The impacts of climate change have become a series of important issues in global public health and environmental governance. As a major developing country with carbon emissions, China has actively ...participated in global climate and public health governance. The international academic research by Chinese scholars on carbon neutrality has gradually shifted from focusing on technological development to focusing on sustainability, green development, a decarbonization plan, public health and environmental governance. This study uses bibliometrics, scientometrics, and policy documents quantification to carry out a comparative study, comparing the keywords of China’s national “carbon neutrality” policies from 2006 to 2021 with the keywords of international research by Chinese scholars, and analyzes the evolution of the academic and political concerns and development measures of China’s carbon neutrality. It is found that in the stages of preliminary development and steady growth, China’s carbon neutrality research and policy portfolio grew in an orderly manner, and the influence of policy and the promotion of academic research gradually strengthened. After 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19, national policies and carbon neutrality research began to focus on green development and public health issues, and the intersections of policy keywords and academic keywords increased. Overall, the focus of Chinese scholars on carbon neutrality research and policy is gradually approaching and integrating, and the degree of interaction and integration between academia and politics is increasing. Under the complex situation of China’s decarbonization plans, climate changes, COVID-19, and international political and economic changes, China’s policy design and development model are conducive to public health, green development, and innovation transformation, and building a community with a shared future for mankind.
Policy is an important element of influencing individual health-related behaviours associated to major risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as smoking, alcohol consumption, ...unhealthy eating and physical inactivity. However, our understanding of the specific measures recommended in NCD prevention policy-making remains limited. This study analysed recent World Health Organization (WHO) documents to identify common policy instruments suggested for national NCD prevention policy and to assess similarities and differences between policies targeting different health-related behaviours.
Evert Vedung's typology of policy instruments, which differentiates between regulatory, economic/ fiscal and soft instruments, served as a basis for this analysis. A systematic search on WHO websites was conducted to identify documents relating to tobacco, alcohol, nutrition and physical activity. The staff of the respective units at the WHO Regional Office for Europe conducted an expert validation of these documents. The resulting documents were systematically searched for policy instruments. A word frequency analysis was conducted to estimate the use of individual instruments in the different policy fields, followed by an additional in-depth coding and content analysis by two independent reviewers.
Across all health-related behaviours, the following policy instruments were suggested most frequently in WHO guidance documents: laws, regulations, standards, taxes, prices, campaigns, recommendations, partnerships and coordination. The analysis showed that regulatory and economic/fiscal policy instruments are mainly applied in tobacco and alcohol policy, while soft instruments dominate in the fields of nutrition and especially physical activity.
The study confirms perceived differences regarding recommended policy instruments in the different policy fields and supports arguments that "harder" instruments still appear to be underutilized in nutrition and physical activity. However, more comprehensive research is needed, especially with respect to actual instrument use and effectiveness in national-level NCD prevention policy.
This article provides an overview of major dimensions of the professional development of adult educators identified in European policy documents, relevant reports and research. The author reviews the ...relevant policy visions of the past two decades, aiming to determine the extent to which professional development of adult educators is visible in European policy documents, how it is conceptualised and under which terms it is discussed. The author argues that adult educators play an essential role in adult education and society in general, are an important factor for securing quality in the sector, and are considered to be a critical pillar of adult education. To perform this role well, they require specialised, targeted and systematic professional development programmes in a changing environment which affects both their learners’ and their own position as educators. However, the analysis of the policy documents shows that despite a consensus about the importance of quality adult education, over the past two decades little attention has been given to the initial training and continuous professional development of adult educators in practical terms. Due to a lack of opportunities, their professional development seems weak and still faces many challenges.
Numerous guidelines and policies for ethical research practice have evolved over time, how this translates to global health practice in resource-constrained settings is unclear. The purpose of this ...paper is to describe how the concept of ancillary care has evolved over time and how it is included in the ethics guidelines and policy documents that guide the conduct of research in the global south with both an international focus and providing a specific example of Malawi, where the first author lives and works, as a case study.
Discourse analysis was conducted on 34 international ethics guidelines and policy documents. Documents were purposively selected if they contained a set of key terms that reflect the concept of ancillary care. Following a process of inductive discourse analysis, five key interrelated text phrases relating to ancillary care were extracted from the documents. The evolution of these phrases over time was explored as they represented the development of the concept of ancillary care as a component of ethical health research guidance and practice.
We found key interrelated phrases that represent discourses regarding the evolution of ancillary care including participant protection; provide care as appropriate; supererogation; patient needs prevail over science; and ancillary care as an obligation. Arguments for the provision of ancillary care were characterised by safeguarding the safety, health rights and well-being of study participants. However, despite the evolution of discourse around ethical obligations to provide ancillary care, this is rarely made explicit within guidance documents, leaving interpretive space for differential application in practice.
While there have been major changes to the ethics guidance that reflect significant evolution in the ethical conduct of research, the specific vocabulary or language used to explain the ethics of researchers' ancillary care obligations to the health needs of their research participants, lacks clarity and consistency. As a result, the concept of ancillary care continues to be under-represented in local ethical guidelines and regulations, with no clear directives for country-level research ethics committees to apply in regulating ancillary care responsibilities.
