Bjørn Ralf Kristensen

Hundreds of millions of people living in urban informal settlements rely on irregular and unsafe water supply and sanitation services. To meet their needs, they must navigate fragmented service delivery environments and use multiple different water and sanitation facilities. Using high-frequency longitudinal survey data from three informal settlements in Kenya, Peru and South Africa, we document the variability in water supply and sanitation service access. Across the year-long study period, 62–73% of respondents across all contexts changed their primary toilet, with 10–27% reporting five or more different primary facilities, with similar variability in water access. High levels of disruption were reported, with issues related to crowding/queuing, breakdowns, and physical barriers disrupting accessibility all contributing to the churn of services. To explain the results, we develop the concept of a “service ecosystem” to describe how people living in urban informal settlements rely on multiple water supply and sanitation services simultaneously and how these patterns of access shift over time. Using James C Scott’s theory of legibility, we argue that this irregularity means these service ecosystems are largely illegible within formal monitoring frameworks, that typically categorise households by a primary service. This leads to an information deficit for policymakers and practitioners who have a mandate to improve services in these environments. We further develop the implications of service ecosystems by calling for policymakers and service providers to recognise and support a diversity of service systems which have sufficient redundancy between them to meet the needs of populations, at least until broader structural reforms can address the underlying challenges in these settings.

John Dewey and the prominent contemporary public philosopher Peter Singer both give naturalistic consequentialist accounts calling for actionable steps within present contexts. In the following pages, I put Dewey and Singer in conversation, focusing on commonalities and differences in their moral approaches, and in particular their diverging conceptions of how individuals can be understood within moral problems. My motivations for this writing stem from a sympathy for the ideals put forward by the effective altruism movement, an influential approach inspired largely by Singer. Effective altruism (EA) has been particularly influential in the contemporary animal protection movement, a community that I count myself... Read More.

Animal Ethics and the Nonconformist Conscience is an illuminating text which examines the historical roots of the animal advocacy movement in the theology of the nonconformist tradition. In this work of interdisciplinary scope transcending the fields of theology, history, and philosophy, Phillip J. Sampson not only traces these roots, but also sets forth an active call to reevaluate the current paradigm of animal advocacy toward the inclusion of nonconformist principles. This is an innovative book that presents a largely unknown tradition of Christian thought that not only influences contemporary perspectives with regard to animals, but challenges conventional hang-ups stemming from enlightenment and neo-Darwinian reason. It will be of interest within both secular and religious circles, and to those working in animal ethics and more broadly within animal studies and environmental humanities.