While opportunities to learn about potential careers in early childhood are often limited to stereotypical role play contexts, a project undertaken in collaboration with three early childhood centres in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, demonstrated that early childhood settings can play an important role in supporting children to expand their understandings of potential careers in the World of Work [WoW], and help interrupt trajectories of disadvantage and unemployment. For children in this low socioeconomic area, families' ability to support their educational and career aspirations was sometimes found to be limited by unemployment and a lack of positive educational experiences. Intentional Teaching was identified as an important pedagogy to address children's lack of knowledge about potential careers and in particular, highlighted the rich potential for drawing attention to the WoW through children's play interests and incidental conversations.

An autoethnographic exploration of the life and career experiences of ten academics across the Australian Regional University Network (RUN) unearthed a prevailing disjuncture between formative cultural experiences and academia that expands upon Binns' revised notion of cleft habitus. It signifies a gap between the generative capacity of cleft experience and its predominant construction in the literature as loss, difficulty and perceived deficit. Drawing on a framework that combines 'cleft habitus' and principles of intersectionality, this paper examines how cleft experiences impact study and academic work in higher education. Key findings include how academics within a cleft habitus space occupy liminal insider/outsider positions of privilege and disadvantage and can leverage insights gained from these experiences to inform their broad scholarly practice. Reconceptualising cleft habitus as a resource provides a new contribution to discourses around equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education.

Enabling education programs in Australia assist students, who would otherwise have been excluded from higher education, to transition into undergraduate study. These programs emerged independently in response to the needs of individual universities and the varying cohorts of students they serve. The exclusion of these programs from the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) has meant they remain unregulated, with no national framework for standards. The development of academic standards is a dynamic, consensus driven process, and benchmarking provides a method through which academics from across institutions can work in partnership to reach shared understandings and improve and align practices. This practice report outlines the results of the first comprehensive cross-institutional benchmarking project involving nine Australian universities and demonstrates there is shared understanding of the standards of enabling programs between institutions. These findings will contribute to the establishment of national standards for enabling programs in Australia.

This chapter examines discourses that address the obstacles confronting regional youth transitioning to the future world of work (WoW). Mainstream discourses associated with cultural capital and youth aspirations tend to be deficit focused, highlighting perceived challenges and limitations. As such, this chapter adopts new lenses using possible selves and self-determination theories to inform strategic approaches to support youth transitions into the future WoW in the Latrobe Valley, Australia. These support the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, Quality Education, which promotes educational opportunities that contribute towards a progressive and healthy society. They also link closely to SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth. It is widely accepted that schools, families, industries and communities in partnership have vital roles in preparing young people for the changing WoW and their future lives. The literature informing this chapter identified that interventions to sustain Middle Years student aspirations require active rather than passive experiences with the WoW and are particularly pertinent for regions such as the Latrobe Valley, as they transition away from trades related work roles to an uncertain future.

This research explored how engineering apprentices at an Australian TAFE institution perceive their supported acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. Using a mixed methods approach, 56 apprentices completed questionnaires with nine participating in subsequent interviews. The study identified apprentices' perceived ability levels in reading, writing and numeracy, learning strategies they employed, and literacy and numeracy support they found most helpful. Findings provide insight into apprentices' approaches to learning, many of whom struggled to articulate how they acquired the literacy and numeracy skills for their studies and employment. Participants primarily focused on navigation of coursework and reading demands while reporting similar learning strategies. Literacy and numeracy support (LNS) teachers were considered helpful for others, with clear distinctions between the trade teacher/trainer and LNS teacher. Agitation with the self-paced nature of the classroom and a mismatch between study and workplace was also highlighted. This research suggests greater awareness of how apprentices learn would support literacy and numeracy skills development without reinforcing a deficit discourse. New approaches to develop apprentices' learning strategies within the wider dialogue of literacy and numeracy acquisition is recommended.

This book engages with a pressing question: How does global climate change increase the need for accountable governance? It examines interdisciplinary approaches to consider how accountable climate governance mechanisms can meet the complex challenges of environmental changes impacting natural systems and the global distributions of species, water, arable and habitable land. Integrated approaches that take heed of ecological and biological systems are identified as enabling better understandings of accountable climate governance systems, human and environmental interfaces, political and economic sectoral interplay and scalable solutions. It argues that achieving accountable climate governance mechanisms will enable states to meet the expectations of informed citizens and provide better environmental outcomes.

