Suchergebnisse

Drinking water supply and sanitation have had a strong association with military institutions in South Asia from the colonial period to the present. This paper shows how military-state-society relationships created spaces of differential water access and sanitation burdens in mid-19th-century cantonments in ways that involved complex gender relations. In comparison with previous research, we argue that privileged military enclaves were segregated but never fully separated from larger urban water and sanitation systems. We use historical geographic methods to review the evolving role of military sanitation regulations in cantonments from late-18th-century policies of the East India Company (EIC) through mid-19th-century rule by the British Crown, during which time military cantonments, regulations, and formal monitoring reports were established. Close reading of the British Army Medical Department's Statistical, Sanitary, and Medical Reports (Sanitary Reports) in the 1860s then shows how military-state-society relations diverged from civilian public health programs in ways that persist to some extent to the present day. Health advisors, some of them women, pursued an ideology and tactics to "guard the sons of empire", from what they perceived to be a disease-filled landscape of "lurking evils", "choleric attacks", and "native offensives". We conclude with a discussion of both continuities and change in the relationships between military and civilian public health reforms beyond the barracks. Keywords: cantonments; gender; hygiene; India; military sanitation; water; waterborne disease

Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the impacts of service learning (SL) on teaching sustainability competencies in an undergraduate tourism program at Bamyan University, Afghanistan. This study reports on tourism students' experiences in the SL course which taught five key sustainability competencies (collaboration, values thinking, action-oriented, systems thinking and integrated problem-solving).


Design/methodology/approach
This paper assessed students' perceptions of their sustainability competencies gained during the implementation of the course in 2016 and 2017 through focus groups, reflective essays and participant observation.


Findings
The results demonstrate how the SL experience led students to self-discovery, strong conceptualizations of sustainability and working relationships with community stakeholders.


Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to assess the impacts of a SL course in Afghanistan. The analysis provides valuable information for developing effective higher education programs, relationships of trust between students and community stakeholders and the empowerment of students to contribute to local solutions which serve a role in stabilization efforts in conflict-affected contexts.

This study was partially supported by core funds of ICIMOD contributed by the governments of Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Sweden, and Switzerland. AO was supported by funding from the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) National Capability Overseas Development Assistance under the grant 'Polar expertise –Supporting development' (NE/R000107/1). ; River systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB region will be affected by considerable (yet poorly quantified) changes to the seasonality and composition of runoff in the future, which are likely to have considerable impacts on these supplies. Given how directly and indirectly communities and ecosystems are dependent on these resources and the growing pressure on them due to ever-increasing demands, the impacts of climate change pose considerable adaptation challenges. The strong linkages between hydroclimate, cryosphere, water resources, and human activities within the UIB suggest that a multi- and inter-disciplinary research approach integrating the social and natural/environmental sciences is critical for successful adaptation to ongoing and future hydrological and climate change. Here we use a horizon scanning technique to identify the Top 100 questions related to the most pressing knowledge gaps and research priorities in social and natural sciences on climate change and water in the UIB. These questions are on the margins of current thinking and investigation and are clustered into 14 themes, covering three overarching topics of 'governance, policy, and sustainable solutions', 'socioeconomic processes and livelihoods', and 'integrated Earth System processes'. Raising awareness of these ...