Documents Schroeder, Heike 2 results

"Owing to the ageing of their respective populations, policy-makers in Japan and Germany are challenged to extend the working life of individual employees. However, conditions of physical and mental ill health tend to increase with old age, leading to disabilities that affect whether and how individuals can remain active in the labour market. Workplace accommodation is a means to enable disabled individuals to remain productively employed. Drawing on qualitative interview data, this discussion explores how institutions such as School Authorities in Japan and Germany use workplace accommodation to support teachers with physical and mental disabilities. Teachers are a white-collar profession strongly affected by ill health, especially burnout. The discussion furthermore explores how such workplace accommodation measures influence older teachers´ career expectations and career outcomes, including thoughts about (early) retirement. It finds that even though the institutional contexts in Japan and Germany are rather similar, career options and expectations vary, though with similar (negative) outcomes for national strategies towards the extension of working lives."

"The international UN Climate Change conferences known as “Conferences of the Parties (COPs)” have an enormous convening power and are attended annually by tens of thousands of actors working on climate change topics from a wide range of perspectives. In the COP spaces outside of the formal negotiations, the communication culture is dominated by “side events,” a format that relies heavily on conventional presentations and panels that can be informative, but is generally not conducive to mutual engagement, reflection, or dialogue. There is an urgent need for new dialogue formats that can better foster learning and community-building and thereby harness the enormous latent potential for climate action represented by the diverse stakeholders that gather at the COP. Against this backdrop, and drawing on our experience with the development and implementation of the Co-Creative Reflection and Dialogue Spaces at COP25, COP26, and COP27, we make recommendations for further developing the communication culture of the COPs. At the level of individual sessions, we provide recommendations for designing participatory dialogues that can better support reflection, interconnection, and action orientation. In addition, we offer guidance for scaling up these practices, for instance through networks and communities of practice to support a shift of the overall communication culture of the COPs. Our recommendations focus on interactions and exchanges that unfold outside of the formal negotiation sessions, with a view toward enabling and accelerating transformative action by non-state actors."