Monitoring the progress and impact of a multicountry, interdisciplinary research project on childhood stunting: the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub MEL protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) is an integral part of research, programme and policy development and implementation. However, MEL methods used to monitor and evaluate interdisciplinary research projects are often informal and under-reported. This article describes the MEL protocol of the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub (AASH). METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The AASH conducts interdisciplinary research into childhood stunting in India, Indonesia and Senegal across 23 distinct work packages. Project-specific MEL framework and methods will be implemented. A logframe will be developed to monitor and evaluate the research activities across the field sites including the number of participants recruited, questionnaires, measurements and procedures completed. MEL dashboards using Tableau and Glasscubes will be used to track and report progress, milestones and outcomes of the project. Dashboard outputs will be reported as numbers and percentages, with additional graphs/charts for easy visualisation. A 'learning' framework will be developed to outline appropriate pipelines for the dissemination of the research findings. This includes a theory of change explicating the overarching ambitions of the project in influencing policy, practice and research, and strategic engagement of relevant stakeholders to evaluate knowledge, attitudes and best practices for impactful engagement and dissemination of the research findings. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (17915/RR/17513); National Institute of Nutrition (ICMR)-Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India (CR/04/I/2021); Health Research Ethics Committee, University of Indonesia and Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital (KET-887/UN2.F1/ETIK/PPM.00.02/2019); and the National Ethics Committee for Health Research (CNERS), Senegal (Protocole SEN19/78). Findings from this work will be published in peer-reviewed journals, presented in conferences and disseminated to policy makers and research communities.

Creating culturally-informed protocols for a stunting intervention using a situated values-based approach (WeValue InSitu): a double case study in Indonesia and Senegal.

International development work involves external partners bringing expertise, resources, and management for local interventions in LMICs, but there is often a gap in understandings of relevant local shared values. There is a widespread need to better design interventions which accommodate relevant elements of local culture, as emphasised by recent discussions in global health research regarding neo-colonialism. One recent innovation is the concept of producing 'cultural protocols' to precede and guide community engagement or intervention design, but without suggestions for generating them. This study explores and demonstrates the potential of an approach taken from another field, named WeValue InSitu, to generate local culturally-informed protocols. WeValue InSitu engages stakeholder groups in meaning-making processes which 'crystallize' their envelope of local shared values, making them communicable to outsiders.Our research context is understanding and reducing child stunting, including developing interventions, carried out at the Senegal and Indonesia sites of the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub. Each national research team involves eight health disciplines from micro-nutrition to epigenetics, and extensive collection of samples and questionnaires. Local culturally-informed protocols would be generally valuable to pre-inform engagement and intervention designs. Here we explore generating them by immediately following the group WeValue InSitu crystallization process with specialised focus group discussions exploring: what local life practices potentially have significant influence on the environments affecting child stunting, and which cultural elements do they highlight as relevant. The discussions will be framed by the shared values, and reveal linkages to them. In this study, stakeholder groups like fathers, mothers, teachers, market traders, administrators, farmers and health workers were recruited, totalling 83 participants across 20 groups. Themes found relevant for a culturally-informed protocol for locally-acceptable food interventions included: specific gender roles; social hierarchies; health service access challenges; traditional beliefs around malnutrition; and attitudes to accepting outside help. The concept of a grounded culturally-informed protocol, and the use of WeValue InSitu to generate it, has thus been demonstrated here. Future work to scope out the advantages and limitations compared to deductive culture studies, and to using other formative research methods would now be useful.

Sociocultural environmental factors and childhood stunting: qualitative studies - a protocol for the Shared Values theme of the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub.

INTRODUCTION: Stunting is a significant and growing global problem that is resisting scientific attempts to understand it in terms of direct nutrition-related determinants. In recent years, research included more complex, indirect and multifactorial determinants and expanded to include multisectoral and lifestyle-related approaches. The United Kingdom Research Initiative Global Challenges Research Fund's (UKRI GCRF) Action Against Stunting Hub starts on the premise that dominant factors of stunting may vary between contexts and life phases of the child. Thus, the construction of a typology of clustered factors will be more useful to design effective programmes to alleviate it.The Shared Values theme seeks to build a bottom-up holistic picture of interlinked cultural contextual factors that might contribute to child stunting locally, by first eliciting shared values of the groups closest to the problem and then enquiring about details of their relevant daily activities and practices, to reveal links between the two. We define shared values as what groups consider 'valuable, worthwhile and meaningful' to them. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will recruit 12-25 local stakeholder groups in each site (in India, Indonesia and Senegal) involved in children's food and early learning environments, such as mothers, fathers, grandmothers, teachers, market vendors and health workers. The WeValue InSitu process will be used to assist them to collectively elicit, negotiate and self-articulate their own shared values through exploration of shared tacit knowledge. Focus group discussions held immediately subsequently will ask about daily activities relevant to the children's environment. These contain many examples of cultural contextual factors potentially influencing stunting locally, and intrinsically linked to shared values articulated in the previous session.

