These conditions can hinder economic growth, social development and environmental protection, making conventional approaches to regional and local development less effective. Rather than offering a general test of grassroots innovation, the research provides a context-specific interpretation of sustainable development in Nablus and links local innovation to resilience theory. To investigate these dynamics, the researchers used qualitative methods that included document analysis, technical reports, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and field observations.

Together, these sources were used to examine grassroots initiatives in the governorate and their relationship to community needs, local solidarity and wider support structures. The reported findings indicate that grassroots responses did more than meet urgent practical requirements: they also reinforced social cohesion, empowered marginalized groups and enhanced adaptive capacity in places where external pressures severely constrained development opportunities. The research characterizes these relationships as hybrid systems, showing that grassroots innovation within Nablus was linked to external assistance rather than developing wholly apart from it.

The initiatives therefore appear as part of a broader support arrangement for sustainable development under occupation. The researchers also emphasize that grassroots innovation should not be treated as inherently effective. As a qualitative study centered on Nablus, the evidence provides an interpretation of community experiences and institutional relationships rather than a quantified assessment of long-term development outcomes.

Its findings identify reported associations between grassroots initiatives and stronger cohesion, solidarity, empowerment and adaptive capacity, while also underscoring the structural constraints faced by communities in the conflict-affected governorate.

Subject of Research: Grassroots innovation, territorial resilience and sustainable development in conflict-affected Nablus, Palestine

Article Title: Investigating the role of grassroots innovation in fostering territorial resilience and sustainable development in the conflict-affected Nablus Governorate of Palestine

Article References: Aburaida, L., & Nunes, F. (2026). Investigating the role of grassroots innovation in fostering territorial resilience and sustainable development in the conflict-affected Nablus Governorate of Palestine. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04467-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04467-0

Keywords: grassroots innovation, territorial resilience, sustainable development, Nablus Governorate, Palestine, conflict-affected communities, social cohesion, local solidarity, adaptive capacity, qualitative research, Investigating, role

The team recruited 410 community-dwelling older adults across Hong Kong in 2024 using purposive quota sampling, a design intended to capture a spread of residential districts and socioeconomic circumstances rather than a random population sample. Participants had a mean age of 67.5 years, with a standard deviation of 4.9, and 80.2 percent were women. Each person completed a tablet-assisted interview covering sociodemographic characteristics, health status and seven distinct domains of perceived neighbourhood environment, ranging from aesthetics and walking conditions to social cohesion, safety, neighbourhood violence, neighbourly interaction and the availability of healthy foods.

Crucially, the study did not rely on self-reported exercise, which is notoriously prone to overestimation and recall bias. Instead, participants wore ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometers, research-grade triaxial devices that record raw acceleration at high frequency, for at least 10 hours per day over four consecutive days including one weekend day. The devices distinguish light activity from moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, or MVPA, the intensity band most strongly linked in epidemiological literature to cardiovascular, metabolic and cognitive health benefits in later life.

The accelerometer data revealed a median MVPA of 283.5 minutes per week, with an interquartile range of 225.0 minutes. That figure is notable because it suggests many of these older Hong Kong residents already exceed widely cited activity guidelines, which typically call for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity per week. The authors attribute part of this to the structure of daily life in a compact, transit-oriented city where walking is often the default mode of getting to markets, clinics and community centres.

To connect perception to movement, the researchers fitted separate gamma generalised linear models with a log link, one for each environmental domain, adjusting for sociodemographic, residential and health-related factors. Gamma models are well suited to skewed, strictly positive outcomes such as minutes of activity, and the log link means the coefficients can be read as multiplicative effects on MVPA rather than simple additive shifts.

Four perceptual domains emerged as significant. Higher perceived social cohesion carried the largest association, with a beta of 0.40 and a p-value below 0.001, followed by aesthetic quality at 0.32, safety at 0.30 and walking environment quality at 0.24, all similarly significant. In practical terms, an older adult who rates their neighbourhood as trusting, attractive, secure and walkable tends to log meaningfully more moderate-to-vigorous minutes than an otherwise comparable peer who does not, even after accounting for age, sex, finances, housing and self-rated health.

Just as telling were the null results. Perceived availability of healthy foods, perceived neighbourhood violence and the frequency of neighbourly interaction showed no significant association with MVPA once the models were adjusted. The distinction between social cohesion and mere neighbourly interaction is conceptually interesting: it suggests that a general sense of collective trust and shared norms, rather than the simple amount of chatting over the fence, is what travels with higher activity levels.

The covariates told a consistent story of their own. Older age was reliably associated with lower MVPA across models, while male sex, more favourable financial circumstances and better self-rated physical health were generally linked to higher activity. These gradients align with a large international literature and reinforce the point that environmental perceptions operate alongside, not instead of, individual determinants of movement in later life.

For urban planners and public health officials in high-density cities, the findings carry a pointed implication: age-friendly activity strategies should treat the social texture of a neighbourhood as seriously as its pavements and parks. Improving aesthetics, maintaining safe and comfortable walking routes and cultivating cohesion between residents may each contribute to keeping older adults active, whereas interventions focused narrowly on infrastructure or on food access alone might miss part of the effect. The study’s cross-sectional design, however, limits causal inference; it cannot determine whether people who feel good about their neighbourhoods move more, or whether active residents come to view their surroundings more favourably.

The authors are explicit on this point, calling for longitudinal and intervention studies to establish temporality and to test whether deliberate changes in neighbourhood conditions actually raise physical activity. The work received no specific grant from any funding agency, and it was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Hong Kong Baptist University under approval number SOSC-SPEH-2023-24_112, with written informed consent from all participants. As Hong Kong and other rapidly ageing societies confront rising chronic disease burdens, the message from this dataset is that the neighbourhood itself, as experienced by its older residents, is a measurable and potentially modifiable lever on health behaviour.

Subject of Research: Associations between perceived neighbourhood environment and accelerometer-measured physical activity among older adults in Hong Kong

Article Title: Perceived neighbourhood environment and accelerometer-measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity among community-dwelling older adults in Hong Kong: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Ou, A. Y. T., Lai, D. W. L., Sun, Y., Gao, Y., Huang, C. Z. D., & Qu, Z. (2026). Perceived neighbourhood environment and accelerometer-measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity among community-dwelling older adults in Hong Kong: a cross-sectional study. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08517-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08517-0

Keywords: older adults, physical activity, MVPA, neighbourhood environment, accelerometer, Hong Kong, social cohesion, walkability, cross-sectional study, urban health, healthy ageing, BMC Geriatrics

The research, led by Nicolette V. Roman of the University of the Western Cape together with colleagues from Uganda Christian University, Makerere University, and Moi University, was supported by the African Peacebuilding Network 2024 Collaborative Working Group Fellowship administered by the Social Science Research Council. Rather than testing a pre-existing questionnaire, the team adopted a qualitative, participatory action research-informed design grounded in a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm. Between them, the researchers conducted 85 semi-structured in-depth interviews across six carefully paired urban and rural field sites, two in each country, allowing direct comparison of how the same psychological processes play out in metropolitan and village settings.

