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The UK has a long history of providing and managing urban parks. The formal park and garden, developed as a morally improving 'place apart' in the city, can inform people's idea of what a park is. This paper aims to explore the legacy of this conceptualisation of the park through an extensive review of literature and policy documents. This paper examines prevailing discourses by locating them more accurately within its political, economic and social context of the times. The paper also examines why, despite being described as 'treasured assets' by national government today, UK urban parks continue to be undervalued and taken for granted? Why does the lamenting of the fate of UK urban parks sector persist in the twenty-first century? To answer this question, the paper will focus on the formal urban park by applying the analytical framework of place-keeping as a conceptualisation of long-term green space management and stewardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges of historic building adaption for reuse are well documented and often refer to building fabric, listed status, historical significance, environmental sustainability, and structural layout as limitations to their successful re-development. However, few studies have explored how such issues manifest in the operational use of historic buildings developed for reuse, the significance on cities, and the long-term socioeconomic value. This study proposes a stewardship-based strategy to manage facilities to improve the socioeconomic value of historic buildings and support the socioeconomic demand in cities and territories. Within the context of a selected case study in the UK, a mixed-method approach was used to attain the data. Quantitative evidence, using a questionnaire survey with building users, and qualitative evidence, using semi-structured interviews with the facility management team, are presented. The results suggest that historic buildings are empowered by an organisational stewardship strategy, resulting in an acceptable operational compromise that involves an acceptance of building issues and their impact on the building users' experience, and this can support the more operational adaption of facilities by the facility management team. The research proposes a stewardship-based strategy to support an improved socioeconomic value by incorporating user perspectives while ensuring a less preservation-centred and a more flexible-oriented approach towards managing facilities in historic buildings. This study constructively forms a base for further research into facility management strategies in historic buildings and their impact on cities' needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Care Act 2014 gave English local authorities a duty to 'shape' social care markets and encouraged them to work co-productively with stakeholders. Grid-group cultural theory is used here to explain how local authorities have undertaken market shaping, based on a four-part typology of rules and relationships. The four types are: procurement (strong rules, weak relationships); managed market (strong rules, strong relationships); open market (weak rules, weak relationships); and partnership (weak rules, strong relationships). Qualitative data from English local authorities show that they are using different types of market shaping in different parts of the care market (e.g. residential vs home care), and shifting types over time. Challenges to the sustainability of the care system (rising demand, funding cuts, workforce shortages) are pulling local authorities towards the two 'strong rules' approaches which run against the co-productive thrust of the Care Act. Some local authorities are experimenting with hybrids of the two 'weak rules' approaches but the rival cultural biases of different types mean that hybrid approaches risk antagonising providers and further unsettling an unstable market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once considered a scientific, technocratic activity, marine governance has shifted from a top down, state directed process toward participatory and deliberative approaches. In parallel, there has been increasing acknowledgment of the need to consider the human dimensions of marine and coastal issues, and the role of citizens in delivering the sustainable management and protection of the marine environment. By doing so, a more complete understanding of the complex relationship between society and the sea may be achieved. Research has shown that marine practitioners recognise that higher levels of civic involvement and citizenship in the management of the marine environment would be beneficial. Despite this, questions are raised as to whether existing governing institutions, legal structures, and planning instruments enable this to readily happen in practice. This paper explores the extent to which existing marine governance instruments are positioned to engender a society of marine citizens to meaningfully engage with marine stewardship behaviours in the UK and Ireland. A multi-phased research approach critically analyses existing relevant legislation, legal and policy frameworks, focusing on themes associated with the human dimensions of marine governance, including marine stewardship. This evaluation highlights a limited inclusion of terms relating to marine stewardship nationally, but recognises the foundations are there a more strategic and cognisant recognition of human-ocean relationships within marine governance across a range of scales and contexts. • Marine governance has shifted from a top-down to a more participatory process. • Practitioners recognise a need for higher civic involvement and citizenship. • Research critically analyses existing instruments for human dimensions. • Recommendations call for explicit inclusion of people in marine governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I compare the compensation contracting relevance of fair values (FVs) and market values in the setting of UK real estate firms and find that FVs are weighted more heavily than market values. I further find that FV weighting is increasing in FV estimate reliability and signal strength, while market value weighting is decreasing in FV estimate reliability. FV accounting represents a key trend over the past several decades with International Financial Reporting Standards permitting FVs to a greater extent than many national standards. My study provides a counterpoint to