SCHOLARLY SHOWCASE SCHOLARLY SHOWCASE 16 Wing Shan Kan, Nina Sander, Ching Chit Chau, and Raul P. Lejano. “Climate and relationality: Transforming gendered relations from vulnerability to resilience.” Progress in Disaster Science (2026): 100653. Focus of Study The study examines how gendered social relationships shape women’s vulnerability to climate change and extreme weather events. Using a relational perspective, the authors argue that women’s disproportionate exposure to disaster risks is produced by context-specific cultural norms, unequal power relations, limited access to resources, and gendered divisions of labour. The article also explores how these same relationships can be transformed to strengthen resilience and empowerment. Rather than presenting women only as passive victims, it emphasizes their roles as local knowledge holders, community leaders, and active participants in disaster preparedness and climate adaptation. The study therefore focuses on how institutional change, participatory communication, and women-led initiatives can challenge social exclusion, strengthen women’s agency, and improve disaster risk reduction, planning, and policy responses. Policy Recommendation This paper recommends transforming climate and disaster policy from merely including women to restructuring institutions with their active leadership. Policymakers should strengthen women’s representation in decision-making, redistribute resources and unpaid care responsibilities, and direct more climate funding to local women-led organizations. Disaster programs should remove practical barriers to participation by providing childcare support and considering meeting times, mobility, and accessibility. Women should also be treated as local knowledge holders and co-designers of climate adaptation rather than passive recipients of expert information. Participatory communication, storytelling, community dialogue, and shared decision-making should be incorporated into disaster risk reduction planning so that policies better reflect local experiences, strengthen women’s agency, and connect formal institutional frameworks with the everyday realities of climate-vulnerable communities. Gietel-Basten, Stuart. “The roots of equality?: Marital age homogamy and female agency in Lesotho, 1880-Present.” Canadian Studies in Population 53.1 (2026): 1. Social and Urban Policy Focus of Study This demographic paper uses marital age homogamy and the Girlpower-Index to trace Lesotho’s gender equality origins. It compares 3,575 1880–1939 church marriage records with 2004–2024 DHS survey data. After filtering inconsistent marriage samples, the study finds nearly unchanged spousal age gaps and female agency metrics over a century. It refutes the mainstream view that balanced marital power only comes from recent modernization, proving Lesotho’s high female autonomy has deep historical roots, though its church-only dataset limits full societal generalization. Policy Recommendation For Lesotho’s gender policymakers, long-term marriage demographic trends should guide anti-early-marriage and women’s empowerment programs built on its historic female agency foundation. For African governments and researchers, digitizing colonial demographic archives is critical to avoid biased gender policy analysis. Policymakers should abandon over-simplified modernization frameworks and incorporate indigenous marital traditions to craft contextually suitable, sustainable gender equality policies across Sub-Saharan Africa. He, Alex Jingwei, Mengjie Long, Xiaoting Liu, Na Tang “Forging integrated care through collective policy entrepreneurship in a fragmented health system: a tale of two counties in China.” Health Economics, Policy and Law (2026): 1-19. Focus of Study This qualitative comparative study examines county medical conglomeration, China’s vertical integrated care model, through collective policy entrepreneurship theory, selecting Deqing (Zhejiang) and Zhijiang (Hubei) as pioneer cases. It addresses severe fragmentation in China’s health system caused by split governance, fee-for-service incentives and weak primary care. Field interviews reveal two distinct reform pathways: Deqing’s consensus-driven technocrat coalition and Zhijiang’s top-down crisis-led leadership team. Both entrepreneurial groups deployed shared tactics like cross-region policy learning and bundled global budgets, yet adopted divergent organizational structures shaped by local economic and healthcare pressures to unify county hospitals, township clinics and village facilities. Policy Recommendation The paper offers multi-level health policy suggestions for fragmented systems across developing nations. Governments should nurture collective policy entrepreneurs at county levels, granting local discretionary space for incremental care integration pilots. Vertical medical conglomeration paired with bundled global budgets is recommended to realign provider incentives away from volume competition. Policymakers must tailor integration architectures to regional socioeconomic conditions instead of copying uniform models. Inter-departmental coordination mechanisms need establishment to break bureaucratic silos, and regular upper-level venue communication should be encouraged to secure political endorsement and scale proven local health innovations nationwide. 15
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