The analytical engine of the study was an abductive, reflexive thematic analysis implemented in ATLAS.ti. Abductive analysis is a technique that moves back and forth between observed data and existing theory: researchers begin with established psychological frameworks, such as Erikson’s psychosocial theory, but remain open to patterns in the interviews that those frameworks cannot explain. Reflexivity, meanwhile, demands that the analysts continuously examine their own assumptions and positionality, an essential safeguard when interpreting accounts collected across multiple languages, cultures, and ethical jurisdictions. The work received approval from the Moi University/MTRH Institutional Research and Ethics Committee in Kenya, the University of the Western Cape Human Research Ethics Committee, and the Makerere University School of Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee, alongside national clearance from NACOSTI in Kenya.

The study’s central theoretical contribution is the finding that trust is not a fixed personality trait but a dynamic, sequential architecture assembled from four distinct psychological constructs. The first is cognitive appraisal: the deliberate evaluation of another party’s reliability, intentions, and track record before any commitment is made. The second is affective security, the emotional sense of safety that allows a person to lower their defences once appraisal has been passed. The third is confidentiality, the expectation that vulnerabilities shared will not be exploited or exposed. The fourth, and perhaps most striking, is structured repair: the recognition that trust will eventually be breached and that relationships survive only when communities possess recognised, legitimate procedures for restoring damaged confidence.

What makes the finding genuinely novel is that this four-part sequence operates simultaneously at every level of social life. Within individuals, it functions as a self-regulatory evaluation process, an internal negotiation between caution and openness. Within families, the same constructs manifest as relational bonding and restorative practice, shaping how households absorb conflict and repair it. Within communities, the architecture scales up into institutionalised mutual aid and perceived procedural fairness, the shared belief that the rules governing cooperation apply equally to everyone. Trust, in this model, is less a thing people have and more a process they repeatedly perform, from the privacy of the mind to the public square.

Equally important, and arguably more policy-relevant, the study documents precisely the conditions under which this architecture collapses, and those conditions differ sharply by country. In the South African sites, the researchers found pervasive baseline insecurity that foreclosed the trust sequence before it could even begin. Where people do not feel physically or economically safe, cognitive appraisal never matures into affective security, and the entire chain breaks at its first link. This suggests that trust-building interventions in high-violence or precarious settings must first establish basic safety, because no amount of dialogue or civic programming can substitute for it.

Uganda presented a different failure mode: trust vacuums generated by religious leader misconduct. In communities where faith leaders are custodians of moral authority, breaches by those leaders do not merely damage individual relationships; they hollow out an entire tier of institutional trust, leaving a vacuum that secular or informal structures struggle to fill. Kenya revealed a third pattern, the decoupling of practical cooperation from personal affective trust under sustained economic pressure. In Kenyan sites, respondents continued to cooperate functionally with neighbours and institutions, but the emotional bond that traditionally underpinned such cooperation had thinned or vanished. People transacted without trusting, a pragmatic adaptation that keeps daily life running while quietly eroding the social fabric that cohesion depends upon.

The theoretical framing of the study is as significant as its empirical findings. The authors deliberately ground their analysis in African epistemological traditions, particularly ubuntu, the Southern African philosophy that frames personhood as fundamentally relational, often summarised in the idea that a person is a person through other persons, and in broader Pan-Africanist thought. By treating these traditions as serious theoretical sources rather than cultural colour, the researchers extend psychological theory beyond its Euro-American limits. Where much Western psychology conceptualises trust as an individual disposition or a calculative choice between self-interested actors, the ubuntu-grounded model treats trust as an emergent property of relationship and community, with repair conceived as a collective, restorative practice rather than a private act of forgiveness.

The practical implications reach well beyond the academy. Because the study identifies trust as sequential, it offers a culturally grounded, multi-level framework for designing and sequencing trust-building interventions. Development agencies, peacebuilding organisations, and public health programmes operating in the region could use the model diagnostically: first asking which link in the trust chain is broken in a given community, then selecting interventions matched to that specific failure. A programme aimed at restoring affective security in a South African neighbourhood scarred by violence would look very different from one rebuilding institutional credibility after clergy misconduct in Uganda, or reattaching emotional bonds to functional cooperation in economically strained Kenyan communities. One-size-fits-all trust campaigns, the findings imply, are almost guaranteed to miss their target.

The research also stands as a methodological exemplar. Its participatory action research orientation meant community members were not merely data sources but collaborators in interpretation, with workshops held to disseminate preliminary findings back to stakeholders. All quotations were fully anonymised, and participants consented in their preferred languages, with explicit rights to withdraw at any point. The authors declare no competing interests and note that the conclusions are solely their own responsibility. As societies worldwide grapple with declining confidence in institutions and fraying social bonds, this three-country study makes a compelling argument: understanding trust requires listening to communities where the concept has always been understood as fundamentally collective, and the deepest insights may come from philosophies that placed relationship at the centre of human nature long before psychology did.

Subject of Research: Psychological constructs of trust and social cohesion at individual, family, and community levels in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa

Article Title: A multi-level perspective of the psychological constructs of trust and social cohesion in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa

Article References: Roman, N. V., Nalwadda, P., Mutiso, M. M., Masita, E. N., Mugambwa, J., Human-Hendricks, A., & Lewaks, A. (2026). A multi-level perspective of the psychological constructs of trust and social cohesion in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00944-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00944-9

Keywords: trust, social cohesion, psychology, ubuntu, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, participatory action research, qualitative research, institutional trust, cross-cultural psychology, community development

The research team set out to answer a question that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention: how do indigenous conflict-management systems operate when the state around them is weakened by overlapping crises? Most existing literature on Ethiopian conflict resolution has centered on state-led mechanisms, courts, and formal peace processes. Yet in Dessie, a city where Muslim and Christian communities have long lived side by side, tensions that might otherwise escalate into open confrontation are frequently channeled through councils of respected elders. The researchers wanted to understand how this works in practice, why it commands trust, and what threatens its future.

Methodologically, the study relied on qualitative approaches. The authors conducted key informant interviews and focus group discussions with a total of 32 participants who had direct, lived experience of interreligious tensions and of Shimglina mediation practices. Participants were selected purposively, meaning the researchers deliberately sought out individuals whose positions gave them relevant knowledge: elders who mediate, community members who have brought disputes to them, and others embedded in the social fabric of the city. The study received ethical approval from the Institutional Research Ethics Review Committee at Debre Tabor University, and informed consent was obtained from all participants, all of whom were adults, with anonymity and confidentiality maintained throughout the research process.

To interpret what they heard, the researchers drew on three complementary theoretical lenses. Social capital theory, most closely associated with the work of Robert Putnam, helped explain how Shimglina generates two distinct but interlocking forms of trust. Bonding capital refers to the dense networks of reciprocity within a single community, while bridging capital describes the connections that span social and religious divides. Shimglina, the study finds, produces both: it consolidates solidarity within neighborhoods and, crucially, builds relationships of trust across the Muslim-Christian boundary that defines much of Dessie’s interreligious landscape.

