Vulnerability assessments as a political creation: tsunami management in Portugal.

Vulnerability assessments are a cornerstone of contemporary disaster research. This paper shows how research procedures and the presentation of results of vulnerability assessments are politically filtered. Using data from a study of tsunami risk assessment in Portugal, the paper demonstrates that approaches, measurement instruments, and research procedures for evaluating vulnerability are influenced by institutional preferences, lines of communication, or lack thereof, between stakeholder groups, and available technical expertise. The institutional setting and the pattern of stakeholder interactions form a filter, resulting in a particular conceptualisation of vulnerability, affecting its operationalisation via existing methods and technologies and its institutional embedding. The Portuguese case reveals a conceptualisation that is aligned with perceptions prevalent in national government bureaucracies and the exclusion of local stakeholders owing to selected methodologies and assessment procedures. The decisions taken by actors involved in these areas affect how vulnerability is assessed, and ultimately which vulnerability reduction policies will be recommended in the appraisal.

ISBARR Huddle: First-Year Medical Students Managing Critical Hypoglycemia as an Interprofessional Team.

Introduction: Recognizing a patient requiring urgent or emergent care and initiating evaluation and management must include elements that support teams working and thinking together. Although team communication strategies exist, a standardized approach for communicating about patients with urgent or emergent conditions is lacking. This simulation was designed to provide first-semester medical students with the opportunity to deliberately practice the foundational teamwork skills required to think as a team while caring for a patient with critical hypoglycemia. Methods: Students were introduced to a team huddle that was structured using ISBARR (identify, situation, background, assessment, recommend, recap) to assist in synthesizing gathered information and arriving at a diagnosis and associated care plan. Students practiced in small groups with faculty coaches and then applied the skills learned to two cases of a patient with critical hypoglycemia followed by debriefing. Results: Two hundred eight first-semester medical students participated in the simulation course across three campuses. We surveyed a single campus subset of 172 students. One hundred thirty-three students completed a postevent survey. The majority felt that the difficulty of the simulation was appropriate for their educational level (94%) and that the training would be applicable to real-life clinical events (76%) and would improve the quality and safety of care (100%). Survey comments highlighted teamwork and the use of the ISBARR huddle communication tool. Discussion: The course provided first-semester medical students with standardized practice of a team-based approach using huddle communication to advance patient care.

Participatory Mapping with Herders in a Climate Adaptation Research Project.

Declining grazing lands threaten the livelihoods of Fulɓe herders in Burkina Faso and other parts of Africa. I used GIS to spatially represent ethnographic narratives about land use and land cover changes. In a place where maps were unavailable or treated as closely held community secrets, I used participatory mapping to offer participants the opportunity to control the process and resulting maps. Our project sought to understand environmental challenges from a fine-grained emic perspective using high-resolution satellite imagery and focus groups. I reflect on challenges of conducting fieldwork in one's home country, which made it easier to build relationships and interact with officials. At the same time, however, I faced the intersecting challenges of "being an outsider and a woman" as I interacted with Fulɓe men and that of being "too educated" in interacting with women.

'Where's the map?': Integrating ethnography with maps to understand the complementarity between pastoral mobility and border formation.

The resettlement of herders in pastoral zones is often criticized for hindering pastoral mobility, which is essential to survival. We integrate narratives of conflict and environmental change with maps to demonstrate the complementarity between pastoral mobility - porous borders- and border demarcation - rigid borders. We use evidence from the Sondré-Est Pastoral Zone in southern Burkina Faso, where herders were voluntarily resettled near agricultural villages following the droughts of the 1970s. Over time, however, farmers encroached on the borders of the pastoral zone and surrounding grazing areas declined. This increased land-use disputes. Tensions were exacerbated by the fact that these communities kept maps as community secrets. We re-created the administrative boundaries of the pastoral zone to map land-use/land-cover changes and conflict hot spots. The maps show that conflicts happened along porous borders where agricultural fields encroached. Herders called for a clear demarcation of the border of the pastoral zone to preserve exclusive access to resources within it. Simultaneously, they also wanted to maintain shared access to other resources outside the pastoral zone. The herders' desire for both border clarity and some form of flexibility underlines the complementary between both processes, especially in times of resource scarcity and land-use conflict. The mystery around the maps helps sustain ambiguity that is key for pursuing both goals.

