Introduction:Effective pandemic response requires large-scale behavioural change. Despite efforts to integrate behavioural science advice in public health policy making, there is a shortage of empirical evidence on the challenges faced by countries that want to professionalise their behavioural science advisory capacity. As senior behavioural science advisers during the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored and compared how behavioural science organised itself across Northwestern Europe in order to draw lessons for integrating behavioural insights into policy during future crises. Methods/data:Using the evidence-based public health framework, we conducted interviews with 21 senior stakeholders from the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK and Finland, followed by a facilitated look-back meeting with a subset of participants. All participants were actively involved in their countries' pandemic responses. Analytical plan:Data were analysed using qualitative analysis software (NVivo 15) and validated during the facilitated look-back meeting. Results:Producing actionable and relevant behavioural science advice during crises benefits from: (1) drawing on a wide mix of research methodologies; (2) sustaining continuous dialogue with, and access to, policy and decision-makers; (3) ensuring clear packaging and delivery of advice, including additional efforts to support comprehension; (4) creating functional structures for interdisciplinarity; and (5) maintaining institutional memory of the competencies and relationships developed during crisis response. Conclusion/implications:An improved science for policy practice in the health field involves the difficult tasks of motivating direct dialogue, interdisciplinarity and co-creation, and a functioning governance of behavioural science advice systems. The findings further illustrate the conceptual utility of the evidence-based public health framework.

This article explores the evolving role of social sciences in humanitarian action, focusing on its potential for community engagement, and how this can aid capacity building and localization efforts that might lead toward decolonisation. Drawing on interviews and group discussions with humanitarian practitioners internationally, it examines both the promise and the challenges of integrating social sciences into emergency responses. While valued for their holistic and relational approaches, social sciences often clash with the fast-paced, outcome-driven demands of crisis settings. Participatory and qualitative methods are frequently adapted to meet institutional expectations for standardized, quantifiable results, risking reinforcement of top-down, decontextualized practices. Findings highlight the need for greater reflexivity and alignment between critical social scientists' social justice aims and their professional practices. Decolonising humanitarian action requires more than participatory tools: it demands redistributing resources and shifting decision-making power to local communities. Despite growing localization discourse, participants reported persistent barriers to leadership, funding, and recognition of local knowledge. We call on social scientists, practitioners and organizations integrating social science methodologies into humanitarian programming, to advance a critical, transdisciplinary practice that supports local governance, strengthens sustainable capacities, and disrupts structures that perpetuate dependency, enabling genuinely community-led and sustainable solutions.

This paper discusses the methodological lessons learned from applying an innovative Consultative Process Approach to investigate the use of evidence in concrete advice-making processes across various European national health agencies. The methodological approach employs a sequential research design combining two components: a core consultative workshop with participation of key actors involved in national advice-making processes, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with other relevant stakeholders identified to have influenced advice-making. The approach was piloted in five focused after-action review (AAR) case-studies across four countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Georgia). The lessons learned from applying this approach are discussed in terms of the (i) process; (ii) outcomes, and (iii) limitations. The approach appears useful for collecting data among experts about deliberative and decision processes. Limitations mainly pertain to the resources and expertise needed and representativeness of voices. To increase analytical robustness, the paper recommends applying multiple methods.

Background There is recognition of the importance of community resilience in mitigating long-term effects of health emergencies on communities. To guide policy and practice, conceptual clarity is needed on what community resilience involves and how it can be operationalised for community protection in ways that empower and strengthen local agency.Objectives To identify the core components of community resilience to health emergencies using a scoping review methodology.Search methods PubMed, EMCARE, Scopus, Web of Science, PTSDpubs, APO and ProQuest Dissertations were systematically searched to identify review studies published from 2014.Selection criteria Studies were included if they reported a review of original research papers investigating community resilience in the context of a health emergency.Data collection and analysis Data were extracted from included studies using a specially developed data extraction form. Qualitative data were subjected to a meta-synthesis consisting of three levels of analysis.Main results 38 evidence reviews were included. Analysis identified recurring characteristics of community resilience. Six studies reported 10 abilities required for community resilience including: adapt, transform, absorb, anticipate, prepare, prevent, self-organise, include, connect and cope. 25 studies reported 11 types of resources: social, economic, environmental, governance, physical infrastructure, institutional, communication, human capital, health, emergency management and socioeconomic.Conclusions 21 components have been identified that can be used as a basis for operationalising and measuring community resilience. In contexts of disaster management, community resilience is a fairly mature concept that reflects a community’s inherent capacity/abilities to withstand and recover from shocks. There is a need to incorporate a ‘resource’ perspective that speaks to a wider enabling environment. There is scope to investigate whether the same set of components identified here has relevance in public health emergencies emanating from disease or human acts of aggression and to articulate resilience logics to critical endpoints for health emergency management.

