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This review article questions the assumptions at the core of peer education interventions adopted in young people's sexual and reproductive health programmes in developing countries. Peer education is a more complex and problematic approach than its popularity with development agencies and practitioners implies. Its rise to prominence is more indicative of the desire to find effective tools to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic, than of peer education's proven effectiveness. The often simplistic model of social relations that underlies peer education interventions leads to the reinforcement of gendered power relations, and a failure to take account of the social dynamics of poverty. The dominant rationales for peer education are examined and contested. In spite of the mismatch between rhetoric and experience, the appeal of the approach remains powerful, stemming largely from the objective of engaging young people in health interventions in a way that increases their autonomy and capacity.

Environmental catastrophes represent profound challenges faced by societies today. Numerous scholars in the climate sciences and the humanities have argued for a greater ethical engagement with these pressing issues. At the same time, several disciplines concerned with hazards are moving towards formalized ethical codes or promises that not only guide the dissemination of data but oblige scientists to relate to fundamentally political issues. This article couples a survey of the recent environmental ethics literature with two case studies of how past natural hazards have affected vulnerable societies in Europe's prehistory. We ask whether cases of past calamities and their societal effects should play a greater role in public debates and whether archaeologists working with past environmental hazards should be more outspoken in their ethical considerations. We offer no firm answers, but suggest that archaeologists engage with debates in human-environment relations at this interface between politics, public affairs and science.