An exploration of nudging towards transformative environmental behaviour changes prior to a values-crystallization event.

Reduction of environmental problems needs durable transformative changes in behaviour, and developments in Transformative Learning are increasingly called for, to achieve them. Only recently has a method been demonstrated to routinely produce transformations in behaviour - a significant step forward - but they are not focused in specific thematic directions, and rarely environmental, which leaves the research need still unanswered. Here, we present an exploration of the use of that method (which involved values-crystallization of groups) with prior Nudging, with the aim of increasing the environmentally-themed transformed behaviours. The Nudging used was one open question about the environment in participants' current roles, plus a short questionnaire about current environmental behaviours, which also provided baseline data. Comparison with 3-4-days post-event interviews revealed most of the reported transformative behaviours were indeed environmental, such as waste sorting, water and electricity conservation, found retained via further 14-56-days post-event interviews. These results, from two separate groups of participants, suggest that the Nudging_Plus_Values-crystallization approach may be useful for pro-environmental practitioners in sustainability. Furthermore, the process involved of influencing choice spaces via Nudging, in values-crystallization events, deserves further studies to confirm causation and understand linkages between Nudging, reflection, values-crystallization, and Transformative Learning because it is likely that the process can be easily transferred to many different types of behaviour change programs, which will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and practitioners.

Local contextual factors of child stunting found via shared values of stakeholder groups: an exploratory case study in Kaffrine, Senegal.

OBJECTIVE: This work aims to demonstrate an original approach to identify links between locally situated shared values and contextual factors of stunting. Stunting results from multi-factorial and multi-sectoral determinants, but interventions typically neglect locally situated lived experiences, which contributes to problematic designs that are not meaningful for those concerned and/or relatively ineffective. DESIGN: This case study investigates relevant contextual factors in two steps: by first facilitating local stakeholder groups (n 11) to crystallise their shared-values-in-action using a specialised method from sustainability studies (WeValue_InSitu (WVIS)). Secondly, participants (n 44) have focus group discussions (FGD) about everyday practices around child feeding/food systems, education and/or family life. Because the first step strongly grounds participants in local shared values, the FGD can reveal deep links between contextual factors and potential influences on stunting. SETTING: Kaffrine, Senegal, an 'Action Against Stunting Hub' site. December 2020. PARTICIPANTS: Eleven stakeholder groups of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, pre-school teachers, community health workers, farmers, market traders and public administrators. RESULTS: Local contextual factors of stunting were identified, including traditional beliefs concerning eating and growing practices; fathers as decision-makers; health worker trust; financial non-autonomy for women; insufficient water for preferred crops; merchants' non-access to quality produce; religious teachings and social structures affecting children's food environment. CONCLUSIONS: Local contextual factors were identified. Pre-knowledge of these could significantly improve effectiveness of intervention designs locally, with possible applicability at other sites. The WVIS approach proved efficient and useful for making tangible contextual factors and their potential links to stunting, via a lens of local shared values, showing general promise for intervention research.

Recovery of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) polymers from a mixed microbial culture through combined ultrasonic disruption and alkaline digestion.

PHAs are a form of cellular storage polymers with diverse structural and material properties, and their biodegradable and renewable nature makes them a potential green alternative to fossil fuel-based plastics. PHAs are obtained through extraction via various mechanical, physical and chemical processes after their intracellular synthesis. Most studies have until now focused on pure cultures, while information on mixed microbial cultures (MMC) remains limited. In this study, ultrasonic (US) disruption and alkaline digestion by NaOH were applied individually and in combination to obtain PHAs products from an acclimated MMC using phenol as the carbon source. Various parameters were tested, including ultrasonic sound energy density, NaOH concentration, treatment time and temperature, and biomass density. US alone caused limited cell lysis and resulted in high energy consumption and low efficiency. NaOH of 0.05-0.2 M was more efficient in cell disruption, but led to PHAs degradation under elevated temperature and prolonged treatment. Combining US and NaOH significantly improved the overall process efficiency, which could reduce energy consumption by 2/3rds with only minimal PHAs degradation. The most significant factor was identified to be NaOH dosage and treatment time, with US sound energy density playing a minor role. Under the semi-optimized condition (0.2 M NaOH, 1300 W L-1, 10 min), over 70% recovery and 80% purity were achieved from a 3 g L-1 MMC slurry of approximately 50% PHAs fraction. The material and thermal properties of the products were analyzed, and the polymers obtained from US + NaOH treatments showed comparable or higher molecular weight to previously reported results. The products also exhibited good thermal stability and rheological properties, compared to the commercial standard. In conclusion, the combined US and NaOH method has the potential in real application as an efficient process to obtain high quality PHAs from MMC, and cost-effectiveness can be further optimized.