The second lens, functionalist theory, situates Shimglina as a stabilizing force that sustains social order. From this perspective, the institution persists because it performs functions that society needs: it absorbs disputes before they harden into feuds, provides a legitimate arena for grievance, and reaffirms shared norms. The third framework, conflict transformation theory associated with peace-building scholars such as John Paul Lederach, goes further. It highlights that Shimglina does not merely resolve individual disputes; it works to reshape the fractured relationships underneath them, promoting reconciliation rather than simply closing cases. Where a court might issue a verdict that leaves one party resentful, an elder-led process aims to restore the social bond itself.

Finally, the authors frame the entire analysis through the concept of poly-crisis, a term gaining traction in global sustainability and political research to describe situations in which multiple crises interact and amplify one another. Ethiopia’s recent history offers a stark example: political instability and armed conflict have strained governance, economic hardship has sharpened competition over scarce resources, and social fragmentation has eroded the informal trust that once buffered communities against shocks. In such an environment, formal institutions often lose legitimacy and reach precisely when they are needed most. The poly-crisis lens, the authors argue, explains why a grassroots mechanism like Shimglina becomes not a relic but a lifeline.

The findings are striking in their consistency. Participants reported that they trusted Shimglina more than formal courts, a judgment rooted in accessibility, cultural fluency, and the perceived fairness of elder deliberation. Court proceedings are costly, slow, and adversarial; Shimglina is local, conversational, and oriented toward restoring coexistence. Perhaps most significantly, the study found that Shimglina actively depoliticizes and dereligionizes conflicts. Disputes that could be framed as Muslim-versus-Christian, or as proxies for national political struggles, are instead reframed as neighborhood problems between people who share markets, streets, and kinship ties. By stripping away the inflammatory labels, elders remove the fuel that turns a quarrel into a communal rupture.

The mechanisms through which this happens are both procedural and symbolic. The study describes dialogue, ritual practices, and the mobilization of collective wisdom as the core instruments of the system. Elders convene the parties, listen, invoke shared moral norms, and guide participants toward settlement and reconciliation. Rituals mark the restoration of relationships, giving disputes a socially recognized endpoint rather than a lingering legal residue. This human-centered, culturally grounded approach, the authors write, is what allows Shimglina to strengthen social cohesion in ways that formal adjudication rarely achieves. Its resilience, they suggest, lies in these deep cultural roots, which predate the modern Ethiopian state and have survived successive political orders.

Yet the study is candid about the pressures on the institution. Political interference threatens the neutrality that gives elders their authority; when actors with partisan agendas seek to co-opt mediation, the system’s legitimacy is at risk. Generational shifts are eroding deference to elder authority, as younger Ethiopians, shaped by different education and media environments, question whether customary councils should hold sway. Women’s voices remain underrepresented in a system dominated by male elders, limiting its inclusiveness. Religious extremism poses a direct ideological challenge to the syncretic, accommodationist ethos of Shimglina, and the absence of formal legal recognition leaves the institution operating in a gray zone, without institutional protection or resources.

The authors conclude that Shimglina is a culturally grounded, adaptive, and human-centered peace-building mechanism whose sustainability depends on addressing generational change, gender inclusion, and political neutrality. By situating the institution within Ethiopia’s poly-crisis, the study makes a broader contribution: it demonstrates that indigenous mediation systems are not museum pieces but living governance technologies, capable of conflict transformation and social resilience under conditions that overwhelm formal institutions. For scholars of peace and conflict studies, and for policymakers searching for hybrid models of peace governance, the message from Dessie is that some of the most effective instruments of stability may be the oldest ones, provided they are given the recognition and support to adapt without losing what makes them trusted in the first place.

Subject of Research: Indigenous elder-led mediation (Shimglina) and interreligious conflict management in South Wollo, Ethiopia

Article Title: Poly-crisis and interreligious tension management: the role of Shimglina in Southern Wollo, Ethiopia

Article References: Dagnew, T. A., Beyene, S. S., & Eshete, B. M. (2026). Poly-crisis and interreligious tension management: the role of Shimglina in Southern Wollo, Ethiopia. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 537. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01852-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01852-4

Keywords: Shimglina, indigenous mediation, interreligious tension, Ethiopia, South Wollo, Dessie, poly-crisis, social capital, conflict transformation, peace-building, social cohesion, qualitative research

The spatial analysis is stark. Using Landsat satellite data from the United States Geological Survey, processed through supervised classification with the Maximum Likelihood algorithm in ArcGIS 10.7, the team mapped land use and land cover across Asansol’s 127.3 square kilometres for the years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The classification scheme distinguished six categories: water, dense vegetation, sparse vegetation, agriculture, built-up land and fallow land. Accuracy was assessed against Google Earth reference imagery using thirty independent validation points per decade, yielding an overall classification accuracy of 87.49 percent. The results showed that sparse vegetation, the dominant form of greenery in the city, fell from 10.17 percent of the land area in 1990 to just 4.8 percent by 2020, a decline of more than five percentage points over thirty years. Dense vegetation, already scarce at 0.53 percent in 1990, slipped marginally to 0.42 percent. In absolute terms, the area covered by greenery was cut roughly in half, from 12.95 square kilometres to 6.10 square kilometres.

The built-up story mirrors the botanical one. Built-up areas expanded by more than ten percentage points across the study period, while agricultural land contracted dramatically from 29.26 percent of the city in 1990 to 15.62 percent in 2020. Together, these figures describe a city converting its vegetated and cultivated periphery into dense urban fabric at a pace that outstripped most planning controls. Asansol’s trajectory is rooted in its industrial history: the discovery of coal and the arrival of the East Indian Railway in the mid-nineteenth century set the city on a path of extraction and heavy industry, and the establishment of coal mines, steel plants and associated infrastructure drove extensive deforestation and land degradation. The authors note that the pattern they document in Asansol echoes broader trends across rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South, where economic and infrastructural development has consistently been prioritized over vegetation cover.

What distinguishes this study from most land-change research is its insistence on pairing the satellite record with the human dimension. The researchers conducted a pilot survey in June 2024 to refine their questionnaire, then carried out the main survey in June and July 2024 in gardens, community parks and playgrounds across the city, using purposive sampling of residents who regularly spend time outdoors. Fifty respondents completed the survey, 76 percent of them men and 60 percent aged between 18 and 33. Respondents reported on their demographic characteristics, mobility, perceived wellbeing, community engagement and eco-friendly practices, allowing the team to test statistically how green space use relates to stress and social cohesion rather than simply assuming a link from the environmental literature.