The regime complex of the Paris Agreement set new parameters for climate governance of coupled human environment systems during the Anthropocene. Two significant and pressing challenges emerged from it: (i) how to make a diverse multitude of actors accountable for their activities and (ii) how to orchestrate effective climate governance. Accountable and effective climate governance will be: reliable (based upon principles of accepting rather than contesting emerging knowledge); transparent (open to the identification of different albeit complementary agendas); flexible (able to accommodate both the uneven effects of climate change and the specific requirements of different communities); and robust enough to withstand inevitable conflicts.

Examinations of climate change governance approaches firmly establish the importance of accountability for achieving both good environmental outcomes and enduring societies. The studies presented here focus on opportunities to progress climate governance including experimental approaches to overcome stall-points or other limits to progress. These studies suggest that more accountable climate governance mechanisms are better able to avoid the limits of spiralling risk avoidance approaches and also more likely to pursue more flexible approaches that emphasise the benefits of change. They consider shared visions of sovereign states offering valuable normative contributions in balanced assessments of the risks arising from climate change.

The Paris Agreement 2015 was mostly a success, given ongoing challenges to reconcile contests between the functions and capacities of sovereign states and the need to establish effective climate governance mechanisms. Sovereignty privileges states’ internal interests over external demands and limits their readiness to see themselves as accountable for climate change contributions. Climate governance mechanisms can be thwarted when states maintain their privileged status, but sovereignty also provides states with inherent responsibilities to protect. Accountability might therefore be regarded as the fulcrum for order as environmental transformations driven by climate change take them into uncharted governance territories. A regime complex is a step in the right direction for states as they confront new uncertainties regarding the sustainability of their societies and systems.

Interdisciplinary approaches aid understandings of sovereign states as central agents in establishing and implementing international organisations, agreements and regimes and their roles in recognising and responding to global climate change and the environmental transformations that demand adaptation and mitigation strategies. Selected thematic studies focus on diverse approaches to understanding, reconciling and implementing climate governance mechanisms and ideas of accountabilities as sovereign states respond to climate change. In Section One, authors examine the significance of these developments for ideas about the rights and responsibilities of contemporary forms of government, relationships between governments and people, and the roles of international governance mechanisms. Accountability is a central theme throughout, with attention to its capacity to promote comprehensive responses to climate governance.

Through much of 2009, the world waited for political leaders to convene at a climate summit in Copenhagen. In turn, many of these leaders waited for others to lead the way in declaring emissions targets and other political strategies for responding to climate change. Overall, 2009 was a year in which the world waited for a new program of action to emerge. Some held high expectations of likely comprehensive agreements. Some expected that the Copenhagen Summit would provide a venue for intense political bargaining. Many believed that a raft of linked agreements would emerge from what was expected to be one of the most important meetings of government leaders since the first international climate change discussions of the 1980s. Even those with relatively modest expectations anticipated the likely negotiation of parameters for a new global climate change agenda. Few expected that this cornerstone event in 21st-century political leadership would result in so little. The Copenhagen Climate Summit provided no substantive new emissions targets, no new international standards or strategies and no new political alliances or coalitions of interests to support subsequent initiatives.

Throughout the 20th century, higher atmospheric temperatures increased the intensity of the global water cycle, altering the processes of water evaporation, cloud formation, rainfall, river flow and groundwater storage, thereby changing 'its impacts upon regions and continents' (Huntington, 2006, p. 90). Further changes will continue into the future as atmospheric temperatures continue to rise. These changes in the global water cycle are altering the distribution of water resources which will, over time, also alter the suitability of many parts of the world for human habitation (Postel, 2000, p. 941). As is often observed, climate change has begun to make parts of the world wetter, more prone to flooding, with shorter periods of intense rainfall, while others are becoming more prone to severe and protracted periods of drought. Many scientists argue that even if urgent action is taken to reduce green-house gas emissions in order to slow the rate of increasing atmospheric and ocean temperatures, water redistributions will create major challenges for current patterns of human settlement, food production and industrial capacities (United Nations Development Programme, 2008; Parry et al., 2007; Pearce, 2007). If the build-up of atmospheric green-house gases is not reduced, and atmospheric temperatures increase more quickly, scientists predict that some 'areas of the globe… [will] become uninhabitable' (Diffenbaugh and Scherer, 2011, p. 616; see also Sherwood and Huber, 2010).