For many people living with long COVID (PWLC), self-tracking has emerged as a valuable practice to monitor their illness. An examination of self-tracking practices can, therefore, shed light on the ways in which individuals navigate their care, make sense of their experiences and advocate for their needs. This study investigates how PWLC engage in self-tracking practices and how they utilise and negotiate the data generated. Based on 33 semi-structured interviews with PWLC in the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland, we found that PWLC use self-tracking to recognise patterns and identify limits, triggers and effective interventions. The insights drawn from this are used to make informed decisions about health management strategies. Yet, self-tracking may also reify symptoms and negatively influence the subjective illness experience, exacerbating stress and anxiety. Although PWLC themselves negotiate and question their tracking data, they find a variety of responses from healthcare providers in clinical interactions. Using the concept of 'trading zone' (Kjærulff and Langstrup), we argue that although self-tracking cannot replace treatment and good care, its integration into the healthcare experience as a valuable form of patient knowledge may improve the patient-provider relationship.

The application of social sciences has been recognized as valuable to inclusive humanitarian programming that aims to be attentive to the needs and initiatives of affected communities. However, the integration of social science-informed community engagement (CE) approaches in humanitarian action remains episodic, fragmented, and under-resourced. This research article provides insights from a study that reviewed existing and needed capacities for the systematic integration of social sciences for community engagement in humanitarian action. We examined what capacity resources exist and what resources need to be developed for strengthening social science integration into humanitarian programming for improved engagement of affected and at-risk communities in conflict and hazard contexts. A mixed method approach was used, including twenty-two key informant interviews and a focus group discussion with social scientists and humanitarian practitioners, an online survey with 42 respondents, a literature review, and a year-long monthly consultation with social scientists and humanitarian practitioners in a UNICEF-led global technical working group. Results illustrate insights on the value of the “social science lens” in humanitarian action and current usage of different social science disciplines. Challenges found include different understandings (e.g., on standardization), languages and methods used by practitioners and social scientists, and how to integrate the seemingly “slow” processes of social sciences to fit emergency response. Institutional barriers to mainstream community-centered humanitarian action facilitated by the social sciences include top-down decision-making and resourcing, lack of localization, and many siloed, dispersed, and episodic efforts.

The capacity to deliver programmes that prevent and control infectious diseases is a key public health function. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) aims to support and strengthen this capacity in European Union/ European Economic Area (EU/EEA) countries as part of its 2021-27 strategy which includes explicit attention to social and behavioural aspects of disease prevention. To achieve its strategic goals, it is important that ECDC improves its knowledge of prevention strategies, actors and activities in EU/EEA countries. In this Perspective, we summarise three challenges to implementing the prevention framework proposed by ECDC: (i) defining, recognising and identifying with 'prevention', (ii) integrating new understandings into established ways of thinking, and (iii) the need for more attention to prevention in governance. These challenges are derived from the findings of a project which conducted a preliminary mapping of prevention actors, networks and activities in four EU countries to support the development of a community of practice within the new ECDC prevention framework. This Perspective serves to draw attention to this prevention framework and the three identified challenges for those working on its implementation.

This open access book examines the use of relocation and resettlement processes in the USA as a means of responding to climate change

AbstractFor better and worse, community resettlement as climate adaptation can disrupt regional land and property relations. Government officials in U.S. jurisdictions have raised concerns that resettlement threatens municipal budget stability by potentially decreasing the property tax base and stifling future development (Koslov in Public Culture 28:359–387, 2016; Shi and Varuzzo, Cities 100, 2020).

AbstractBased on the relationships and work that have informed this book, it has become apparent to us that we ought to dedicate the last chapter to what we believe relocation scholars should know about how bureaucratic discretion works in conjunction with the law. Initially, we intended the latter part of this book to be a kind of a primer on laws, legal concepts, and legal tools that framed relocation. This was done in part so that relocation scholars and practitioners who have not had legal training could have a technical short course on some concepts; and to put legal constructs in conversation with the critical social sciences and critical social theory.