La réinstallation des éleveurs dans les zones pastorales est souvent perçue comme étant une entrave à la mobilité pastorale, essentielle à la survie dans le Sahel. Nous associons les récits sur les conflits et changements environnementaux à des cartes pour démontrer la complémentarité entre la mobilité pastorale ­ nécessitant des frontières poreuses - et la démarcation des frontières ­ imposant des frontières rigides. Nous utilisons comme exemple la zone pastorale de Sondré-Est dans le sud du Burkina Faso, où les éleveurs ont été volontairement réinstallés près des villages agricoles à la suite des grandes sécheresses des années 1970. Au fil du temps, cependant, les agriculteurs ont empiété sur les frontières de la zone pastorale, diminuant ainsi les zones de pâturage environnantes. Cela a accru les conflits d'utilisation des terres entre éleveurs et agriculteurs. Les tensions sont exacerbées par le fait que les cartes montrant les limites réelles de la zone pastorale sont gardées comme des secrets communautaires. Nous avons recréé les limites administratives de la zone pastorale pour cartographier les changements d'utilisation des terres et de la couverture terrestre ainsi que les lieux principaux de conflits. Les cartes montrent que les principaux conflits se sont produits le long de frontières poreuses où les champs agricoles empiétaient. Une démarcation claire de la frontière de la zone pastorale pourrait préserver l'accès exclusif des éleveurs aux ressources en son sein. Cependant, le désir des éleveurs de clarifier les frontières et de maintenir simultanément une certaine forme de flexibilité pour l'accès aux ressources en dehors de la zone souligne la complémentarité entre les deux processus, à savoir la démarcation des frontières et la mobilité pastorale. Cette complémentarité est encore plus importante en période de pénurie de ressources et de conflits. Le mystère autour des cartes contribue à entretenir une ambiguïté qui est essentielle pour atteindre simultanément les deux objectifs.

Systematic Review of Methods in Low-Consensus Fields: Supporting Commensuration through `Construct-Centered Methods Aggregation' in the Case of Climate Change Vulnerability Research.

There is increasing interest in using systematic review to synthesize evidence on the social and environmental effects of and adaptations to climate change. Use of systematic review for evidence in this field is complicated by the heterogeneity of methods used and by uneven reporting. In order to facilitate synthesis of results and design of subsequent research a method, construct-centered methods aggregation, was designed to 1) provide a transparent, valid and reliable description of research methods, 2) support comparability of primary studies and 3) contribute to a shared empirical basis for improving research practice. Rather than taking research reports at face value, research designs are reviewed through inductive analysis. This involves bottom-up identification of constructs, definitions and operationalizations; assessment of concepts' commensurability through comparison of definitions; identification of theoretical frameworks through patterns of construct use; and integration of transparently reported and valid operationalizations into ideal-type research frameworks. Through the integration of reliable bottom-up inductive coding from operationalizations and top-down coding driven from stated theory with expert interpretation, construct-centered methods aggregation enabled both resolution of heterogeneity within identically named constructs and merging of differently labeled but identical constructs. These two processes allowed transparent, rigorous and contextually sensitive synthesis of the research presented in an uneven set of reports undertaken in a heterogenous field. If adopted more broadly, construct-centered methods aggregation may contribute to the emergence of a valid, empirically-grounded description of methods used in primary research. These descriptions may function as a set of expectations that improves the transparency of reporting and as an evolving comprehensive framework that supports both interpretation of existing and design of future research.