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The publication reviews the concept of accessibility and its role in achieving inclusive and sustainable development. It propositions that accessibility be, not only a means and a goal of inclusive development, but also an enabler of an improved, participative economic and social environment for all members of society, including persons with disabilities.

Three key issues are addressed in the publication: (1) Accessibility in the context of human rights and development; (2) accessibility in policy and practice; and (3) accessibility and a disability-inclusive post-2015 development agenda.

The publication reviews good practices and lessons learned from both top-down and bottom-up approaches in promoting accessibility in practices and provides a response to the question: “How does accessibility relate to inclusive, sustainable and equitable development?” The publication argues that accessibility must be re-conceptualized as an enabler: a precondition for any progress toward development for all members of society.  It concludes that the full and effective participation of persons with disabilities in decision-making processes would contribute directly to the successful adoption of an inclusive post-2015 development agenda

ST/ESA/350

This paper is characterised as a legal and philosophical essay exploring the underpinnings for universal legal capacity as an alternative to functional capacity and examining key issues from a psychosocial disability perspective

This paper proposes a nonparametric matching approach to estimation of implicit costs based on the compensating variation (CV) principle. The paper aims to introduce the matching approach, compare its properties with those of the conventional indirect parametric approach, and demonstrate its application in an important policy area. The authors apply the method to estimate the additional personal costs experienced by disabled older people in Great Britain, finding that those costs are substantial, averaging in the range £48-61 a week, compared with the mean level of state disability benefit (£28) or total public support (£47) received. Estimated costs rise strongly with the severity of disability. The authors compare the nonparametric approach with the standard parametric method, finding that the latter tends to generate large overestimates unless conditions are ideal, and recommend the nonparametric approach

ISER Working Paper Series, No. 2013-26

In Disability Studies the evolution of conceptual models is often portrayed as linear, with a nineteenth-century charity model shifting to the medical model that dominated disability discourse in the twentieth century. This is then assumed to be largely unchallenged until the 1970s, when an emergent Disability Rights Movement re-framed issues into the social model, from which evolved a rights-based model. This paper documents two early efforts to address disability issues submitted to the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights in 1931 and a ‘Memorial’ requesting the establishment of an International Bureau of Information on Crippled Children in 1929. Neither submission achieved its stated goals, yet both reflect early attempts to place disability within wider social contexts.

“The aim of the present study is to identify the visibility of disabled people in the academic social sustainability literature, to ascertain the impact and promises of social sustainability indicators put forward in the same literature and to engage especially with the concepts of ‘development sustainability’, ‘bridge sustainability’ and ‘maintenance sustainability’ through disability studies and ability studies lenses”

Sustainability, Vol 5, Issue 11

This report presents a review of the evidence base of public health interventions in humanitarian crises by assessing the quantity and quality of intervention studies, rather than measuring the actual effectiveness of the intervention itself.  It notes an increase in quality and volume of evidence on health interventions in humanitarian crises and recognises that evidence remains too limited, particularly for gender-based violence (GBV) and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). This report identifies a number of common needs across all areas, namely more evidence for the effectiveness of systems and delivery, better developed research methods, and more evidence on dispersed, urban and rural populations, on ensuring continuity of care and measuring and addressing health care needs in middle-income settings (particularly NCDs)

Note: Use links on the left hand side of the webpage to access either the full report, the executive summary, or the individual chapters arranged by health topic

This is ebook chapter presents different forms of participatory mapping to facilitate the integration of people’s capacities within disaster risk reduction.   The chapter "presents a particular form of participatory mapping...Participatory 3 Dimensional Mapping (P3DM), as a tool for making people’s capacity, as well as vulnerabilities, tangible, so that these can be considered in DRR [disaster risk reduction].  It draws upon a project led by coastal communities in the Philippines, between 2008 and 2009"

Chapter 17 of LÓPEZ-CARRESI, Alejandro, et. al, Eds, (2013) "Disaster management : International lessons in risk reduction, response and recovery” 

Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS.