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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the economic backbone of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), generating over 60% of employment and driving local supply chains. Yet, systemic barriers – including limited access to financing, digital exclusion, and regulatory hurdles – prevent them from reaching their full potential. These challenges disproportionately impact informal businesses, restricting their growth and long-term sustainability.
This chapter explores how philanthropy can be a catalyst for change, addressing these barriers and unlocking SME potential. Through the Tienda Cerca initiative by AB InBev, it highlights how blended finance, digital tools, and capacity-building programs can empower small businesses. By digitizing informal enterprises, expanding access to credit, and fostering entrepreneurial resilience, these interventions not only drive financial inclusion but also promote sustainable economic development.
Current scholarship often views international environmental law (IEL) through a crisis or ambition lens. The “crisis lens” apologizes for the limitations of doctrinal methods in resolving disputes. The “ambition lens” seeks to align IEL with a planetary perspective but is criticized for utopianism. We offer a social-systems-theoretical alternative. IEL’s ability to learn and adapt to social change also depends on sustaining law’s function of stabilizing expectations. This constitutes the core of Luhmann’s theory of operative closure. We devise three hypotheses to reconstruct IEL’s operative closure and apply them to the South China Sea. Hypothesis 1: Environmental impact assessment norms address the problem of contingency management. Hypothesis 2: Due diligence norms address the problem of confidence maintenance. Hypothesis 3: Cooperation norms address the problem of trust retention. Our analysis shows that reconstructing IEL’s operative closure reveals its societal responsiveness. This presents a new critical lens for observing IEL’s social phenomena.
Chapter 1 examines the the US military operations in China within the volatile context of the civil war and the emerging Cold War. As the US forces accepted the Japanese surrender, clashed with Communist forces in sporadic skirmishes, and adjudicated trials of Japanese criminals in China independent of the Nationalist Government, they staged an American victory, might, and justice to both enemies and allies. The tactic of “show of force” was used in a “peaceful” mission to ensure submission and deference. However, its diverse, ambiguous, and at times contradictory objectives created significant military and political challenges. Ultimately, occupying China became a mission impossible.
Spatial neglect is a heterogeneous post-stroke disorder with subtypes differing in reference frames, processing stages, and spatial domains. While egocentric peri-personal neglect recovery has been studied, recovery trajectories of allocentric peri-personal visuospatial and personal neglect remain unclear. This study investigated recovery time courses of egocentric and allocentric peri-personal visuospatial and personal neglect during the first 12 weeks post-stroke; whether initial severity predicts recovery and defines distinct patient clusters; and how subtypes interrelate over time.
Method:
Forty-one first-ever stroke patients were evaluated at weeks 3, 5, 8, and 12 post-stroke using the Broken Hearts Test, Line Bisection Test, Visuospatial Search Time Test, and Fluff Test. Recovery was analyzed using linear mixed models, clustering with Gaussian finite mixture models, and interrelationships using Spearman correlations.
Results:
Significant improvements occurred in egocentric and allocentric peri-personal visuospatial and personal neglect, primarily between weeks 3 and 5, followed by a plateau. The Line Bisection Test detected no changes. Higher initial severity predicted greater residual impairment. Cluster analysis identified near-normal, mild, and moderate-to-severe baseline subgroups with distinct recovery trajectories. Moderate-to-good correlations (ρ = 0.33 – 0.55) emerged between egocentric and allocentric neglect at week 3 and when timepoints were pooled.
Conclusion:
Neglect improved mainly between weeks 3 and 5 after which recovery plateaued, mirroring motor and language recovery and suggesting a shared time-limited window. Initial severity was a determinant of recovery, highlighting the value of early severity stratification to monitor and support recovery potential after stroke. As subtypes are distinctive, assessment should include multiple neglect tests.
The manipulation of risk and uncertainty by decision makers who are more or less rational and are experiencing more or less fear offers a first cut of the crisis (section 1). A second cut enriches the individual-level analysis by attending to organizational malfunctioning as a potential cause of inadvertent nuclear war. In this analysis political agency is widely dispersed across many layers of the American and Russian militaries (section 2). A symposium on nuclear politics refers briefly to “very innovative” work on nuclear issues without engaging with work in science and technology studies (STS) (section 3). Exemplifying large world thinking, it does away with dualities such as rational and irrational, politics and technology, risk and uncertainty. It integrates human agency, organizational functioning and malfunctioning, and politics across all levels. And embedding the observer fully in a world that does not exist “out there,” it acknowledges the importance of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. In the politics of the crisis, its meaning for different actors, and its effect on shaping the complementarity of risk and uncertainty language matters hugely (section 4). The analysis of nuclear politics has shaped profoundly a widely accepted rational model of war (section 5). And the conclusion illustrates the evolution of a crazy nuclear politics (section 6).
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) hold one-third of the world’s biodiversity, yet climate change and deforestation threaten this vital ecological powerhouse. Despite the urgency, nature-based solutions (NBS) receive a fraction of global climate finance, while billions flow into environmentally harmful subsidies.
This chapter explores how philanthropy can help bridge the gap and reshape conservation finance by funding high-impact, scalable solutions that protect ecosystems, empower communities, and drive economic transformation. Through case studies of leading philanthropic initiatives – Arapyaú Institute in Brazil, Moisés Bertoni Foundation in Paraguay, and Grupo Argos in Colombia – it demonstrates how strategic investments in forest restoration, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable land use can accelerate climate mitigation and adaptation.