The first statistical test, a multinomial logistic regression, treated perceived stress in daily life as a three-level dependent variable, low, moderate and high, with low stress as the reference category, and entered three predictors: frequency of visits to urban green spaces, distance from home to those spaces, and duration of time spent in them. The overall model was statistically significant, with a chi-square of 28.607 and a p-value of 0.005, and the pseudo R-square statistics indicated moderate explanatory power, with Nagelkerke’s R-squared reaching 0.501, meaning roughly half the variation in perceived stress could be explained by the predictors. Within the model, the likelihood ratio tests revealed a clear hierarchy. Duration of time spent in green spaces was the strongest predictor of stress levels, with a p-value of 0.007, followed by proximity, measured as distance of green space from home, which was significant at p = 0.029. Frequency of visits, by contrast, showed no statistically significant association, with a p-value of 0.538.

That last result is perhaps the most counterintuitive and the most consequential for urban policy. Simply visiting green spaces often, the data suggest, does not by itself reduce stress; what matters is how long people stay and how easily they can reach greenery from home. The parameter estimates for long and moderate durations of exposure showed strongly negative coefficients relative to the short-duration reference category, indicating that prolonged immersion in green settings substantially lowers the likelihood of reporting moderate or high stress. The authors caution that some coefficients in the model, particularly those accompanied by zero standard errors, reflect sparse data or complete separation in certain category combinations and should not be interpreted substantively. Even so, the overall pattern aligns with international evidence, including a large meta-analysis by Twohig-Bennett and Jones linking greenspace exposure to reduced risks of high blood pressure and type II diabetes, and cross-national work by White and colleagues associating regular contact with green and blue spaces with lower depression and anxiety.

The second statistical test shifted from individual stress to collective life. An ordinal logistic regression, a proportional odds model with a logit link, examined how social interaction within green spaces and participation in community events held there influenced respondents’ perception of community strengthening, an ordered outcome ranging from disagree to agree. The model was significant at p < 0.01, and its predictors explained between 36 and 47 percent of the variation in perceived community strengthening. Social interaction emerged as the dominant predictor: respondents who always, often, or even rarely interacted with others in green spaces were significantly more likely to report stronger community bonds than those in the reference category, with estimates of 3.361 for always, 3.360 for often and 4.568 for rarely, all statistically significant. Participation in organized community events, by contrast, had minimal influence once other factors were accounted for, with only the rarely category reaching significance. The implication is subtle but important: communities grow stronger through informal, everyday encounters in shared green settings, not necessarily through formal programming.

Respondents’ own narratives reinforced the quantitative findings. Most strongly agreed that greenery enhances residential wellbeing and described, with evident regret, the loss of vegetation Asansol has experienced over recent decades. The study’s conceptual framework frames these effects as operating through both direct and indirect pathways: directly, through psychological restoration, stress relief and mood enhancement, consistent with classic work by Ulrich and by Bratman on nature’s cognitive and emotional benefits; and indirectly, through physical activity, walkability, social contact and exposure to biodiversity. Green spaces with jogging tracks, seating, lighting and open ground encourage exercise, which in turn reduces risks of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, particularly among older adults, while community gardens and neighbourhood parks foster the social capital that underpins belonging and mutual support.

For a densely built city where most land is already committed to private and institutional uses, the authors argue that large new parks are rarely feasible, and they point instead to decentralized greening strategies: rooftop gardens, green walls, courtyard and backyard gardens, community gardens and roadside plantations. Photographic documentation from the study shows rooftop gardening, a green wall at Asansol railway station and pond-side tree planting in the Gopal Nagar neighbourhood, illustrating that these approaches are already taking root. The team recommends integrating green infrastructure formally into urban planning, ensuring equitable access across neighbourhoods, and encouraging community participation, noting that marginalized low-income communities typically have fewer quality green areas and therefore receive fewer of the health benefits greenery provides.

The study is candid about its limitations. It relies on self-reported measures of wellbeing and perceptions of green space quality, which are vulnerable to bias; its sample of fifty respondents was drawn from selected neighbourhoods, limiting generalizability; seasonal variation in green space use was not examined; and socioeconomic inequalities and gender differences in access were not analysed. Nevertheless, the integration of remote sensing with survey-based regression modelling in a single analytical framework is a methodological step forward for research on medium-sized industrial cities in eastern India. The broader message is that green infrastructure is not decoration but a strategic instrument of public health and social cohesion, and that for cities like Asansol, bridging an industrial heritage with environmental foresight through evidence-based planning and active public participation offers a credible path toward a healthier, more inclusive and more resilient urban future.

Subject of Research: Urban green space accessibility and its effects on health and wellbeing in the mining city of Asansol, West Bengal

Article Title: Accessibility to urban green spaces and its influence on human health and wellbeing in Asansol, West Bengal

Article References: Das, D., Haque, M. S., Jahangir, S., Choudhury, S., & Fatma, K. (2026). Accessibility to urban green spaces and its influence on human health and wellbeing in Asansol, West Bengal. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 439. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01711-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01711-2

Keywords: urban green spaces, Asansol, West Bengal, land use land cover, remote sensing, stress reduction, social cohesion, logistic regression, urban planning, green infrastructure, public health, mining city

The book’s subject, Ibn Khaldun, was born in Tunis in 1332 and lived one of the most turbulent lives of his era. He lost his parents and relatives to a plague epidemic, was imprisoned for long periods by some of the volatile North African rulers he served, and endured the deaths of his wife and children in a shipwreck. Out of this upheaval emerged a prolific career as historian, philosopher, scholar, and statesman, capped by the Muqaddimah, the voluminous introduction to his universal history in which he laid out systematic criteria for distinguishing historical truth from error. In doing so, he effectively founded a science of civilization, or umran, that sought to explain how human societies cohere, flourish, and decay.

The Muqaddimah’s reputation has only grown since its author’s death. Arnold Toynbee, the prominent British historian and theorist of civilizational development, famously described it as a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place. The Scottish philosopher and theologian Robert Flint offered comparable praise, and the BBC World Service, in its program The Forum, characterized Ibn Khaldun as a top scholar, a scheming political mastermind, and a peripatetic political guru. The new volume neither simply repeats these eulogies nor adjudicates whether Toynbee’s superlative holds, but its contributors leave little doubt that the text remains one of the most fertile sources of reflection on the birth, development, rise, and decline of societies.

What distinguishes the collection is its insistence that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas function as analytical instruments rather than museum pieces. Mesut Idriz, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Sharjah and co-editor of the volume, identified the central takeaway in remarks to the publishers: Ibn Khaldun’s ideas are not simply historical theories; they can still help us understand how societies work today. His concepts, Idriz explained, describe in accessible terms why people need social bonds and cooperation, how strong communities and states emerge, and how prosperity, leadership, taxation, education, and social cohesion can influence the strength or weakness of a society.

At the technical heart of this framework sit two interlocking concepts. The first is umran, often translated as civilization or human social organization, which Ibn Khaldun treated as an object of systematic study in its own right. The second is asabiyyah, a term rendered in the volume’s discussions as social cohesion or group solidarity, which he identified as the animating force behind political authority and dynastic power. In his model, a strong asabiyyah allows a group to conquer and govern; over generations of luxury and sedentary life, that solidarity erodes, opening the way for new groups with fresher bonds to displace the old. The result is a cyclical theory of dynastic rise and fall that anticipates, in some respects, modern sociological accounts of institutional decay and renewal.