existing studies that find FVs are not useful for contracting with executives (DeFond et al., 2020; Livne et al., 2011). Furthermore, I find that FV is used as a performance measure in an efficient way that is dependent on the signal‐to‐noise ratio of FV estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the financial crisis, regulators have put emphasis on encouraging institutional investors to take their governance responsibilities more seriously. In the UK, the Stewardship Code was introduced to enhance the engagement of institutional investors with shareholdings in UK listed companies. In the literature, institutional investors have been predominantly conceptualised as owners, although a number of authors have rejected this view, arguing that traders would be more appropriate. The UK Stewardship Code adds a third view: the institutional investor as steward. The literature generally considers the stewardship concept to be the ownership role combined with wider stakeholder responsibilities. By focussing primarily on this new stakeholder element, this study examines empirically the new stewardship concept by undertaking a content analysis of the published Stewardship Statements of 81 asset managers. The results find support for both the ownership and stewardship role but also highlight significant variations in practices that point toward different competitive strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tedizolid is a new oxazolidinone antibiotic with little real-life data on use outside of skin and soft tissue infections. There is a paucity of safety evidence in courses greater than 6 days. Our centre uses tedizolid predominantly when linezolid-associated adverse events have occurred. This service evaluation describes our experience to date. We performed a retrospective service evaluation by reviewing case notes, prescription charts, and laboratory system results for each patient prescribed tedizolid at our hospital and recording patient demographics, clinical details, and outcomes. Sixty patients received tedizolid between May 2016 and November 2018. Most were treated for bone or joint infections and had stopped linezolid prior to tedizolid prescription. Mean length of tedizolid therapy was 27 days. Haematological adverse effects were infrequent. Most patients (72%) finished the course and their clinical condition improved during treatment (72%). Adverse events were common, but often not thought to be tedizolid related. Tedizolid appears to be safe in prolonged courses within this context. It may be suitable for longer-term antibiotic therapy within a complex oral and parenteral outpatient antibiotic therapy (COPAT) service. Patients who do not tolerate linezolid can be safely switched to tedizolid if appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews past literature on the governance aspect of takaful operators. This aspect has been given limited attention in literature on Islamic finance compared to other components such as Islamic banking and Islamic capital market. Therefore, major articles concerning governance issues of takaful operators are discussed and special consideration has been given to the UK Stewardship Code and the Malaysian Rating Corporation (MARC) guidelines for Islamic financial institutions. Interestingly, this article suggests that the Malaysian Rating Corporation (MARC) guidelines for Islamic financial institutions and the UK Stewardship Code should be used as references in order to develop dedicated stewardship guideline for Islamic financial institutions like takaful operators. The stewardship theory is compatible with the Islamic notion of al-falah. Therefore, by having specific stewardship guidelines for the takaful operators it can further encourage policyholders’ engagement with the takaful operators’ management. Last but not least, this article contributes to discussion in this area especially on the possibility of having a set of stewardship guidelines for the Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) such as takaful operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Antibiotics are among the most frequently administered drugs globally, yet they are often prescribed inappropriately. Guidelines for prescribing are developed by expert committees at international and national levels to form regional standards and by local experts to form hospital guidance documents. Our aim was to assess variability in antibiotic prescription guidelines for both regional standards and individual hospitals. Methods A search through 3 publicly accessible databases from February to June 2018 led to a corpus of English language guidance documents from 70 hospitals in 12 countries and regional standards from 7 academic societies. Results Guidelines varied markedly in content and structure, reflecting a paucity of rules governing their format. We compared recommendations for 3 common bacterial infections: community-acquired pneumonia, urinary tract infection, and cellulitis. Hospital guidance documents and regional standards frequently disagreed on preferable antibiotic classes for common infections. Where agreement was observed, guidance documents appeared to inherit recommendations from their respective regional standards. Several regional prescribing patterns were identified, including a greater reliance on penicillins over cephalosporins in the United Kingdom and fluoroquinolones in the United States. Regional prescribing patterns could not be explained by antibiotic resistance or costs. Additionally, literature that cited underlying recommendations did not support the magnitude of recommendation differences observed. Conclusions The observed discordance among prescription recommendations highlights a lack of evidence for superior treatments, likely resulting from a preponderance of noninferiority trials comparing antibiotics. In response, we make several suggestions for developing guidelines that support best practices of antibiotic stewardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on previous studies of UK churchgoers by examining the factors that predict concern for the environment and willingness to make sacrifices to preserve it. A sample of 825 churchgoers from a range of denominations completed a questionnaire that contained items used to assess psychological preferences, biblical literalism, and a range of theological stances toward creation. Psychological variables showed both direct and indirect effects on environmentalism that were in line with