The Plural Practice Of Adoption In Pacific Island States

This book deals with adoption laws and practices in small island developing states in the Pacific. It commences with an introductory chapter giving an overview of relevant laws and practices and pulling together the common themes and issues raised in the book. Each of the following chapters deals with adoption law and practice in a small South Pacific country. The countries in question all have plural legal systems, with systems of adoption and its closest customary law equivalent operating side by side. In most cases, there is an insufficiently developed relationship between the two systems, which has resulted in a number of problems. Additionally, international law adds another layer of complexity. Size and remoteness in the small states under discussion have a profound impact on local practices.

This volume examines environmental law and governance in the Pacific, focusing on the emerging challenges this region faces. The Pacific is home to some of the world’s most astonishing biological and cultural diversity. At the same time, Pacific Island nations are economically and technically under-resourced in the face of tremendous environmental challenges. Destructive weather events, ocean acidification, mining, logging, overfishing, and pollution increasingly degrade ecosystems and affect fishing, farming, and other cultural practices of Pacific Islanders. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to understand and analyse the role of law and governance in responding to these pressures in the Pacific. Drawing on academic and practitioner expertise from the Pacific region, as well as Europe and the United States, this unique collection navigates the major environmental law and governance challenges of the present and future of the Pacific. Environmental Law and Governance in the Pacific discusses 21 Pacific Island countries and territories, including Cook Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Samoa, and a broad range of themes, such as deep-sea mining, wetlands and mangroves, heritage, endangered species, human rights, and access to justice, are addressed, thus providing a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of environmental law and governance within specific jurisdictions as well as across the Pacific region as a whole. This volume will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in environmental law and governance in the Pacific region, as well as policy-makers, practitioners and NGOs involved in the development and implementation of environmental law and policy.

This book offers a comparative study of the management of legal pluralism. The authors describe and analyse the way state and non-state legal systems acknowledge legal pluralism – defined as the coexistence of a state and non-state legal systems in the same space in respect of the same subject matter for the same population - and determine its consequences for their own purposes. The book sheds light on the management processes deployed by legal systems in Africa, Canada, Central Europe and the South Pacific, the multitudinous factors circumscribing the action of systems and individuals with respect to legal pluralism, and the effects of management strategies and processes on systems as well as on individuals. The book offers fresh practical and analytical insight on applied legal pluralism, a fast-growing field of scholarship and professional practice. Drawing from a wealth of original empirical data collected in several countries by a multilingual and multidisciplinary team, it provides a thorough account of the intricate patterns of state and non-state practices with respect to legal pluralism. As the book’s non-prescriptive approach helps to uncover and evaluate several biases or assumptions on the part of policy makers, scholars and development agencies regarding the nature and the consequences of legal pluralism, it will appeal to a wide range of scholars and practitioners in law, development studies, political science and social sciences.

This essential Research Handbook provides a multifaceted exploration of surrogacy and the law, examining a variety of critical yet under-researched perspectives including globalisation, power, gender, sexual orientation, genetics, human rights and family relations. It covers four distinct topics: surrogacy and rights, the interplay between surrogacy and different areas of the law, cross-border aspects, and regional perspectives.

Academic survey of the Pacific Islands. Includes maps, photographs, tables, diagrams, atlas, and detailed index.

This new edition of the bestselling text, Nurturing Natures, provides an indispensable synthesis of the latest scientific knowledge about children’s emotional development. Integrating a wealth of both up-to-date and classical research from areas such as attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental psychology and cross-cultural studies, it weaves these into an accessible, enjoyable text that always keeps in mind children recognisable to academics, practitioners and parents. New to this edition, the book considers transgender issues, same-sex parenting, experiences of black and minority ethnic groups, well-being and the impact of mental health in relation to climate change anxiety. It looks at key developmental stages from life in the womb to the preschool years and right up until adolescence, examining how children develop language, play and memory and moral capacities. Issues of nature and nurture are addressed and the effects of different kinds of early experiences are unpicked, creating a coherent and balanced view of the developing child in context. Nurturing Natures is written by an experienced child therapist who has used a wide array of research from different disciplines to create a highly readable and scientifically trustworthy text. Equipped with key points, questions for consideration, further reading and online video chapter introductions, this book is essential reading for childcare students, teachers, social workers, health visitors, early years practitioners and those training or working in child counselling, psychiatry and mental health. Full of fascinating findings, it provides answers to many of the questions people really want to ask about the human journey from conception into adulthood.

This book is a unique collection of high quality articles analysing legal issues with particular regard to small states. The small states of the world differ considerably in their geography, history, political structures, legal systems and wealth. Nevertheless, because of their size, small states face a set of common challenges including vulnerability to external economic impacts such as changing trade regimes and limited ability to diversify economic activity; limited public and private sector capacity, including the legal and judicial infrastructure; a need for regional co-operation; a vulnerability to environmental changes as well as a limited ability to engage with supranational bodies and the forces of globalisation. This is the first volume of an exciting and unique new series, The World of Small States. In this work, legal experts from small jurisdictions and those with a particular interest in legal issues facing small states explore inter alia ethics in small jurisdictions, legal education and the profession in small states, the challenges facing small states with mixed legal systems, the constitutional arrangements in small states, small states as tax havens, and intellectual property and competition law issues.

Sustainable tourism is a widely used term that has accumulated considerable attention from researchers and policy makers over the past two decades. However, there is still an apparently wide gap between theory and practice in the area. Recent scholarly research has tended to focus on niche areas of alternative tourism rather than address the broader issues and vagaries and paradoxes that appear to plague the broader notion of sustainable tourism. As such, there is a need for a new and pragmatic analysis of sustainable tourism as an overarching idea and how this manifests in practice. The Practice of Sustainable Tourism fulfils this need by offering a fresh perspective on sustainable tourism as an umbrella concept with inherent tensions. It presents a way of thinking about tourism based on the notion of finding common ground using the dialectic tradition of philosophy. Dialectics focusses on resolving opposing viewpoints by recognising they have common elements that can be combined into a rational and practical solution over time. As part of this approach, the book examines the strongly apparent tensions within alternative tourism as well as the paradox of continuing growth and other mass tourism related issues. It is divided into three parts, Part I includes chapters discussing the general concept of sustainable tourism, its history, current status and possible futures; Part II includes a range of destination case studies exploring how sustainable tourism has been applied and Part III includes perspectives from the tourism operator view. Given the international content and challenging themes, the book will be appealing internationally to students, researchers and academics in the fields of tourism, geography, sustainability and social science.