Effective coordination of humanitarian assistance activities remains elusive. This paper briefly addresses some of the reasons for what is widely perceived as a coordination dilemma in humanitarian affairs and argues for a new conceptualisation of the issue. Rather than continue to request that more authority be vested in a single organisation to secure coordination through top-down control, it contends that it may be timely to consider whether relief agencies involved in an emergency should be reconceived as social networks and efforts made to achieve changes in their organizational cultures that encourage operational coordination across institutional lines. Since such labours imply the need to trust, this article explores what forms of trust might be employed to promote improved coordination among relief institutions and how those relationships could themselves be conceptualised. Finally, while acknowledging that coordination is not costless, it suggests that its effective pursuit may be advantageous even in scenarios where aid organisations balk at cooperating to secure it.
Environmental justice, a term that incorporates 'environmental racism' and 'environmental classism,' captures the idea that different racial and socioeconomic groups experience differential access to environmental quality. This article explores what previous studies have established about environmental justice as an urban phenomenon and critiques the focus and methodologies of those efforts within the larger context of urban inquiry. After assaying the concepts that have guided most of the research, the paper considers the arguments that analysts have offered for the causes of environmental injustice. The review of the literature reveals significant problems of focus, measurement, specification and research design. Nonetheless, environmental justice research raises critical concerns about how citizens should be treated and what constitutes a just distribution of collective urban goods in a democratic society. It is the authors' view that due consideration of these matters can enlighten urban and environmental inquiry and policy.
This article explores the relationship between leadership as adaptive work and different forms of social consciousness, and between leadership and alternate facets of imagination. It argues that nongovernmental and government leaders typically are enjoined either to support or to challenge existing imaginaries at different levels of analytic aggregation — social, community, interorganizational and organizational — and that they routinely employ different dimensions of imagination to do so. These include aesthetic, cognitive, affective and moral imagination. The essay concludes with a brief overview of the implications of the argument for leadership practice.
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