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Transparency has become a catchword for proper governance in contemporary organisations, affecting the buildings arts therapists work in, the equipment they use and the way staff communicate with each other. Hence the move to open plan working in a mental health care setting for older people (‘Cloffaugh’), a popular environment for the NHS, provides a touchstone for this article: namely a detailed study of collaboration between an anthropologist (Ruth) and an arts therapies manager (Angela) that invites readers to look behind the surface appearances of everyday inter-professional interaction. Using an ethnographic approach, it follows their journey through three different office settings to show how working transparently across disciplines is harder to achieve than policy exhortations imply. Too sharp a division between what is and what merely seems, though clear, may mislead. While open plan working has many virtues, it is not simply a variable for management to manipulate. It is also an image. Transparency has to come in the right amount if it is not to be exclusive. In the spirit of ‘positive risk-taking’ often advocated, we believe the article will interest arts therapists and managers who work in organisations, large or small. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reflects on a practitioner-grounded metaphor -- the mosaic -- as a means to think the relationship between health and the environment in two policy initiatives, a walking and a conservation group. These were both part of Thames Chase Community Forest, a UK-based nature program to combat ill-health, poverty and social exclusion for those on the fringe of large urban conurbations. Using multiple research methods, the paper questions the simple, literal, equal-but-separate notions of the two pre-set policy parameters to show how the solidarity that mattered could not be fixed in advance. It was a mosaic-in-the-making, that came to life along the way, within the shifting ground of patterned regularities, people and happenings that often escape the net of rapid approaches to ethnographic policy research. Such reflections might usefully offer fresh soundings for policy-makers to contemplate, not merely a blueprint to be followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores perceptions of health, the environment, and the relationships between them, in a programme of community forestry. Drawing on qualitative data generated within a multi-disciplinary project, the paper discusses the difficulties of conceptualising the key variables utilised in research on the links between green space and health. Health and the environment were not discrete entities that could be mapped on to one another, but fluid and contested concepts. A simple model of the ‘impact’ of environment on health could not do justice to the ways in which ‘use’ of outdoor space is a process, not an event. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]