Building operations require about a third of global energy demand and about a quarter of global carbon emissions, not counting the embedded carbon emissions associated with building materials. Cost-effective solutions are available today to reduce those emissions by 75% or more by 2050. But buildings also represent a massive long-term investment, both for individual families and for society at large, and the current pace of renovation needs massive acceleration if those goals are to be met. Accelerating building energy solutions will require changes in policy and regulation, new financial models, and a vast retraining effort for hundreds of millions of construction workers and building professionals as well as billions of building residents all across the globe. This chapter focuses on that education effort, which must be local as well as global, place-based and people-centered, and leverage international agreements as well as use-inspired research. We provide case studies and a roadmap to illustrate the range and scope of the educational efforts required to address the complexity and critical nature of this challenge.

This book is about distributive justice. It is about when and for what reasons a certain distribution of important goods and opportunities can be said to be unjust and how we should think about eliminating such injustices. This is, I take it, an important project. It is important because justice is an important value and because distributions matter for justice. This is the central motivation for the book. It is a call to enquire into what justice requires regarding distributive obligations. This is clearly not all that matters. Ethics is so much more than justice, and justice is more than distributions. But distributions matter for justice, and justice is important.

This chapter explores the poetry of G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) as a medium for expressing political ideas, highlighting his dual identity as a socialist intellectual and poet. While Cole is best remembered for promoting guild socialism and contributing to economic history and the Fabian Society, he also published poetry, which he saw as part of his political life. His early and middle-age works, including New Beginnings (1914) and The Crooked World (1933), reflect a serious literary approach, aspiring to integrate historical verse forms within socialist thought. Cole’s poetic output also embraced satire, with The Bolo Book (1921) parodying hymns and popular songs to critique political figures and issues humorously. This blend of literary and satirical genres allowed him to engage readers in socialist discourse through varied tones and forms. By examining both the poetry itself and its cultural reception, this chapter illuminates how Cole’s verse contributed to and reflected British socialist culture in the early twentieth century, offering insight into how poetry served as a vehicle for political engagement in his era.

Portugal’s social and environmental sectors both exhibit pervasive and severe policy triage, driven by pronounced policy growth that no longer aligns with stagnating or shrinking administrative capacities. Despite the formal centralization of administrative responsibilities, environmental agencies across the board routinely prioritize urgent tasks while neglecting or delaying routine monitoring, inspections, and enforcement. Austerity measures have worsened chronic understaffing, leading to shortfalls in skilled personnel and aging workforces. Similar challenges plague social implementers, which struggle to fulfill core functions amid overwhelming caseloads and hamstrung resource mobilization. Efforts to mitigate overload such as overtime, inter-agency staff transfers, and basic workflow automation provide only limited relief. Moreover, policymakers frequently shift blame for implementation failures to budgetary constraints and the Ministry of Finance. As a result, Portugal’s public agencies are forced to engage in near-constant triage, with significant negative effects on timeliness and thoroughness of policy implementation.

A cherished myth in devolved Scotland is that writers and artists were crucially responsible for the establishment of the new parliament. While there is some truth to this, understanding the full context requires looking beyond the literary texts typically viewed as pivotal in reviving national confidence. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) certainly impacted a small literary audience, but its status as a “national” novel emerged from broader print culture networks. To appreciate its political significance, we must consider magazines like Scottish International, which published extracts of Lanark in 1969, alongside cultural periodicals like Chapman and the Edinburgh Review, which integrated Gray’s political vision into their missions during the 1980s and 90s.This chapter considers a range of Scottish political writing that contributed to this process. Here, “political writing” refers not to grand rhetoric, but to the organised creation of a neo-national public that recognised itself. It encompassed literary novels, journalism, and philosophical essays, including Tom Nairn’s work and the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Gordon Brown (1975). The Red Paper, published by the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board (EUSPB), was connected to numerous Edinburgh-based magazines and the literary publisher Polygon. By examining this network of magazines, campaign groups, and party factions (Labour and SNP), we can identify the discursive frameworks and political alliances that led to the Scottish Parliament’s establishment in 1999, tracing much of contemporary Scottish politics back to the writing, editing, and publishing efforts of prior decades.

During multisite fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, across two wholesale trading hubs in the midstream pipeline of the diamond industry (Antwerp and Mumbai), diamond brokers voiced a confounding claim: they know nothing about the diamonds they broker. I argue that this reveals a core contradiction of diamond brokers: their trustworthiness depends upon their ignorance of a diamond’s value to be deemed an impartial third actor to the transaction, while their utility as a search function depends upon their knowledge of diamonds to connect buyers and sellers in the market. In the current regime of pricing transparency, standardized diamond certificates, a pricing index, and e-commerce websites now instantly reveal diamond grades and prices, upending the necessary fiction of ignorance upon which brokers rely. These technologies are not mechanistically replacing the role of human middlemen, but rather are revealing the very structural instabilities and ideological contradictions at the heart of brokerage.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

In the Coda, I revisit the book’s main themes from non-European perspectives. I suggest that as much as the notion of world literature and the comparative philological apparatus underlying it were conceived and elaborated in European criticism upon late-enlightenment encounters with Oriental literatures, the reception of non-European economies played a comparable role in shaping European discourses of world literature. Directly or indirectly, each design discussed in previous chapters resonated with or drew on non-European conceptions of exchange, wealth, and property (or, rather, what was perceived as such in the encounters). These include the Oriental “bazaar economy”, the anthropology of the gift in pre-modern communities, the isolationist policies of Edo-period Japan, the cult of the indigenously produced in pre-industrial societies, and the dissolution of commons in colonial land reform. Based on these comparisons, the conclusion offers tentative suggestions about a global political economy of world literature.

Energy access, sustainability, and innovation introduce complex scenarios for all dealmakers, regardless of their level of power and leverage. This chapter examines negotiation planning, strategies, tactics, and ethics to provide a roadmap for educators who will develop strategic courses for future energy dealmakers, whether they are business leaders, politicians, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, or educators.

While the mutual-responsibility principle and the criminalization of job performance produced innocent convicts, the redemption policy and imperial amnesty created unlawful commoners. The punitive system was designed neither to restore the vicious parts of criminals to virtue nor to remove the wicked and evil from society. Various punishments, including some death penalties, could be redeemed via money, rank, or the labor of other people. Crimes, punishments, and rank could all be reduced to economic values and were therefore exchangeable. Furthermore, the emperor could use redeeming punishments as a resource to raise revenue during financial crises, calling for the purchase of rank or the direct donation of money or grain to redeem or mitigate punishments. Although no theories explicitly stated that the punitive system was formulated according to the calculation of economic gain, its practice benefited the government financially. Redemption functioned as a form of political economy.