previous work by environmental psychologists. Indirect effects were related to the way that some psychological type preferences either shape biblical interpretation or are associated with religious conservatism. Religious affiliation had no direct effects on environmentalism, but did have indirect effects through literalism and religious conservatism. Beliefs about dominion and eschatology directly reduced concern, but dominion was also positively associated with stewardship, which emerged as the main promoter of both concern and sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of stewardship in offshore petroleum licensing systems, comparing Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom. These countries face similar challenges such as ageing infrastructure as production areas reach maturity, but have taken different approaches to evolving their ideas of stewardship to deal with them. One such approach is the UK's recently introduced strategy of maximising economic recovery of UK petroleum, which is indicative of a profound change to the traditional concession model on which its system is based. That model focuses on production in an individual licence area rather than achieving maximum value for the nation. This paper explores how this and other innovative approaches to stewardship can produce improved outcomes for the management of offshore petroleum and other natural resources, and in doing so suggests a way forward for countries like Australia who have relied on the concession model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biofuels have transitioned from a technology expected to deliver numerous benefits to a highly contested socio-technical solution. Initial hopes about their potential to mitigate climate change and to deliver energy security benefits and rural development, particularly in the Global South, have unravelled in the face of numerous controversies. In recognition of the negative externalities associated with biofuels, the European Union developed sustainability criteria which are enforced by certification schemes. This paper draws on the literature on stewardship to analyse the outcomes of these schemes in two countries: the UK and Guatemala. It explores two key issues: first, how has European Union biofuels policy shaped biofuel industries in the UK and Guatemala? And second, what are the implications for sustainable land stewardship? By drawing attention to the outcomes of European demand for biofuels, we raise questions about the ability of European policy to drive sustainable land practices in these two cases. The paper concludes that, rather than promoting stewardship, the current governance framework effectively rubberstamps existing agricultural systems and serves to further embed existing inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To improve the quality of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) interventions the application of behavioural sciences supported by multidisciplinary collaboration has been recommended. We analysed major UK scientific research conferences to investigate AMS behaviour change intervention reporting. Methods: Leading UK 2015 scientific conference abstracts for 30 clinical specialties were identified and interrogated. All AMS and/or antimicrobial resistance(AMR) abstracts were identified using validated search criteria. Abstracts were independently reviewed by four researchers with reported behavioural interventions classified using a behaviour change taxonomy. Results: Conferences ran for 110 days with >57,000 delegates. 311/12,313(2.5%) AMS-AMR abstracts (oral and poster) were identified. 118/311(40%) were presented at the UK's infectious diseases/microbiology conference. 56/311(18%) AMS-AMR abstracts described behaviour change interventions. These were identified across 12/30(40%) conferences. The commonest abstract reporting behaviour change interventions were quality improvement projects [44/56 (79%)]. In total 71 unique behaviour change functions were identified. Policy categories; "guidelines" (16/71) and "service provision" (11/71) were the most frequently reported. Intervention functions; "education" (6/71), "persuasion" (7/71), and "enablement" (9/71) were also common. Only infection and primary care conferences reported studies that contained multiple behaviour change interventions. The remaining 10 specialties tended to report a narrow range of interventions focusing on "guidelines" and "enablement". Conclusion: Despite the benefits of behaviour change interventions on antimicrobial prescribing, very few AMS-AMR studies reported implementing them in 2015. AMS interventions must focus on promoting behaviour change towards antimicrobial prescribing. Greater focus must be placed on non-infection specialties to engage with the issue of behaviour change towards antimicrobial use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to use front-line antibiotics wisely has never been greater. Antibiotic resistance and multi-drug resistant infection, driven by antibiotic use, remain major public health and professional concerns. To overcome these infection problems, use of older antibiotics active against multidrug-resistant pathogens is increasing - for example, colistin, fosfomycin, pivmecillinam, pristinamycin, temocillin and oral tetracyclines. The number of new antibacterials reaching clinical practice has reduced significantly in the last 20 years, most being focused on therapy of Grampositive infection - eg linezolid, daptomycin, telavancin and ceftaroline. Recent guidance on antibiotic stewardship in NHS trusts in England is likely to provide a backdrop to antibiotic use in hospitals in the next 5 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manuscript Type Empirical Research Question/Issue This study examines how the practice of pension fund investment management informs the ownership behavior of pension funds vis-à-vis investee corporations. Research Findings/Insights Using data from: 35 in-depth semi-structured interviews with pension fund trustees, executives, investment officers and financial intermediaries; documentary analysis; and observations of four fund investment meetings, we find a variation in pension fund behavior, where a very small number of well-resourced and internally managed pension funds exhibit engaged ownership behavior. By contrast, the vast majority of pension funds operate at a considerable distance from their investee corporations having delegated pension fund investment management