This article examines the early Nazi movement through the contested and violent politics of Munich’s beer halls between 1919 and 1923. It argues that these spaces were not neutral stages for political speech, but rather central arenas in which the movement defined its identity, tested its tactics, and fused party and paramilitary organization. Drawing on police reports, eyewitness accounts, and Nazi publications, the article shows how the NSDAP sought to recode beer halls into sites of antisemitic and anti-republican action, aided by the toleration and complicity of Bavarian state authorities. These spaces became laboratories for masculine bonding, crowd mobilization, and practices of exclusionary violence that made the boundaries of the Volk both visible and enforceable. By foregrounding the interplay of space, sociability, and violence, the article reframes the origins of Nazi radicalism and highlights the role of everyday venues in shaping interwar populist politics.
Fiscal rules for devolved nations present some fundamental challenges not faced when making national fiscal Rules. Most importantly, rules across devolved nations involve a negotiation between the central and devolved governments who have very different objectives and so the framework created ends up as a mix of economics, politics and the vagaries of compromise. This article highlights how these issues have resulted in Scotland finances being heavily influenced by both inflation and population growth in ways that were never intended to become a long run feature of the funding framework.
Clinical progression during psychosis has been closely associated with grey matter abnormalities resulting from atypical brain development. However, the complex interplay between psychopathology and heterogeneous maturational trajectories challenges the identification of neuroanatomical features that anticipate symptomatic decline.
Aims
To investigate cortical volume longitudinal deviations in first-episode psychosis (FEP) using normative modelling, exploring their relationship with long-term cognitive and symptomatic outcomes, as well as their cytoarchitectural and neurobiological underpinnings.
Method
We collected magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), cognitive and symptomatic data from 195 healthy controls and 357 drug-naïve or minimally medicated FEP individuals that were followed up 1, 3, 5 and 10 years following the first episode (1209 MRI scans and assessments in total). Using normative modelling, we derived subject-specific centile scores for cortical volume to investigate atypical deviations in FEP and their relationship to long-term cognitive and symptomatic deterioration. The resulting centile association maps were further characterised by examining their cytoarchitectural and neurobiological attributes using normative atlases.
Results
FEP centiles demonstrated a widespread reduction at treatment initiation, with longitudinal analysis showing an increase during treatment time, indicating convergence towards normal maturation trajectories. Interestingly, this effect was reduced in highly medicated individuals. Additionally, we found that cognitive impairments experienced during early FEP stages worsened under long-term medication. Positive symptomatology was negatively associated with regional centiles, and individuals with higher centiles benefited most from treatment. Cytoarchitectural and neurobiological analyses revealed that regional centiles related to FEP, as well as to symptomatology, were associated with specific molecular features, such as regional serotonin and dopamine receptor densities.
Conclusions
Collectively, these findings underscore the potential use of centile-based normative modelling for a better understanding of how atypical cortical development contributes to the long-term clinical progression of neurodevelopmental conditions.
Despite the Arab world’s growing development needs, its third sector remains constrained by outdated regulatory frameworks that limit its potential. This chapter explores how effective policy reforms can unlock catalytic capital, empower civil society organizations (CSOs), and drive systemic change across the region.
Through the case study of Bab Amal in Egypt, an evidence-based poverty alleviation initiative, this chapter illustrates how regulatory inefficiencies increase costs, delay impact, and hinder large-scale social transformation. It highlights five key policy areas – streamlining registration, financial sustainability, data access, multi-sector collaboration, and evidence-based policymaking – offering a pathway for unlocking billions in untapped development capital.
Human actions are causing climate change, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity, making our planet less safe. To address these problems, solutions must be developed from current and future research, involving different scientific fields and respecting diverse knowledge systems. It is essential to engage with society, as the relationship between science and society drives progress. Studying coasts as complex systems requires input from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Technical Summary
In the coastal zone, the triple planetary crisis manifests as accelerating losses and changes and increasing challenges and risks for people and livelihoods. Acceptance of a future existential crisis compels the urgency of corrective action to cause an inverse positive societal response to bend the negative trajectories of loss and damage. The rate and extent of corrective societal action (policies, laws, practices, knowledge, etc.) should at least keep pace with the projected rate of loss and environmental degradation. This urgency and acceleration of action are major societal challenges, especially considering the overwhelming evidence of impacts. In this paper, we offer three propositions for accelerating urgent actions and fostering innovation in coastal research and management, focusing on emerging trends and foundational changes. Scientists need to (1) reflect on the performativity of their research and perceptions of neutrality in anticipating the future of coasts; (2) think and act equitably in local and global partnerships; and (3) improve their engagement and willingness to innovate with society. This is not a call for linear or incremental change, but a call for the radical. The relationship between society and science drives progress and shapes our collective future.
Social media summary
Human actions drive climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, threatening our planet. To address these crises, we need solutions that blend current and future research, span multiple scientific fields, and respect diverse knowledge systems. Engaging with society is key. The bond between human society and science shapes our future. Coastal studies must integrate natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
In this chapter I explore theories, models, and methods. The narrative turn in the social sciences and in the analysis of world politics has been fostered by and drawn attention to McCloskey’s work and the importance of story-telling (section 1). Theories and models tell stories that are created by acts of individual imagination and that exist as collective imaginaries (section 2). Experiments and experimentation are different ways of testing and test-driving scientific theories and models in a world that is both risky and uncertain (section 3). And the simplicity or complexity of the stories told by theories and models always grapples with the risk-uncertainty conundrum (section 4).