Community engagement (CE) is essential to humanitarian assistance, and the social sciences have been credited in recent epidemics and disease outbreaks as having played a crucial, supportive role. Broadening this attention to other humanitarian fields, this scoping review asks what lessons learned can be found in grey and peer-reviewed literature on the integration of the social sciences in CE for conflicts and disasters. Using an analytical framework developed through a UNICEF-led project called Social Science for Community Engagement (SS4CE) in Humanitarian Action, we identified 1093 peer reviewed publications and 315 grey literature reports of possible relevance. The results show that only a small minority-18 publications and 4 reports-tangibly comment on the relevance of social sciences, mostly only in passing and implicitly. While social science techniques are used and the importance of understanding a community's cultural, linguistic, and religious context is emphasized, further discussion on the integration of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary social sciences is absent. Furthermore, CE is mostly seen as an instrumental ('means to an end') involvement, for example to collect data in emergency situations and receive feedback on interventions, but not as a critical and transformative intervention. We conclude that unlike the attention given to social sciences in disease outbreaks, there is a knowledge gap and an accordingly proper planning and implementation gap regarding the potentiality of social science to improve CE across all humanitarian contexts of disasters and conflicts.

AbstractThis chapter focuses on communities, groups, neighborhoods, individuals, classes of individuals, and families who have a precarious relationship with property. Here, we discuss the ways in which that relationship structures rights to imagine, access, and rebuild infrastructure and social life after a disaster and during processes of relocation as an adaptation to climate change—rights we collectively describe as “the right to rebuilding the city.”

AbstractOver the last twenty years, the authors of this book have been enmeshed in conversations about how difficult it is to support communities as they plan relocations and resettlements as an adaptive response to climate change-related flooding. Twenty years ago in Alaska, relocation challenges seemed born of state ignorance and neglect.

AbstractOne premise of this book is that the most prominent federal solution and funding mechanism to support relocations linked to repetitive flooding is the use of voluntary buyouts and acquisitions of at-risk properties.

AbstractVoluntary buyouts are the primary way that relocation away from climate risk is currently carried out. Within the literature on buyouts, there is widespread consensus that interventions should ideally be conceptualized and administered as a “people-centered,” community-based disaster risk reduction strategy, with a focus on supporting populations who have been made vulnerable through unsustainable and inequitable development processes (Rumbach and Kudva in Risks, Hazards, and Crisis in Public Policy 2:1–23, 2011).

AbstractDespite its ubiquity, “property” is a difficult legal concept to pin down. The property regime and case law regarding property encompass many different forms of tangible and intangible property such as land and structures, intellectual property, hunting rights, personal possessions, and much more.

AbstractThroughout this book, we suggest that understanding the law, particularly the law as it pertains to property, is important for pursuing justice within the context of relocation planning linked to climate change. As described in the previous chapters, communities inevitably confront and work within legal structures that frame relocation processes. These engagements with the law can be “successful” in carrying out physical relocation, but they can also be divisive, tiring, obfuscating, and lead to unsatisfactory and inequitable outcomes. All relocations are informed by community histories and interactions with government and legal structures.

AbstractDespite the widely proclaimed principle of “community-led” processes within climate adaptation discourse, individuals’ assertion of a right to act communally is often undercut by the law, the application of the law, and planning conventions. The previous chapter emphasized some of the profound challenges associated with individual choice and community action during the administration of buyout programs.

The importance of community participation in malaria elimination efforts has been trumpeted in various studies; however, the reasons why communities participate are often under examined. We explored the underlying socio-cultural environment of marginalized communities in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to ascertain why these groups participate in a malaria elimination project, through 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, informal conversations, and observation. Findings show various reasonings and motivations of these communities to use participation. In Vietnam, the Stieng and M'nong ethnic minority groups used participation to protest ethnic inequalities and abuses. In Laos, the Brao ethnic minority group feigned participation to deter outside interference in their traditional spaces and identity. In Cambodia, marginalized Khmer and Cham communities actively participated in the project to tailor community development. The paper concludes that participation in health interventions was consistently manipulated as a strategy to protect or nurture community identity and further socio-cultural and political interests.