CORA
Cork Open Research Archive (CORA) is UCC’s Open Access institutional repository which enables UCC researchers to make their research outputs freely available and accessible.
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Indigenous knowledge
(Routledge, 2026-06-09) Kavanagh , Elena; Limeberry , Veronica
This book chapter introduces Indigenous Knowledge (IK) as a diverse set of knowledge systems, practices, and ways of knowing that are continually generated through relationships with place, culture, and community. It discusses the relationship between Indigenous Knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), including their relevance to environmental stewardship, biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation, natural resource management, and conflict mitigation.
Within the context of environmental peacebuilding, the chapter highlights the importance of Indigenous Knowledge for supporting more inclusive decision-making, ecological sustainability, and peaceful approaches to land and resource governance. It also addresses the historical marginalization of Indigenous knowledge systems by colonial and Western scientific approaches and considers frameworks such as “two-eyed seeing,” which brings Indigenous and Western ways of knowing into dialogue. The chapter emphasizes that meaningful inclusion requires Indigenous communities to have agency, leadership, and decision-making authority in environmental governance and peacebuilding processes.
Rights of nature
(Routledge, 2026-06-26) Cullinan, Cormac; Kavanagh, Elena
This book chapter introduces Rights of Nature (RoN) as an emerging legal and ethical approach that recognizes nature, ecosystems, and other natural entities as subjects with rights rather than solely as objects of human ownership, use, or regulation. Rights of Nature represents a shift from predominantly anthropocentric approaches to environmental law toward more ecocentric forms of governance that recognize the intrinsic value and ecological integrity of the natural world.
Within the context of environmental peacebuilding, the chapter considers the potential of Rights of Nature to reshape relationships between people, law, governance, and the environment. It highlights how recognizing the rights and legal standing of nature can influence environmental decision-making, strengthen ecological protection, and contribute to more sustainable and equitable approaches to managing land and natural resources. The concept also raises important questions concerning representation, legal personhood, enforcement, and the role of Indigenous and other relational understandings of human–nature relationships.
Rights of Nature offers a framework for reconsidering conventional legal systems and governance structures in ways that acknowledge ecological interdependence and the responsibilities of humans toward the wider Earth community. Its growing recognition in legal systems around the world makes it increasingly relevant to environmental governance, ecological justice, and environmental peacebuilding.
Sustainability
(Routledge, 2026-06-26) Jaskolski, Martina; Kavanagh, Elena
This book entry examines sustainability as a key concept for understanding the long-term relationship between environmental, social, and economic systems. Sustainability concerns the capacity to meet present needs while maintaining the ecological and social conditions necessary for future generations, requiring attention to the interconnected consequences of human activities, resource use, and development.
Within the context of environmental peacebuilding, sustainability provides an important framework for considering whether interventions, policies, and institutions can support both lasting peace and environmental integrity over time. Environmental degradation, resource pressures, inequality, and conflict can undermine sustainable outcomes, while approaches that integrate environmental protection, social well-being, participation, and long-term thinking can contribute to more resilient and peaceful societies.
The entry highlights the relevance of sustainability to environmental peacebuilding as both a guiding principle and a practical objective. It draws attention to the need to move beyond short-term interventions and consider how environmental governance and peacebuilding processes can support enduring relationships between communities, institutions, natural resources, and ecosystems.
Risk management for combinatorial auctions
(University College Cork, 2005-07-31) Holland, Alan; O'Sullivan, Barry; Enterprise Ireland; Science Foundation Ireland
Auction theory has traditionally regarded bids in auctions as enforceable commitments. We relax this important, yet often incorrect, assumption that is common to almost all prior literature on the subject. This work addresses the possibility of winning bids being withdrawn, or reneged upon, before a transaction is completed successfully. In particular, we examine the significance of winning-bid withdrawal in a combinatorial auction setting. We find that it may be difficult or even impossible for the bid-taker to find a repair solution of adequate revenue without causing undue disturbance to the remaining winning bids in the allocation. We have called this the bid-taker's exposure problem and we also show that it is exacerbated for a risk averse bid-taker. It is preferable for the bid-taker to pre-empt uncertainty by choosing a solution that is robust to bid-withdrawal and provides a guarantee that possible with-drawls may be repaired easily with a bounded loss in revenue. We discuss the computational difficulties posed by risk management and investigate a constraint programming approach to tackling the problem. We also analyze the drawbacks of this approach and motivate useful extensions to the framework. We then propose a new framework that facilitates solution robustness for constraint programs in a wide range of settings. We briefly demonstrate its versatility with an application to job-shop scheduling. We then apply this new framework to combinatorial auctions in order to investigate the trade-off between robustness and revenue. We also introduce a new auction model that improves solution reparability by facilitating backtracking on winning bids by the bid-taker. We demonstrate experimentally that fewer winning bids partake in robust solutions, thereby reducing any associated overhead in dealing with extra bidders. Finally, we consider the case in which the bid-taker wishes to optimize some social objective, thereby necessitating truthful bidding. We have provided some impossibility results pertaining to truthful mechanism design that incorporate robust solutions. However, we also propose a means of circumventing this problem for restricted class of combinatorial auctions. We develop an approximate allocation algorithm that incentivizes truthful bidding whilst attaining an allocation that minimizes the risk of revenue loss in the event of a winning bid being withdrawn.
Back to the Future? Institutional learning curves and intraoperative fracture rates associated with adoption of a cemented composite beam stem for hemiarthroplasty
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2026-06-16) Hennessy, Orla; Field, Kieran; Flynn, Sean O.; Dahly, Darren; Rowan, Fiachra E.; Pomeroy, Eoghan; Murphy, Terence; Cleary, May S.
Background: Hemiarthroplasty remains the gold standard for hip fracture care in displaced intracapsular fractures. There is now substantial evidence that uncemented femoral stems are associated with higher risk of perioperative fractures. Cemented composite beam (CCB) stems offer some of the lowest overall rates of perioperative fracture risk, but are not widely used in the Irish system, and concern regarding the use of new implants and associated learning curves can act as a barrier to change. Objectives: We aim to assess our units experience transitioning to a cemented composite beam (CCB) and the associated learning curve and technical pitfalls. Design: Retrospective, single centre, single blind review identified the first 140 cases of CCB stems. Methods: Post-operative radiographs on all cases were assessed for perioperative fracture and stems were classed as being varus or valgus if the stem alignment was >3 degrees from the anatomical axis. A cemented taper slip (CTS) stem, which was in use for over 10 years in the unit, provided a control group. Results: Following introduction, higher odds of malalignment were experienced with the CCB stem (OR 2.19, 1.09-4.55 p<0.031), relative to CTS. However, compared to overall rate of malalignment in the CTS group (9.3%), the learning curve for the CCB stem was short, with rates of malalignment returning to in line with our control CTS cohort within 46 cases (Cases 1-46 32% malaligned, cases 47-92 10.86% malaligned, cases 93-138 4.34% malaligned). There was no increased risk of periprosthetic fracture demonstrated with introduction of the new stem. Conclusions: We have shown a relatively short learning curve associated with transitioning to a CCB stem for fragility fracture hemiarthroplasty. We highlight some of the early technical issues experienced and corrected.