to a chain of external relationships involving actuaries, investment consultants, and fund managers. These relationships are laced with divergent interests and influence dynamics, which explain why these pension funds give primary emphasis to fund investment performance and display little concern for matters of ownership and corporate governance. Theoretical/Academic Implications The ' New Financial Capitalism' is characterized by ownership concentration, yet at the same time liquidity and a lack of institutional investor engagement with corporations. Findings suggest that the principal-agent view of the relationship between institutional investors and corporate managers is more assumed than demonstrated. This widely assumed theory of investor ownership and control is shown to be contingent upon the meanings and practices that underpin investment fund management by institutions. Practitioner/Policy Implications Shareowner engagement is proposed as a solution to problems of corporate governance. Findings about the relationships within the investment chain undermine the notions of pension funds behaving as owners and upholding corporate governance and accountability. This raises skepticism about realizing aspirations for engaged ownership and shareowner stewardship contained in institutional investors' engagement codes such as the Stewardship Code (2010) and contemporary policy debate in the UK and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Events are a growing sector, often attracting tourists to destinations. There is increased emphasis on achieving sustainability in event management; some festivals, particularly large outdoor music festivals, are leading in greening their events. This paper explores the drivers of, and barriers to, greening festivals and considers how events might be a vehicle for promoting sustainable behaviour. The application of the Mair and Jago model is tested. Long interviews were conducted with managers of six UK and Australian festivals that have won awards for their “green” performance and an organisation that encourages the greening of festivals. Findings suggest that managers of these festivals act both as a champion and a steward of greening and that the key drivers of festival greening are the personal values or ethos of the manager and/or the organisation, demand for greening from stakeholders and a desire to educate and act as an advocate of green issues. Barriers to greening festivals included the financial costs, lack of time and control over festival venues and the inability to source appropriate suppliers or supplies. Further research could explore these issues in other events contexts and examine whether events leave a lasting legacy in terms of influencing environmental behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the key topics relating to institutional investor responsibilities and stewardship. It reviews the developments contributing to the increasing scrutiny of institutional shareholders and the standards and guidelines introduced to promote active ownership. The article also analyses the criteria to evaluate stewardship and suggests how asset owners should discharge their share-ownership obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The UK water industry faces a number of water quality issues which mean that capital must be spent on treating raw water in order to meet regulatory standards. Moreover, other policies exist that require improved water quality (e.g. the Water Framework Directive) and contemporary regulation is encouraging water companies to deal with the problem at source, rather than relying exclusively on ‘end-of-pipe’ treatment solutions. Given that much of this pollution results from agricultural practices, agricultural stewardship measures could offer a means of source control. Although numerous schemes are available that encourage farmers to adopt environmentally friendly farming practices, uncertainty exists as to the specific impacts of these measures on water quality. This study has, therefore, reviewed the scientific literature to establish those agricultural stewardship measures that have been proven to impact water quality for three pollutant groups of key concern to the UK water industry, namely dissolved organic carbon, nutrients and pesticides. It has been found that, whilst for many measures there is little or no evidence for impacts on water quality, a range of stewardship practices are available that have been proven to improve water quality. Their effectiveness is subject to a number of factors though (e.g. soil type and pollutant chemistry) and so they should be implemented on a case-by-case basis. Further research is needed to ascertain more fully how contemporary agricultural stewardship measures really do impact water quality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Delayed antibiotic prescription in primary care has been shown to reduce antibiotic consumption, without increasing risk of complications, yet is not widely used in the UK. We sought to quantify the relative importance of factors affecting the decision to give a delayed prescription, using a stated-choice survey among UK general practitioners. Respondents were asked whether they would provide a delayed or immediate prescription in fifteen hypothetical consultations, described by eight attributes. They were also asked if they would prefer not to prescribe antibiotics. The most important determinants of choice between immediate and delayed prescription were symptoms, duration of illness, and the presence of multiple comorbidities. Respondents were more likely to choose a delayed prescription if the patient preferred not to have antibiotics, but consultation length had little effect. When given the option, respondents chose not to prescribe antibiotics in 51% of cases, with delayed prescription chosen in 21%. Clinical features remained important. Patient preference did not affect the decision to give no antibiotics. We suggest that broader dissemination of the clinical evidence supporting use of delayed prescription for specific presentations may help increase appropriate use. Establishing patient preferences regarding antibiotics may help to overcome concerns about patient acceptance. Increasing consultation length appears unlikely to affect the use of delayed prescription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section focuses on the ethical, legal, social, and policy questions arising from research involving human and animal subjects.