Anja Zalta, Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Ljubljana and lead editor of the volume, emphasized the systemic character of this thought. Ibn Khaldun, she noted, viewed society as an interconnected system rather than as separate political, economic, or social problems, and the studies in the volume show that his thinking can be applied to very different societies and periods, including contemporary contexts. In her formulation, his work reminds us that a successful civilization depends not only on wealth or political power but also on cooperation, social trust, effective institutions, education, and the ability of societies to adapt and renew themselves.

The sixteen chapters supply concrete case studies to support these claims, tracing Ibn Khaldunian themes through polities and communities as varied as the United Arab Emirates, Nasrid Granada, Bosnia, and Sahrawi society, alongside analysis of the United States. Several chapters examine the UAE in particular, showing how the country draws on Ibn Khaldun’s concepts to illuminate questions of tolerance, social integration, institutional development, diversity management, and sustainable governance. The volume’s editors suggest that this practical orientation creates potential interest for government institutions, cultural institutions, policy bodies, and organizations concerned with social development, even though the contributors do not document specific partnerships with industry or commercial organizations.

The breadth of disciplines now engaging with the Muqaddimah is itself a measure of its endurance. The volume notes that the text continues to be cited across management, political science, sociology, history, and economics, more than six hundred years after it was written. Contributors present it as a guide to understanding civilizational change, power, and social cohesion, and they argue that Ibn Khaldun should be viewed not only as a medieval Muslim historian but as an important contributor to the broader history of the social and human sciences. By applying his ideas to both historical and contemporary cases, the volume demonstrates that his intellectual framework can still contribute to discussions about governance, social cohesion, diversity, economic development, and civilizational change.

The editors are careful not to overstate the reach of these applications. The book’s most significant broader engagement, according to Zalta, is with cultural, governmental, and public-policy concerns, connecting Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual legacy with practical questions facing modern societies, from education and economic development to cultural change and social integration. The practical message, as Idriz put it, is that classical intellectual heritage does not have to remain confined to historical study; it can provide useful perspectives for addressing present-day questions of governance, social cohesion, education, cultural change, and development. The concepts highlighted by the contributors can serve as analytical tools for policymakers and institutions thinking critically about community solidarity, leadership, institutional stability, taxation, and the management of social diversity.

The volume also points toward a methodological reorientation in future scholarship. Rather than studying Ibn Khaldun mainly in comparison with later Western thinkers, Zalta argued, future research can examine his intellectual framework on its own terms and bring it into dialogue with contemporary social sciences, encouraging more interdisciplinary and comparative studies and demonstrating how Islamic intellectual heritage can contribute to addressing questions facing societies in the twenty-first century. In that sense, the collection goes beyond an exercise in historical scholarship: it invites both specialists and general readers to reconsider the most pressing questions Ibn Khaldun raised in his Muqaddimah, and to weigh their relevance to a world still grappling with cohesion, legitimacy, and the fragility of civilizations. The book is published under the DOI 10.4312/9789612978822 by the University of Ljubljana Press.

Subject of Research: The enduring relevance of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah to modern social science and philosophy of history

Article Title: Is Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah “the greatest work of its kind” in the field of philosophy of history?

Article References: Is Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah “the greatest work of its kind” in the field of philosophy of history?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, philosophy of history, asabiyyah, social cohesion, umran, civilizational change, University of Ljubljana, University of Sharjah, governance, Islamic intellectual heritage, sociology

The scale of the public diagnosis is remarkable in its consistency. Seven in ten respondents, or 70 percent, say there is too much economic inequality in their country. Nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, believe the economic system is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful. And 69 percent want major changes to the economic system, against just 8 percent who disagree. These figures describe societies that are remarkably united in identifying what is wrong with the economy, even as they report feeling more divided than ever. The survey’s authors argue that this combination of shared grievance and fractured social fabric represents one of the most consequential political dynamics of the decade.

The trust data tells a story of rapid deterioration. Only 31 percent of respondents believe their government will make decisions that benefit the majority of people twenty or thirty years from now. That figure stood at 39 percent in 2024, meaning confidence in long-term governmental stewardship has fallen by eight percentage points in just two years. The report’s co-author Kate Pickett, Professor for the Public Understanding of Social Sciences at the University of York, a member of the Club of Rome and co-author of The Spirit Level, said the pattern is deeply concerning. People right across the income spectrum, in country after country, have arrived at the same diagnosis: that the system is rigged and that inequality has gone too far. When people stop believing that their government will act in their interest long-term, she noted, it corrodes the sense of shared future that healthy societies depend on.

The collapse of institutional trust runs through the wider social fabric, according to the survey’s findings on perceived division. Two-thirds of respondents, 67 percent, say their country is more divided than it was a decade ago. Respondents identified serious tension along several distinct fault lines. Some 71 percent perceive serious tension between supporters of different political parties, 63 percent between people on high and low incomes, 62 percent between immigrants and the native-born, and 53 percent between the climate-concerned and the climate-sceptical. Taken together, these figures sketch a portrait of societies in which economic grievance, partisan polarisation, migration anxieties and environmental conflict reinforce one another, producing a pervasive sense of fragmentation even among populations that agree on the underlying economic problem.

Perhaps the most politically charged finding concerns the stability of democratic commitment itself. Support for democracy in principle remains strong, with 68 percent of respondents saying it is the best way to govern their country. Yet democracy is increasingly contested in practice. Some 40 percent say their country would be better off with a strong leader unconstrained by parliament and elections. That figure rises above half in several upper-middle-income countries, a pattern that suggests the appeal of unconstrained executive power is not confined to any single region or income level but grows where the gap between popular demands and governmental responsiveness is widest.

Owen Gaffney, the report’s co-author and narrative chair of Earth4All, framed the findings as evidence of a widening gap between public appetite and political supply. This survey captures a gap that Earth4All has been tracking for several years now, he said. The public wants systemic economic change, yet mainstream politics is consistently failing to offer it. His warning about the consequences of that vacuum is pointed: when the gap is left unaddressed, it gets filled by whoever is willing to promise radical change first, democratic safeguards or not. The opportunity, in his view, lies in forging a new kind of social contract, one that takes seriously the scale of change people are asking for and delivers it through fair and democratic means.

The survey is the third in a series conducted by Earth4All since 2021 examining changing public attitudes toward social and political system change. Its methodology is substantial. Ipsos conducted the polling across G20 countries plus Sweden, with three notable exclusions. China and Saudi Arabia were omitted owing to sensitivities around questions of a political nature, and Russia was excluded because of the war in Ukraine. The seventeen countries surveyed together account for 58 percent of global GDP, 38 percent of the world’s population and 37 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry. That footprint means the findings cannot be dismissed as a niche or regional snapshot; they describe the attitudes of the populations that dominate the global economy and drive the majority of its emissions.

