions are not always supported, therefore explaining, at least in part, the many examples of irresponsible firm behavior observed in business practice. The chapter points to the discrepancies between CSI theory and CSI practice, followed by a discussion concerning the opportunities and challenges associated with acts of irresponsible firm behavior, particularly during times of crises and disruptions. The discussion captures key managerial and policy implications around curtailing corporate social irresponsibility.KeywordsCorporate social irresponsibility (CSI)Performance outcomesOrganizational reputationStakeholder expectationsESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance)Crises and disruptions

This contribution focuses on the search for wellbeing at a time of the profound crisis of the Anthropocene, which demands that we move away from concepts of personal happiness and begin to imagine a more sustainable, relational wellbeing that includes both human and non-human partners. It argues that in this context female midlife is a fascinating terrain, which highlights the tension between the idea of happiness as a product of individual choice and the indisputable fact of our dependence on others. This article takes two recent German-language novels and explores the contrasting ways in which they figure their protagonist’s search for happiness in midlife. Austrian writer Doris Knecht’s Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte (2023) centres on a female protagonist who has experienced personal challenges and seeks to find greater happiness in middle age. Although Knecht’s novel reveals happiness as a social construct, it ultimately remains entangled in the inward-looking logic of happiness and a good life as the product of individualist optimization. By contrast, German author Judith Hermann’s Daheim (2021) situates the protagonist’s search for happiness in midlife as part of a broader context of social and environmental crisis and tentatively suggests the potential for a relational wellbeing based in an awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world.

The Rio + 20 were a landmark event in addressing serious environment & economic crisis affecting the world. The Earth summit was a historical opportunity to set the world on correct development trajectory. Negotiators from 191 countries came together to chart a road map for sustainable development and poverty eradication. But the developed and developing countries could not wipe out their differences and reach consensus on the definition of green economy. The new draft was in favour of developed countries .The current draft agreement is bereft of necessary vision and commitment for eradicating poverty and tackling environmental degradation to deliver sustainable development. The document is still empty and very weak in addressing daunting and grave concerns of women, youth and children, farmers, indigenous people and workers. It has failed in addressing the reproductive and sexual rights of women. There are no strong commitments to women’s rights to land, property and inheritance. The main objective of this paper is to explore that how Rio +20 has become a victim of reduced commitments by developed countries to support the developing countries in the quest of their development. This paper is an academic endeavor to reflect that how the summit is a missed opportunity to tackle the most important environmental issues. There is an increasing rift between fashionable environmental issues focused on by rich countries and the prosaic needs of the rest of the world. The document is an offense to the future generation since the governments have agreed to maintain the status quo on so many issues that will severally effect the future generation. The document is a far cry from the ambitious response to world’s mounting social, economic and environmental crisis. It has missed the opportunity to shift global agriculture onto a path towards ecological sustainability and justice for the hungry. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2014.v3n3p0139

BackgroundGovernmental interventions have been important tools for mitigating COVID-19 transmission, but they have also negatively impacted different gender-related components. We aimed to answer the following questions: What is the scope of the gender approach in the literature analysing health and social protection policies promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the challenges and recommendations for gender-sensitive policies for the post-pandemic and future crises?MethodsThe study design is based on three stages: a global synthesis of the evidence through a scoping review, the generation of a framework of emerging inequalities based on sociocultural markers, and the creation of a matrix with the challenges and recommendations. In this scoping review, we searched 10 online databases for studies published until April 2022 and conducted a content analysis on the extracted studies.ResultsOf the 771 identified records, 67 met our inclusion criteria. Most studies had a female person (52/67) as the first author. The binary model was the main approach addressed in the studies (61/67). The literature showed that the closure, distancing, and other social policies did not include a gender approach and generated negative gaps related to economic instability, reproductive roles, and gender violence. In the intersectionality dimension, multiple aspects emerged (macro, meso, micro-social level, and individual level). Greater gender gaps in connection with employment (related to increased housework) were observed during the closure and distancing stage of the pandemic. Asymmetries related to female participation in the management of the pandemic and an increase in discrimination and abuse of diversity groups were detected.ConclusionsWe observed gaps both in the gender approach both in knowledge and in policy implementation during the pandemic in the different countries explored in this work. This is a call to attention and action for researchers, political decision-makers, and other interested parties to incorporate and accentuate the gender perspective in all policies related to the post-pandemic period and future social and health crises.

BackgroundHealth inequalities can be tackled with appropriate health and social policies, involving all community groups and governments, from local to global. The objective of this study was to carry out a scoping review on social and health policies or interventions to tackle health inequalities in European cities published in scientific journals.MethodsScoping review. The search was done in “PubMed” and the “Sociological s” database and was limited to articles published between 1995 and 2011. The inclusion criteria were: interventions had to take place in European cities and they had to state the reduction of health inequalities among their objectives.ResultsA total of 54 papers were included, of which 35.2% used an experimental design, and 74.1% were carried out in the United Kingdom. The whole city was the setting in 27.8% of them and 44.4% were based on promoting healthy behaviours. Adults and children were the most frequent target population and half of the interventions had a universal approach and the other half a selective one. Half of the interventions were evaluated and showed positive results.ConclusionsAlthough health behaviours are not the main determinants of health inequalities, the majority of the selected documents were based on evaluations of interventions focusing on them.

The author reviews the WHO-EURO report Exploring Health Policy Development in Europe, critically analyzing its content and showing the technocratic nature of the report's discourse, which lacks any grasp or understanding of the political context in which health policies are developed and reproduced in the European region. In a supposedly apolitical way, the report attributes changes in health policy primarily to economic, technological, and demographic events, without referring to the enormously important political events in Europe that mediate these health policy changes. Also, the uncritical nature of the report—which simply reproduces the “conventional wisdom” in the policy circles of most international health agencies and reflects the fact that most of its contributors are employees of their national governments—gives it a public relations tone that limits its usefulness and relevance for most health and social policy analysts.