A systematic review of food loss and waste in China: Quantity, impacts and mediators.

Although food loss and waste (FL&W) is high on China's national policy agenda, there is still little scientific information published about how much FL&W exists in China, what its impacts are, and what needs to be done to reduce it. Furthermore, what is known about FL&W across the various hotspots of China's food supply chain is not accessible in one place due to the tendency of scholars to focus on one part of the food chain depending on their disciplinary backgrounds, thereby making it difficult to obtain a 'comprehensive whole supply chain perspective'. Thus, this review provides an interdisciplinary collation of what is already known about FL&W in China. A systematic review of both English and Chinese databases followed PRISMA guidelines further complemented with a qualitative content analysis process uncovered 57 articles. The view revealed confounding factors such as an inconsistency of the definitions and calculation methods used to measure FL&W, and research gaps such as a lack of focus on the behavioral factors pertaining to waste, and the limited range of social innovations studied to reduce it. Thus, this review will help in the development of research agendas designed to advance efforts in this field.

Drift in policy implementation: Incentives thwarted in a recycling programme.

An incentives-based residential recycling programme was designed and implemented for improving residential waste sorting in Shanghai city, but showed very limited success in its performance. To identify why, this study systematically analysed each step of implementation using key informant interviews and site observations. Results show that policy intentions were retained in the policy devolution processes from Municipality to District, and then to Street (ward) levels, but the incentives concepts were effectively nullified in the further devolution to community-level governance. The local implementers focused on formal key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to satisfy inspections. However, the KPIs, which had been devised to allow ease of measurement, were found to unintentionally cause divergence from the policy intention of incentivisation of residents. Furthermore, high scores for these KPIs masked the implementation failure. This identification of the effective derailing of a policy via conscientious implementation is worth highlighting for avoidance in other programmes, in recycling or elsewhere.

I Am vs. We Are: How Biospheric Values and Environmental Identity of Individuals and Groups Can Influence Pro-environmental Behaviour.

Most research in environmental psychology is conducted in individualistic countries and focuses on factors pertaining to individuals. It is yet unclear whether these findings also apply to more collectivistic countries, in which group factors might play a prominent role. In the current paper, we test the individual-focused value-identity-behaviour pathway, in which personal biospheric values relate to pro-environmental actions via environmental self-identity, in an individualistic and a collectivistic country. Furthermore, we test in both countries whether a new group-focused pathway also exists, in which group values relate to pro-environmental behaviour via environmental group identity, particularly in collectivistic countries. Questionnaire studies were conducted among Dutch (N = 161) and Chinese (N = 168) students. Our results indicated that personal biospheric values, mostly via environmental self-identity, predict pro-environmental behaviour in both countries. We also found initial support for our newly proposed value-identity-behaviour pathway at the group level, particularly in China. Yet, in both countries, the association between group-level variables and pro-environmental behaviour was weaker than for personal-level variables, and partly overlapped with personal-level variables. Our findings show the relevance of personal- and group-level factors in understanding pro-environmental behaviour in both individualistic and collectivistic countries, which has strong theoretical and practical implications, particularly for developing international strategies to promote pro-environmental actions across the world.

Local climate change cultures: climate-relevant discursive practices in three emerging economies.

In recent decades, greater acknowledgement has been given to climate change as a cultural phenomenon. This paper takes a cultural lens to the topic of climate change, in which climate-relevant understandings are grounded in wider cultural, political and material contexts. We approach climate-relevant accounts at the level of the everyday, understood as a theoretically problematic and politically contested space This is in contrast to simply being the backdrop to mundane, repetitive actions contributing to environmental degradation and the site of mitigative actions. Taking discourse as a form of practice in which fragments of cultural knowledge are drawn on to construct our environmental problems, we investigate citizens' accounts of climate-relevant issues in three culturally diverse emerging economies: Brazil, South Africa and China. These settings are important because greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are predicted to significantly increase in these countries in the future. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a range of citizens in each country using a narrative approach to contextualise climate-relevant issues as part of people's lifestyle narratives. Participants overwhelmingly framed their accounts in the context of locally-salient issues, and few accounts explicitly referred to the phenomenon of climate change. Instead, elements of climate changes were conflated with other environmental issues and related to a wide range of cultural assumptions that influenced understandings and implied particular ways of responding to environmental problems. We conclude that climate change scholars should address locally relevant understandings and develop dialogues that can wider meanings that construct climate-relevant issues in vernacular ways at the local level.