The report arrives at a moment when the technical case for economic restructuring has been building for years. Earth4All advocates five key turnarounds to achieve wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries. The first is to eliminate poverty by growing the economies of the poorest countries through green investment and cancelling their debts to high-income countries. The second is to reduce inequality by increasing taxes on the top 10 percent, strengthening workers’ rights and introducing citizens’ funds to give everyone access to a nation’s wealth. The third is to empower women by increasing access to education, putting them in leadership positions and equalising pensions. The fourth is to transform food systems by cutting waste and stopping the conversion of wild landscapes to farmland. The fifth is to transform energy use by immediately phasing out fossil fuels, electrifying everything and investing seriously in renewables and energy efficiency.

What makes the survey’s findings resonate is the alignment between public sentiment and this reform agenda. The public’s demand for major systemic change, expressed by 69 percent of respondents, maps onto proposals that address precisely the grievances citizens identify: rigged economies, excessive inequality and governments that serve narrow interests. Yet the trust deficit documented in the data creates a formidable implementation problem. Reforms of this scale require sustained public cooperation, tax compliance, behavioural change and electoral patience, all of which depend on citizens believing that sacrifices will be shared fairly and that governments will honour long-term commitments. With only 31 percent expressing confidence in governments’ long-term benevolence, the political capital needed to enact transformative policy appears to be eroding at exactly the moment its necessity is most widely acknowledged.

The implications extend well beyond the seventeen surveyed countries. If mainstream democratic politics cannot convert a 69 percent mandate for change into credible policy, the survey’s authors warn, the political space will be contested by actors offering radical alternatives without democratic guardrails. The 40 percent openness to a strong leader unconstrained by parliament and elections, rising above half in several upper-middle-income countries, is the leading indicator of that risk. Conversely, the near-universal agreement on the diagnosis, that inequality has gone too far and the system favours the rich and powerful, suggests an unusual reservoir of common ground on which a renewed social contract could be built. The report’s title captures both the problem and the prescription: economies perceived as rigged and societies experienced as fractured demand rebuilding trust, and the case for change is no longer contested by the public but by the capacity of institutions to deliver it. Whether governments can close the gap between what people want and what they believe is possible may define the political decade ahead.

Subject of Research: Public attitudes toward economic system change, inequality and trust in government across 17 major economies

Article Title: People want economic system change – but have stopped trusting anyone to deliver it

Article References: People want economic system change – but have stopped trusting anyone to deliver it. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Earth4All, Ipsos survey, economic inequality, public trust, democracy, G20, social cohesion, system change, Club of Rome, political polarisation, social contract, planetary boundaries

The study’s scale is notable for a topic that has often been treated through historical narrative rather than quantitative evidence. Between 2023 and 2024, the researcher surveyed 1,200 respondents spanning Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam, the three macro-regions that experienced the war and its aftermath in markedly different ways. Alongside the survey, 100 semi-structured interviews allowed the study to probe the mechanisms beneath the numbers, following a mixed-methods design in which statistical modeling and qualitative interpretation inform one another. Quantitative responses were analyzed using multiple regression, a technique that estimates the independent effect of each factor on recovery while holding the others constant, while the interview material was examined thematically to surface the social processes that statistics alone cannot capture.

The descriptive findings alone convey how deeply the war penetrated ordinary lives. Among survey respondents, 64.5 percent reported the loss of property or land during or because of the conflict, and 48.2 percent experienced wartime-induced displacement. These are not marginal exposures confined to a small subset of the population; they describe the majority experience of a generation. Displacement, in particular, is known from the disaster and conflict literature to sever the informal networks of kinship, reciprocity, and local knowledge that communities rely on in times of stress, which makes the scale of subsequent recovery in Vietnam all the more striking.

When the researcher modeled recovery as an outcome, wartime exposure emerged as a significant negative predictor, with a standardized coefficient of β = −0.326 at p < 0.001. In plain terms, the more intensely a household or community had been touched by the war, the slower and harder its recovery proved to be, even decades later. This result aligns with a growing body of international evidence on the durable costs of armed conflict, including studies of bombing impacts and long-run economic development in Vietnam itself, and it cautions against romantic narratives of rapid national healing. Wounds inflicted at scale do not simply dissolve with time; they shape trajectories that persist across generations of households.

Yet the model also identified powerful counterweights. Education was a significant positive predictor of recovery, with β = 0.112 at p < 0.001, suggesting that schooling functioned as a form of individual and household capital that translated into better post-war outcomes. Vietnam’s investment in mass education, both before and after reunification, has long been noted by development scholars, and this study adds a resilience dimension to that record: educated respondents appear to have been better equipped to navigate reconstruction, access opportunities, and rebuild livelihoods. Participation in reconstruction efforts was an even stronger positive predictor, with β = 0.187 at p < 0.001, indicating that people who took an active role in rebuilding their communities recovered more fully than those who remained on the sidelines.

That last finding is the conceptual heart of the study. Recovery, the results suggest, was not something done to Vietnamese communities by the state, nor something they achieved alone, but something produced in the interaction between the two. The research frames this through community resilience theory, which treats resilience not as a fixed trait of a group but as a set of capacities, including social trust, social cohesion, and participatory governance, that can be developed, depleted, and deliberately cultivated. In the Vietnamese case, state-led reconstruction programs provided the scaffolding of infrastructure, institutions, and policy, while locally driven efforts supplied the labor, legitimacy, and social energy that made those programs work on the ground.

The qualitative interviews illuminate how this interaction played out in practice. Respondents described the everyday politics of village life, the informal farmers’ groups and neighborhood networks through which people coordinated rebuilding, and the ways local participation shaped how national policies were actually implemented. This echoes a well-documented theme in Vietnamese studies: peasants and local communities did not merely receive policy from above but negotiated, adapted, and sometimes quietly transformed it through everyday practice. The study’s contribution is to connect that historical observation to measurable recovery outcomes, showing that communities with stronger participatory dynamics fared better in the long run.

Three social factors stand out in the analysis as key supports for resilience and long-term recovery: social trust, social cohesion, and participatory governance. Social trust, the confidence that neighbors and institutions will act predictably and fairly, lowers the transaction costs of collective action and makes cooperation possible even among people with limited resources. Social cohesion binds individuals into groups capable of sustained joint effort, from rebuilding homes to restoring farmland. Participatory governance ensures that reconstruction reflects local knowledge and that communities have a stake in decisions that affect them, which in turn reinforces trust and cohesion. Together, these elements form a mutually reinforcing cycle in which successful cooperation builds the social capital needed for the next round of collective effort.

The timing of the study adds another layer of significance. Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms, launched in 1986, marked a decisive turn toward market-oriented economic renewal and are widely credited with transforming the country’s economic trajectory. By integrating the reform era into its analytical framework, the study situates community recovery within a longer arc of state-led transformation, suggesting that the reforms succeeded in part because they tapped into resilient local structures that had survived the war years. The lesson is not simply that markets or state programs lift countries out of poverty, but that recovery accelerates when national initiatives connect with, rather than override, the social fabric of affected communities.

