This publication presents the proceedings of the 31st International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities held at American University, in Washington DC, USA, on April 6-7, 2023. The Conference was organized by Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. The Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies is an international scientific organization based in the United States of America with the mission of promoting human values through interdisciplinary scientific research.

Responsible Investment Around the World considers economic recovery undertaken in different regions around the world. Financing policies and investment solutions are proposed that can responsibly help address the world’s most pressing issues – in climate change, social injustice, and access to healthcare.

This book envisions the future of resilient finance and the societal value of responsible investment. Capturing the Zeitgeist of our post-pandemic new Renaissance, the book describes the contemporary use of economics to improve environmental conditions, widen access to health care, and foster social justice. The Future of Resilient Finance helps students, research scholars, and interdisciplinary global governance practitioners understand resiliency management through strategic finance and responsible economics as a politics and international relations tool. The new age of resilient finance captures monetary means as a source of politics, diplomacy, and international aid. The current outpouring of rescue and recovery funds is portrayed as new generation of resilient finance aimed at peace and prosperity for humankind. The integration of environmental, social, and governance criteria in portfolio choices is covered to grant sustainable value of finance for society.

Ethics of Inclusion captures fairness and social justice for all from an ethical perspective in our post-pandemic world. The book discusses inequality in Healthcare, Economics & Finance, Education, Digitalization, and the Environment, in order to envision economics of diversity and a transition to a more inclusive society. A wide-ranging approach addresses issues of inequality in access to innovations such as telemedicine and artificial intelligence, economic gains of robotics, and big data insights. A rising performance gap between the finance sector and the real economy opens in the post-COVID-19 era, with system-inherent inequality, given elevated inflation levels and disparate impacts of low interest rate regimes around the globe. Education offers social transfer hubs and inclusion potential for societal advancement and international development. The transition to a greener economy is addressed in an analysis of the Green New Deal and European Green Deal including the Sustainable Finance Taxonomy. The book sets out a hopeful agenda for equality and social justice to deliver a post-pandemic Renaissance.

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a radical change in both the economic and business paradigms that have ruled countries for decades. Emerging models are leading to a new world economic order predictably led by China and the United States. New forms of organization, new ways of working remotely, the strengthening of some industries to the detriment of others, and the supremacy of technology to be able to work are going to change the economies as we know them today. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Business Models and the New World Economic Order offers strategies, economic policies, social, economic, and political trends that will affect organizations to increase their efficiency and labor productivity and change the world’s business and financial structures. This book forecasts future business changes and prospective models, structural or not, for guiding the survival of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), multinationals, family firms, entrepreneurs, and NGOs in the post-COVID-19 era. Covering topics such as business model creation, global sustainable logistics 4.0, and social and solidarity economy, this text is essential for economists, entrepreneurs, managers, executives, family firms, SMEs, business professionals, policymakers, students, researchers, practitioners, and academicians.

Decisional privacy gives individuals the freedom to act and make decisions about how they live their lives, without unjustifiable interference from other individuals or the state. This book advances a theory of a child’s right to decisional privacy. It draws on the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and extends the work of respected children’s rights scholars to address a significant gap in understanding the interconnections between privacy, family law and children’s rights. It contextualises the theory through a case study: judicial proceedings concerning medical treatment for children experiencing gender dysphoria. This work argues that recognising a substantive right to decisional privacy for children requires procedural rights that facilitate children’s meaningful participation in decision-making about their best interests. It also argues that, as courts have increasingly encroached upon decision-making regarding children’s medical treatment, they have denied the decisional privacy rights of transgender and gender diverse children. This book will benefit researchers, students, judicial officers and practitioners in various jurisdictions worldwide grappling with the tensions between children’s rights, parental responsibilities and state duties in relation to children’s best interests, and with the challenge of better enabling and listening to children’s voices in decision-making processes.

The convergence of profit, public, nonprofit and social organizations constitutes an increasingly important reality that has been labeled the fourth sector. This movement brings together talents, resources, and skills from governmental and non-governmental partners, corporations, and civil society at large to leverage well-being responses and develop new approaches to address social challenges. The diversity and complexity of these problems heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic call for a collective social effort and innovative solutions. Despite the growing importance and initiatives taking ownership of community well-being through fostering partnerships in which different stakeholders share responsibilities to build a better future and common good, this is an under-researched area. This edited book discusses the challenges and opportunities of the emerging fourth sector, and features selected papers from XXI International Congress on Public and Nonprofit Marketing (IAPNM 2022) held at the University of Minho in Braga (Portugal) in July 2022.