Distance is a barrier to recycling - or is it? Surprises from a clean test.

The distance of recycling bins from households is often considered important by practitioners, but published evidence for this uses only indirect and self-reported data. This study aims to provide such evidence by obtaining a clean test using measured distances in a walled community with 1200 households with the same building types, local governance, recycling and waste arrangements. The number of deposits each month of food waste for recycling at a designated site are logged via smart-cards allocated per household. The number of days per month that each household deposits showed a highly significant - but small - negative correlation with distance of the bin: fewer householders participate if further away, accounting for 3% of the variation. Surprisingly, there is no variation with distance among those who do participate: their recycling frequency does not vary. This second result is not consistent with the first in terms of cost/benefit concepts assumed by government planners, nor with the static theories of behaviour currently used in waste management research. We recommend that recycling practitioners note the smallness of the contribution of distance to recycling performance, and not overrate it. And we recommend that researchers make better use of non-static models (which model different stages towards behaviour change), which our second result appears to call for.

A values-based approach for generating localized social indicators for use in sustainability assessment and decision-making: Test case of brownfield soft reuse in Nigeria.

Sustainable development is a global aim, aided in its application by the use of social, environmental and economic indicators for monitoring, planning, and assessment. However, several significant weaknesses are reported which reveal the need for improvement of the social indicators such as problems of being difficult to localize; to measure, and to be complete; being less commonly used; and thus, leading to assessments which are unbalanced across the three domains. Here we demonstrate that a values-based approach called WeValue InSitu, previously known to reliably 'crystallize' local shared values, can be successfully used as a bolt-on process to produce localized social indicators for direct insertion into the SuRF-UK process. SuRF-UK is a widely used decision-support framework for sustainable remediation of brownfield sites, and we apply it here to a hypothetical scenario analysis for a real community in villages near a derelict Salt Lake in Nigeria. Results show the WeValue InSitu approach resolves the reported challenges of localized social indicators, does not introduce any new issues, and in addition provides a route for wider participation and auditability. The study shows that a mechanism of red-flag boundaries may need to be introduced into SuRF-UK to allow veto of unacceptable breaches of social issues by proposed scenarios.

Reflecting on Behavioral Spillover in Context: How Do Behavioral Motivations and Awareness Catalyze Other Environmentally Responsible Actions in Brazil, China, and Denmark?

Responding to serious environmental problems, requires urgent and fundamental shifts in our day-to-day lifestyles. This paper employs a qualitative, cross-cultural approach to explore people's subjective self-reflections on their experiences of pro-environmental behavioral spillover in three countries; Brazil, China, and Denmark. Behavioral spillover is an appealing yet elusive phenomenon, but offers a potential way of encouraging wider, voluntary lifestyle shifts beyond the scope of single behavior change interventions. Behavioral spillover theory proposes that engaging in one pro-environmental action can catalyze the performance of others. To date, evidence for the phenomenon has been mixed, and the causal processes governing relationships between behaviors appear complex, inconsistent and only partly understood. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by investigating accounts of behavioral spillover in three diverse cultural settings using qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that while around half of participants overall who were questioned recalled spillover effects, the other half had not consciously experienced spillover. There were few significant differences across cultures, though some forms of spillover effects were reported more in some cultures than others. More environmentally engaged participants across all three countries were significantly more likely to experience spillover than those who were less engaged. Accounts of within-domain spillovers were most commonly reported, mainly comprising waste, resource conservation and consumption-related actions. Accounts of between-domain spillover were very rare. Recollection of contextual and interpersonal spillover effects also emerged from the interviews. Our findings suggest that more conscious behavioral spillover pathways may be limited to those with pre-existing environmental values. Behavioral spillover may comprise multiple pathways incorporating conscious and unconscious processes. We conclude that targeting behavioral catalysts that generate more socially diffuse spillover effects could offer more potential than conventional spillover involving a single individual.