For policymakers and humanitarian organizations working in war-affected settings today, the implications are concrete. Post-conflict reconstruction that focuses exclusively on physical infrastructure or macroeconomic stabilization may miss the social infrastructure that determines whether recovery takes root. The Vietnamese evidence suggests that programs should be designed to strengthen trust and cohesion, create genuine channels for community participation, and invest in education as a long-horizon resilience strategy. It also suggests humility about timelines: the negative effect of wartime exposure was still detectable in a population surveyed nearly half a century after the fighting ended, which means recovery is a generational project, not a five-year plan. As conflicts continue to displace millions around the world, Vietnam’s post-war experience offers a rare, data-rich demonstration that societies can rebuild profoundly, provided the rebuilding engages the communities themselves as active agents rather than passive recipients of aid.

Subject of Research: Community resilience and post-conflict recovery in Vietnam after the Vietnam War

Article Title: Socio-political legacies and community resilience after the Vietnam war: evidence from Vietnam’s post-conflict reconstruction

Article References: Duc, T. M. (2026). Socio-political legacies and community resilience after the Vietnam war: evidence from Vietnam’s post-conflict reconstruction. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01762-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01762-5

Keywords: Vietnam War, community resilience, post-conflict reconstruction, Đổi Mới reforms, social trust, social cohesion, participatory governance, displacement, education, mixed methods, recovery, Vietnam

The schools at the heart of the study are part of an international network spanning Spain, Portugal and Latin American countries including Chile, Brazil and Peru. Many serve socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods, yet they have produced extraordinary outcomes. The European Commission has recommended their model as a successful approach to preventing early school leaving and improving school performance. At the core of the model are seven Successful Educational Actions: Dialogic Gatherings, Interactive Groups, Family Education, Educational Participation of the Community, a Dialogic Model for Prevention and Conflict Resolution, Dialogic Pedagogical Training, and Extended Learning Time. More than 15,000 schools worldwide now run Dialogic Literary Gatherings, one of the most widely replicated actions.

What has remained under-researched, the authors argue, is the specific role of the principal in these transformations. Educational leadership research has long documented the effects of shared, distributed, instructional and transformational leadership models on achievement in areas such as mathematics and reading. Landmark reviews, including the influential analysis by York-Barr and Duke on teacher leadership, identified parental and community involvement as a key dimension of school leadership practice, and OECD studies have concluded that school leaders contribute most when they work successfully beyond their institution’s borders. Dialogic leadership, the process through which the leadership practices of all members of the educational community are created, developed and consolidated, has received far less empirical attention.

To fill that gap, the research team used Communicative Methodology, an approach that treats knowledge as dialogically constructed and requires researchers to contrast scientific expertise with the lived perspectives of social agents. The methodology has a distinguished pedigree, having been deployed in the European Union-funded INCLUD-ED project, which identified the Successful Educational Actions that improved student outcomes across Europe. The team selected ten schools, seven elementary, one special education and two secondary, chosen to capture diversity in size, location, socio-economic status and the length of time each had operated as a Learning Community, from under five years to more than twenty. One school was in Brazil, chosen for the director’s extensive experience in secondary education. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with each principal, and the transcripts were analysed inductively, identifying critical episodes and grouping them into themes while attending to both obstacles and transformative dimensions.

The first major finding is that these principals exercise leadership within and beyond the school walls. Marta, who leads a large urban school, described the difference starkly: the defining feature of a Learning Community is its openness, with every action projecting outside the school because relatives and volunteers permanently observe and collaborate in the work, turning the environment into what she called an ally in teaching. Joan, another principal, described going out of the school door every morning to talk with community members about everything from the weather to letters from the town hall they did not understand, building the trust that later draws them into the classroom.

The transformative power of that trust is captured in one of the study’s most vivid episodes. Joan recounted a grandmother who initially dismissed the school project with frustration, reluctant to enter because she had never studied and did not feel safe among teachers. She began by spending time in the library, where activities extended learning time for students and families. Through dialogue with teachers, her participation gradually expanded until she was attending Interactive Groups twice a week and contributing significantly to the school community. Her story illustrates how egalitarian dialogue can convert scepticism into engagement, and engagement into leadership.

The principals also created formal structures that distribute leadership across the whole community. Silvia described the mixed committees, management boards composed of teachers, pupils, parents and other community members, as essential shared spaces where everyone can freely express ideas and, where necessary, take decisions. Since her school became a Learning Community and adopted these committees, pupil performance improved by 58 percent within five years. In Brazil, Ana reported that mixed committees in her large urban school, serving a predominantly African Brazilian community in a very poor area, gave space to the voices of students and families in daily decisions, whereas she previously had to make decisions alone. Patricia, leading a small rural school in Spain, asks parents and even children for advice, sometimes posing the question of what they would do if they were the principal, and finds their contributions sharpen her own reflection.

The second theme concerns how this dialogic leadership produces school improvement and social transformation. The principals described deliberately involving teachers in shaping the school programme; Marta noted that she sometimes leaves her proposals incomplete so that colleagues intervene and take responsibility for writing them, a slower process that yields a programme created by everyone. Leadership grounded in equity also emerged as a recurring principle: the principals spoke of re-situating themselves in more equal relationships built on dialogue, honesty and argumentation, reaching broad consensus through debate with all members of the community. Miren, whose school has run the Learning Communities project since 1995, defined leadership as transmitting trust and enthusiasm and ensuring that everyone feels like a protagonist.

Crucially, the leadership in these schools is anchored in scientific evidence rather than charisma alone. Miren recalled the training session in which researchers explained egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, transformation instead of adaptation, and equality of differences, a sentence in particular striking her: the school you want for your children is the school for all. That experience changed her teaching practices and led her to become principal. Patricia, whose school joined the project only two years ago, reported that reading the scientific evidence made her stronger and better able to put the principles into practice daily. The enthusiasm of the most experienced principals, sustained over twelve and fourteen years, is nourished by results, by what Silvia called credible solutions reflecting the direct experience of children’s success.

The study is not without limits. The evidence rests on ten schools, and the authors acknowledge that a larger sample would strengthen the findings, though the qualitative and communicative approach allowed them to identify transferable elements across urban and rural, public and private, and cross-cultural settings. Newly appointed principals also flagged risks to sustainability: turnover in teaching staff and new teachers unfamiliar with the scientific basis of the project. Yet experienced leaders pointed to a built-in safeguard, because leadership developed among families and pupils endures; mothers from minority groups support new teachers, and children explain to newcomers how the interactive groups and coexistence committees work. The authors conclude that dialogic leadership enhances participants’ sense of self-efficacy and connection to the task, demonstrating that with egalitarian dialogue the school context can be transformed and that efforts to guarantee educational success for all children are worthwhile.

