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The BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) was born of a desire to create an alternative to the Western-dominated financial institutions and to secure for these countries a greater role in global affairs. This partnership is based on mutual interests and necessity rather than on shared values and ideals. High levels of social inequality, pervasive corruption, and challenges in education and the environment are common to all five countries. The New Development Bank, together with better coordination of joint action by the BRICS, has the potential to significantly reduce the scale of these problems and contribute to the long-term sustainability of these economies.

Global education plays an increasingly important role in enriching students' learning experiences in US institutions of higher education. Students are connected to the world through global culture, economics, politics, technology and immigration. This paper examines the perceptions of 305 graduate students and alumni concerning the need for global education programs in the United States. Participants shared their views of the importance of global education in understanding today's economy, culture, and environment, while addressing our future needs and challenges. There were no significant statistical differences between the perceptions of graduate students and alumni or between those of international and American students in regards to the importance and benefits of global education.

This article provides an overview of the methods, assumptions, and key findings of behavioral genetics methodology for family researchers with a limited background. We discuss how family researchers can utilize and contribute to the behavioral genetics field, particularly in terms of conducting research that seeks to explain shared environmental effects. This can be done, in part, by theoretically controlling for genetic confounds in research that seeks to determine cause‐and‐effect relationships among family variables and individual outcomes. Gene–environment correlation and interaction are especially promising areas for the family researcher to address. Given the methodological advancements in the field, we also briefly comment on new methods in molecular genetics for studying psychological mental health disorders.

We are living in the midst of a communications revolution that is likely to have significant effects on democracy. Though it is too soon to know where this revolution will lead, it is an opportune moment for a broader historical inquiry into the relationship between democracy and the media. Representative democracy was born in the era of print media, but over the past century it has accommodated the rise of broadcasting and now is being shaped by new communications technologies. As a result, we seem to be heading toward a more pluralistic but also more fragmented media environment that may pose a threat to the shared civic arena essential to democracy.

The Finnish Defence Forces face a changing international environment wherenew threats have risen to complement the traditional ones. The requirementsof national defence and crisis management operations, as well as the tighteningbudgets and the increasing cost of military hardware have to be met whiletransforming the capabilities of the FDF.The globalising world requires transnationalsolutions. Finland seeks to actively deepen the security cooperation withinthe European Union and contribute towards the creation of shared EU capabilities as well as advocate defence cooperation with the Nordic Countries.A balance has to be retained between the different requirements to preservethe FDF as a functional instrument ready to face all challenges. (Europäische Sicherheit / SWP)

Taken from an infinite set of divisors methods, the D'Hondt formula is the unique rule that maximizes the minimum number of seats for parties exceeding average size but not surpassing an absolute majority of the votes. This property is also shared, in the quota set of methods, by the Droop formula. At the same time, these two methods are those most commonly observed in practice. This paper relates the property stated to the observed facts. If parties try to maximize the minimum number of seats for a given share of votes, then the D'Hondt formula should be chosen. This choice is consistent with rational parties that make institutional choices in an uncertain environment. Adapted from the source document.

Despite the proliferation of online courses in social work, questions still exist about learning practice skills in an online instructional environment. This paper describes a case example of an action-oriented approach to the development of an online practice course. Lessons learned from students' and instructor's perspectives are shared as well as recommendations for future research relative to course development and evaluation of online courses. The study examined student feedback with respect to their overall learning experience. Findings indicated that involving students in the design and development of an online practice course benefited both students and faculty and can be an effective teaching and learning strategy regardless of the instructional medium used.

As firms struggle to cope with an increasingly turbulent and uncertain economic environment there is widespread recognition of the importance of organisational learning. One option is to look at the potential of shared learning between firms, where common interests and interdependence provide motivation for experience sharing and other forms of synergy in learning. A particular version of inter‐firm learning is the use of supply chains as a mechanism for upgrading and transferring "appropriate practice" and this article reports on exploratory research on this theme. It draws on a literature survey and a detailed study of six UK supply chains at various stages of implementing supply chain learning.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EUROPEAN INTERNATIONAL ORDER SINCE 1989 HAS FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERED THE CONTEXT FOR CONDUCTING BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY. BEHIND THESE RAPID CHANGES IN BRITAIN'S POLITICAL AND SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, MORE GRADUAL TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES HAVE FURTHER UNDERMINED THE ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE HAS ALSO BEEN ALTERING THE CHARACTER AND COHESION OF THE BRITISH STATE THAT FOREIGN POLICY IS INTENDED TO SERVE. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, CONTINUING TO PUT SUBSTANTIAL MINISTERIAL TIME AND PUBLIC EXPENDITURE INTO NATIONAL FOREIGN AND DEFENSE POLICIES, NOW MUST PERSUADE ITS AUDIENCE BOTH WITHIN AND OUTSIDE BRITAIN THAT IT STILL HAS A DISTINCTIVE PERSPECTIVE TOWARDS SHARED SECURITY AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.

Culture, in the simplest language, refers to the thoughtways, feelingways, and actionways of a people, be they a nation or a subsociety. As a concept, it refers to the established orientations which a people has for managing its relationships in the collectivity and its relationships to the forces and conditions of the physical environment. The key elements of culture are beliefs, sentiments, norms, and values. Almost all behavioral scientists would include in the realm of culture all the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and value orientations shared by a people. With these basic elements of culture, a people constructs complexes which we call ideologies, social structures, institutions, organizations, laws, and policies.

The Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for Tanzania covering FY18-FY22 comes at a time when Tanzania must both consolidate the gains of the last decade and address the continuing gaps in its development outcomes—including sharp spatial (rural-urban) and gender disparities in income and assets, continued challenges with respect to human capital and delivery of public services, and unsustainable use of critical natural resources. To address this, Tanzania has set out an ambitious agenda of nurturing industrialization for economic transformation, and human development. The CPF supports this agenda which is laid out in Tanzania's Second Five-Year Development Plan (FYDP II) and Zanzibar's Third Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (ZSGRP III). The Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) for Tanzania identifies three pathways to leverage the country's advantages to achieve the national development goals: (i) structural transformation to leverage Tanzania's natural assets and capture latent comparative advantage to create more jobs; (ii) spatial transformation to build on Tanzania's geographic advantages and maximize benefits from spatial integration and agglomeration; and (iii) upgrading public institutions and organizations, underpinned by expanding human capital, gender equity, and macroeconomic stability. Following a decade of strong growth and poverty reduction, the CPF addresses the challenges of carving a growth path that is more inclusive and sustainable.The CPF recognizes the close nexus between climate change and poverty reduction in Tanzania and places a strong emphasis on addressing the effects of climate change. The CPF will call upon the full range of World Bank Group (WBG) instruments and financial products to respond to Tanzania's needs. The CPF will address International Development Association (IDA) special themes and seek to be agile in preparing operations and analytical products. The CPF program has three areas of strategic focus. The Focus Area 1, enhance productivity and accelerate equitable and sustainable growth—is closely aligned with the FYDP II's emphasis on industrialization, and with the SCD structural and spatial transformation pathways for development. The SCD's first foundation, macroeconomic stability, is necessary for creating a conducive environment for private investment and growth. Focus Area 2, boost human capital and social inclusion—is aligned with the human development pillar of the FYDP II and the SCD's second foundation, human development and gender equity. Focus Area 3, modernize and improve efficiency of public institutions—is aligned with the SCD's emphasis on institutional transformation and the Tanzanian Government's priority on public sector accountability, private sector support and regulation, and capacity to deliver services. The three CPF focus areas are not mutually exclusive and can be leveraged to achieve substantial progress on overlapping goals. For example, if workers acquire job-relevant skills (Focus Area 2), that will contribute to the job creation goal (Focus Area 1); and improving accountability and PFM is fundamental to reaching service delivery objectives for health and education (Focus Area 3). Similarly, expanding social inclusion requires action in all focus areas.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit Europe in late winter/early spring 2020. Government restrictions and voluntary individual changes in consumer and mobility behavior led to a sharp decline of nonessential activities. For 2020, European Union Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to decrease by about 8 %. Therefore, unprecedented recovery measures have been taken to support the economy, i.e., EU member states will conjointly borrow money to finance a one-off recovery instrument ('Next Generation EU'). Until recently, it remained however unclear whether the additional money will be used to return to the pre-COVID-19 status quo or to support future-oriented transition processes and shape long-term structural change towards more sustainable economies and societies, supporting the transformation process to a 'Green Economy'. This paper looks into the diversity of territorial impacts of the pandemic and drivers behind this diversity. Furthermore, recovery measures relevant for the Alpine region are presented as well as insights from the four pilot regions involved in the current project "Alpine Convention: Sectoral development of Green Economy in the Alpine Region" are shared. As outlook, possible future developments and sector-specific access points for action are provided. Thereby, the mentioned access points are neither fundamentally new nor exhaustive. The pandemic intensifies the challenges deriving from unsustainable developments. The crisis increases their visibility and actual impact. As consequence, the increasing awareness among citizens as well as decision makers might trigger new momentum for change towards more sustainable developments in the Alps.

European agriculture, and Dutch agriculture in particular, is at a crossroads. Due to rationalisation, including intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, biodiversity in rural areas is declining at an unprecedented rate. Socioeconomic developments in the agricultural sector also show 'a race to the bottom'. Farmers produce on world markets and are only able to compete on input costs. This results in lower income per unit crop or animal and leads to an ever increasing farm size. In turn this leads to a further decline of habitat of species bound to rural areas and farmland. To turn these negative trends around the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture has proposed an alternative form of farming, labelled 'nature inclusive' farming, that 1) benefits from the services that natural processes provide, 2) delivers agri-environmental practices to maintain agro-biodiversity and 3) strongly reduces its negative impacts on the environment. Currently this Ministry supports the adoption of nature inclusive farming practices by funding innovative experiments led by farmer initiatives. Despite some promising results, such innovations have large difficulties to be scaled up, largely due to counteracting forces of the current agricultural system. Using the Technological Innovation System (TIS) framework developed by Hekkert and Negro (2009), we argue that a systemic transition of current agricultural practices is required to mainstream 'nature inclusive' farming. Such a transition can only be realised when a shared vision on the future agricultural sector is developed, set out by the government and societal parties. Such a shared vision can then lead to new enabling (policy) environments/landscapes in which these innovations can rise. Without such shared vision, innovations will be locked-in into the current agricultural system, to the extent of a very low prospect of nature inclusive innovations. Furthermore, we observe that the many experiments currently running suffer from a lack of interconnected learning platforms, a lack of documentation of failures and successes and little attention for the forces leading to lock-in and preventing a regime shift. Using two examples, we will illustrate what type of interventions are needed to up-scale nature inclusive innovations. Keyword 1: innovation studies Keyword 2: sustainable agriculture Keyword 3: agricultural policy ; peerReviewed