Using a conceptual site model for assessing the sustainability of brownfield regeneration for a soft reuse: A case study of Port Sunlight River Park (U.K.).

Brownfield regeneration to soft reuse such as recreation and amenity has become increasingly common due to the demand for the potential environmental, social and economic benefits that it can deliver. This has led in turn to an increased demand for improved tools to support decision-making for this style of regeneration: tools which are simple to use, based on robust scientific principles and preferably which can ultimately link to quantitative or semi-quantitative cost-benefit analyses. This work presents an approach to assessing and comparing different scenarios for brownfield regeneration to soft reuse and other end-points. A "sustainability linkages" approach, based on sustainability assessment criteria produced by the UK Sustainable Remediation Forum (SuRF-UK), is developed and used in a refined qualitative sustainability assessment, and applied to develop a conceptual site model of sustainability, for a specific case study site (Port Sunlight River Park, U.K., a public leisure park established and maintained on a capped and managed former landfill site). Ranking, on an ex post basis, highlighted the clear sustainability advantages that the establishment of the Port Sunlight River Park has compared with a hypothetical non-development scenario. The conceptual site model provides a clearer basis for understanding cause and effect for benefits and disbenefits and a rationale for grouping individual effects based on their ease of valuation, providing a road map for cost-benefit assessments by (1) being able to match specific linkages to the most appropriate means of valuation, and (2) transparently connecting the sustainability assessment and cost benefit assessment processes.

Reconceptualizing 'effectiveness' in environmental projects: can we measure values-related achievements?

There have been recent calls for a shift to an evidence-based paradigm in environmental management, grounded in systematic monitoring and evaluation, but achieving this will be complex and difficult. Evaluating the educational components of environmental initiatives presents particular challenges, because these programs often have multiple concurrent goals and may value 'human outcomes', such as value change, which are intangible and difficult to quantify. This paper describes a fresh approach based on co-creating an entirely new values-based assessment framework with expert practitioners worldwide. We first discuss the development of a generic framework of 'Proto-Indicators' (reference criteria constituting prototypes for measurable indicators), and then demonstrate its application within a reforestation project in Mexico where indicators and assessment tools were localized to enhance context-relevance. Rigorously derived using unitary validity, with an emphasis on relevance, practicability and logical consistency from user perspectives, this framework represents a step-wise advance in the evaluation of non-formal EE/ESD programs. This article also highlights three important principles with broader implications for evaluation, valuation and assessment processes within environmental management: namely peer-elicitation, localizability, and an explicit focus on ethical values. We discuss these principles in relation to the development of sustainability indicators at local and global levels, especially in relation to post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Field trials of a novel toolkit for evaluating 'intangible' values-related dimensions of projects.

A novel toolkit has been developed, using an original approach to develop its components, for the purpose of evaluating 'soft' outcomes and processes that have previously been generally considered 'intangible': those which are specifically values based. This represents a step-wise, significant, change in provision for the assessment of values-based achievements that are of absolutely key importance to most civil society organisations (CSOs) and values-based businesses, and fills a known gap in evaluation practice. In this paper, we demonstrate the significance and rigour of the toolkit by presenting an evaluation of it in three diverse scenarios where different CSOs use it to co-evaluate locally relevant outcomes and processes to obtain results which are both meaningful to them and potentially comparable across organisations. A key strength of the toolkit is its original use of a prior generated, peer-elicited 'menu' of values-based indicators which provides a framework for user CSOs to localise. Principles of participatory, process-based and utilisation-focused evaluation are embedded in this toolkit and shown to be critical to its success, achieving high face-validity and wide applicability. The emerging contribution of this next-generation evaluation tool to other fields, such as environmental values, development and environmental sustainable development, shared values, business, education and organisational change is outlined.

Two measured parameters correlated to participation rates in curbside recycling schemes in the UK.

Local authorities in the United Kingdom are currently changing their approach towards recycling as they attempt to meet legislative targets. An important part of this drive is the provision of an effective curbside recycling service and it is vital to understand the parameters that influence the performance of the system offered. In this article, three primary datasets, collected from over 1400 households each, are examined for parameters correlated to participation rates. Two measured parameters were found that are not commonly identified in previous studies of curbside recycling schemes, and they are shown to merit further investigation as useful tools for planning purposes. One is the number of types of material collected; participation rates are greater for schemes collecting more materials. The second is the number of households situated on the same road; the lower the number, the higher the participation rate. In both cases, evidence of the measured correlation is presented, justifying their usefulness for planning. The multiple underlying factors causing the correlations are not identified here, but suggestions are made for further studies.