Subject of Research: Dialogic leadership practices of principals in schools as Learning Communities

Article Title: Leading schools through dialogue: the role of principals in schools as Learning Communities

Article References: Redondo-Sama, G., Khaqan, S., Morlà-Folch, T., & Munté-Pascual, A. (2025). Leading schools through dialogue: the role of principals in schools as Learning Communities. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00033-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00033-0

Keywords: dialogic leadership, school principals, Learning Communities, Successful Educational Actions, educational leadership, school improvement, community participation, social cohesion, egalitarian dialogue, family engagement, Communicative Methodology, educational equity

The review organises the sprawling literature on green and blue spaces into three interconnected domains. The first concerns environmental structural qualities, the objective features of a landscape such as biodiversity richness, vegetation complexity, spatial connectivity, the presence of water, and multisensory characteristics that engage sight, sound, smell and even touch. The second domain covers psychological mediation processes, the internal mechanisms through which these features are converted into restorative effects, including attentional recovery, stress reduction and emotional regulation. The third and, in the authors’ framing, most underappreciated domain comprises socio-behavioural pathways: the ways landscapes actively shape what people do, from walking and exercising to socialising and volunteering. It is the dynamic coupling of all three domains, rather than any single ingredient, that the model treats as the true engine of well-being.

The theoretical backbone of the synthesis draws on three complementary perspectives that have dominated restorative-environments research for decades. Attention Restoration Theory, developed originally by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, holds that natural settings engage our involuntary attention in an effortless way, allowing the depleted directed-attention system that we rely on for work and concentration to recover. Stress Reduction Theory, advanced by Roger Ulrich, emphasises a faster, more primal psychophysiological response: exposure to certain natural scenes triggers an almost immediate decline in negative affect and physiological arousal. The Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, borrowed from environmental psychology’s broader tradition, supplies the connective tissue, describing how environmental stimuli act on an organism’s internal cognitive and affective states, which in turn drive approach or avoidance behaviour. Jiang and Wu’s contribution is to slot behavioural responses into this chain not as an endpoint but as a mediating mechanism in its own right.

That conceptual move matters because a growing body of empirical work shows that what a landscape makes people do may matter as much as how it makes them feel. Physical activity is the clearest example. Greenways, parks and waterfronts provide settings that invite walking, cycling and play, and systematic reviews of urban green and blue infrastructure consistently identify increased physical activity as a major pathway linking these spaces to better cardiovascular and mental health. A park that is beautiful but inaccessible, poorly connected to pedestrian networks, or perceived as unsafe will fail to generate the very behaviours through which its restorative potential is realised. Spatial connectivity, in this framework, is not a design nicety; it is a precondition for the health benefit to materialise.

Social interaction forms a second behavioural channel with its own evidence base. Studies across four European cities have examined how neighbourhood green space shapes the social environment and, through it, mental health, while sensitivity analyses of green-space characteristics in European cities have linked specific qualities of these spaces to social cohesion and psychological outcomes. Place attachment, the emotional bond people form with particular settings, and community participation in the stewardship of parks and gardens extend this pathway further, connecting environmental design to social capital and collective efficacy. In Jiang and Wu’s model, these behavioural and social responses amplify the direct psychological effects of greenery and water, creating a feedback loop in which well-used public spaces become more valued, better maintained and more restorative over time.

The review also underscores that not all green space is created equal, a conclusion supported by experimental and observational studies alike. Research on urban green space has shown that biodiversity predicts the psychological restorative benefits people derive from a site, suggesting that ecologically richer environments deliver measurably greater gains in well-being than simplified mown grass. Vegetation complexity, the layering of trees, shrubs and ground cover, appears to matter for both perceived naturalness and restorative potential, and studies of green-space naturalness have linked it to public well-being in ways relevant to designing healthier cities. Field experiments on urban blue spaces, including within-subject designs comparing physiological and psychological responses across settings, indicate that water features confer restoration benefits that are partly distinct from those of vegetation, while meta-analytic work on blue space has catalogued the mechanisms, from physical activity to psychological restoration, through which rivers, lakes and coasts affect health.

Multisensory design emerges as another frontier. A systematic review of public urban space found that combined multisensory effects, the orchestrated interplay of visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile stimuli, can enhance restoration beyond what visual quality alone achieves, and studies in Edinburgh’s diverse urban environments have explored multi-sensory approaches to psychological well-being in green space. This has practical implications: the sound of running water, the scent of flowering plants and the texture of natural materials are not decorative afterthoughts but active components of a restorative environment. Even small interventions, such as pocket parks in densely populated areas, have been shown to influence perception, preference and psychological well-being, offering a scalable strategy for cities where large parks are impractical.

The public health stakes of this literature are considerable. The World Health Organization has formally recognised green and blue spaces as determinants of mental health, and researchers publishing in The Lancet Public Health have called for advancing the contribution of urban green and blue space to population health. Reviews of cognitive function have begun mapping mechanistic pathways from green and blue exposure to improved cognition, and studies of stress resilience in real-world settings have assessed how blue-green infrastructure buffers the physiological toll of urban life. Equity is a recurring theme in this literature: because access to high-quality green space is unevenly distributed, the health benefits documented in these studies risk accruing disproportionately to wealthier neighbourhoods, making landscape design a matter of environmental justice as well as aesthetics.

Jiang and Wu are candid about the limitations of the current evidence base, and their prescriptions for future research are among the most useful parts of the synthesis. Much of the literature remains cross-sectional, relying on self-reported well-being and correlational designs that cannot cleanly separate cause from effect. The authors argue that the field should move toward longitudinal, experimental and cross-cultural studies that incorporate objective physiological and behavioural measures, such as wearable sensors, biomarkers of stress and direct observation of park use, in order to quantify causal relationships more precisely. Cross-cultural validation is particularly important given that preferences for landscape types, perceptions of safety and patterns of park use vary substantially across societies, meaning that design principles validated in one region may not transfer unexamined to another.

For urban planners and landscape architects, the framework offers a practical checklist grounded in evidence rather than intuition. Design for ecological richness and structural complexity, not just greenery coverage. Connect green and blue spaces into continuous, walkable networks. Engage multiple senses deliberately. And, crucially, design for behaviour: provide the affordances, safety, shade, seating, water access and programming that turn a passive landscape into a stage for physical activity, social encounter and community life. The health of a city’s population, this synthesis suggests, is written into the geometry of its streets and the ecology of its parks, and the most effective prescriptions are those that treat people not as passive viewers of scenery but as active participants in the environments that heal them.

Subject of Research: Environmental psychology of how urban green and blue landscapes influence human health through psychological and behavioural pathways

Article Title: Environmental psychology and behavioral response for creating public spaces and landscapes impacting human health

Article References: Jiang, Z., & Wu, Y. (2026). Environmental psychology and behavioral response for creating public spaces and landscapes impacting human health. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10111-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10111-x

Keywords: environmental psychology, urban green space, blue space, restorative environments, attention restoration theory, stress reduction theory, physical activity, social cohesion, biodiversity, urban planning, public health, well-being