This chapter set up to examine the language of ‘family’ in key policy documents regulating family life in Lithuania. Drawing on theoretical ideas of Ribbens McCarthy the authors look into the ways of ...framing of family life, identify scripts of ‘normal’ family, and analyse how these, in turn, sought to portray migrant families as ‘troubling’. The research presented here was carried out in January-May 2018 and formed a sub-study of the project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family practices, circulation of care and return strategies’ (2017–2019) funded by the Lithuanian Research Council. Analysis of the strategic policy documents regulating family life in Lithuania in the period from 1995 to 2018 has revealed that the imagined orders of family life evolve over time, which explains the changes in the language used to describe family lives. The authors have identified the ways of portraying Lithuanian ‘family’ as ‘normal’, ‘harmonious’, and ‘sovereign’, and examined how legislators ‘troubled’ migrant families or – in a long run – depicted them as ‘sovereign, but silenced’ and as ‘important, but mysterious’.
•Continuous sentiment indices are calculated for the FOMC statements and minutes.•Sentiments of policy documents relay info that affect the predictability of financial markets.•Policy document ...sentiments help guide expectations about the future policy rates.
I develop a semi-automated method that systematically evaluates the information in FOMC meeting documents. This method highlights economic conditions and calculates document sentiment indices that proxy for the FOMC's interest rate tilt. I compare the sentiment indices of FOMC minutes and their corresponding FOMC statements. Using high-frequency data, I then examine how these sentiment indices are associated with the fed funds futures contracts, broad equity, and real estate investment trust indices, and exchange rate valuation of several major currencies against the U.S. Dollar. I find that minutes sentiments have a statistically significant association with the fed funds futures rate and the U.S. dollar's valuation.
As China has undergone a new round of healthcare reforms since 2009, the drug sector has been subjected to a series of reform measures that aim to ensure a sustainable supply of drugs with controlled ...expenditures. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of policy documents for the purpose of exploring the approaches within China’s drug reform. The analysis reveals that the National Health Commission (NHC) is the leading department of China’s drug reform, demonstrating that the core objective of drug reform is to ensure drug supply meets healthcare needs. The reform has evolved from its initial stage to the deepening and adjusting stage, with policy instruments becoming more interactive and involving greater numbers of implementers. Along with supply, drug quality and safety are the top concerns of the drug reform, followed by drug accessibility and affordability. Rational drug use is receiving greater attention in the deepening and adjusting stage. Environmental and demand-side instruments are being used more frequently in policies, while the utilization of supply-side instruments shows the opposite trend. Government departments at all levels play crucial roles in policy instrument implementation, with the significance of this function increasing. The participation of consumers in policy implementation is also rising. While medical institutions and enterprises are important implementers, their role is diminishing.
Water use in the tourism industry is a vital sustainability issue in destination development. Achieving sustainable water demand management (WDM) is challenging and requires destination stakeholder ...collaboration for effective participatory policymaking. Taking the WDM of Singapore's hotel sector as a case, this article applies a policy network analysis to prevailing stakeholder collaboration based on public policy documents published between 2001 and 2015. Thirty-three interconnected organisational stakeholders and 76 policy domains were identified. Longitudinal analyses revealed structural changes in stakeholder collaboration during WDM policy development. The findings also indicate that the policy stakeholders of WDM are becoming increasingly diverse, and with this expansion in stakeholder participation, the collaboration network has evolved from being simple to remarkably complex. This article also discusses the relationship between policy stakeholders and policy domains, revealing that the responsibility, available resources, and interests of stakeholders are the main factors influencing their policy preferences in this discourse. The results enrich our understanding of inter-stakeholder relationships and the dynamic relational structure of interdisciplinary policy system.
Accounts focusing on the relation between conceptualisations of parenthood and neuroDiscourse are missing within educational philosophy. This lacuna forms the background of this paper, which reports ...on a case study on the level of social policy documents addressing parents of the Flemish governmental branch office Kind & Gezin (Child & Family). The case’s focus is a critical analysis of discursive constructions of parenthood, and the extent to which results of neuroscience, as they appear in the documents, exert a change in these discursive constructions of good parenthood. The study deploys critical metaphor analysis to explore the conceptualisations of parenthood that are metaphorically constructed, what these constructions convey about good parenthood, and how they relate to neuroDiscourse. The analysis, firstly, points at neuroDiscourse of parenthood being operational in the documents, but operating in a different manner than that described in the literature. Nevertheless, neuroDiscourse of parenthood exerts a narrowing effect on the way parenthood is conceptualised in parenthood Discourse. Secondly, the analysis exposes the assumption that parenthood advice is best grounded in scientific evidence, facilitating the further occurrence of parenting advice based on neuroscience. Thirdly, in relating Kind & Gezin’s mission of optimal preventive family support to neuroDiscourse of parenthood, the possibility of neuro-governance of parents arises.
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