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The study analyse the convergence of research priorities to development issues especially from the agricultural and food sector in terms of environmental protection and improvement of the business climate, due to weak institution al interconnection devices. Two types of data are used: bibliometric data and a survey of enterprises. Altogether, 1214 and 1708 bibliographic references were generated from WoS and Scopus respectively (from a total of 9146 and 10 557 publications) in Agriculture, Food and Environment for the period 1991-2015 subject to the condition that the author or at least one of the authors is affiliated to an institution based in Cameroon. A total of 317 agro-food companies were identified from the National Institute enterprise's census. The overall message is a relative weak convergence between development priorities identified from perceptions over agricultural and food companies and research works expressed in the scientific literature. This reflects the weak link between research institutions (universities, research canter's) and professional milieus that shape entrepreneurship (firms, policy makers) for guidance of scientific production.

Over the years, Ghana has invested considerable effort and resources together with international partners to develop the energy sector and to mainstream energy low carbon pathways into national development plans. Low carbon development (LCD) provides a good opportunity, of not only building upon earlier energy and climate change local processes and structures but also help to mainstream low carbon agenda in economic activities and national development plans. For this to work however, require efficient institutions and effective institutional arrangements. Based on extensive literature analysis, personal communications and inputs from stakeholders, the paper highlights the key institutional arrangements, their interactions, challenges and proffers recommendations for improvements. To improve energy and low carbon development effort from the perspectives of institutional structures, would require, clearer institutional mandates, continuous improvements in institutional coordination (intra and inter), capacity and skills development, sustained visibility of the essence of energy and LCD at high political levels as well as engagement by civil societies. Equally important are the issues of finance, data availability and quality, monitoring and evaluation.

Cash waqf is a breakthrough in appropriate with religious principles (maqāṣid al-sharī'ah) and social demands of humanity. This program can synergize with government programs in order to realize the welfare of the people of Indonesia as a manifestation of the ideals of the Republic of Indonesia, as stated in the preamble of the 1945 Constitution. Judging from the principle of religious, cash waqf has also been exemplified by several companions of Rasullullah and the scholars from time to time. Call it like what has been exemplified by the Caliph 'Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb when making a land in Khaibar as productive land that used as much as possible for the benefit of Muslims. In addition, this program has also had supported by law. MUI Fatwa Commission also stipulates that the cash waqf is a movement in accordance with the principles of the religion that brought prosperity to the human in here and hereafter. This paper is literature research with reference to several primary and secondary sources such as books or books relevant to the study.

Innovation platforms (IPs) appear to be one of the most appropriate tools to operationalize research for development. Increasingly, agricultural research initiatives for development set up innovation platforms to facilitate the management and support of innovation processes. Yet, the mechanisms by which they operate are not well understood. This paper seeks to open the "black-box" and proposes a framework to analyze processes that occur in innovation platforms from inception to maturity. Firstly, we use a New Institutional Economics (NIE) based analytical framework for the M&E of IP performance. Secondly, from a review of the literature, we identify three ways through which research could be done within IPs: 1) soft transfer, when research has readily available results that could help solve jointly identified problems; 2) co-creation, when researchers and IP members develop research objectives and protocols together; and 3) community-based research, when IP members set up experiments on their own. We propose that both frameworks should be used to improve the monitoring of IP dynamics.

In recent years, INGO legitimacy has been subject to growing scrutiny from analysts and practitioners alike. Critics have highlighted a backlash against INGOs in the Global South, a growing mismatch between INGO capacities and contemporary global challenges, and diminishing support for norms such as democracy and human rights that underpin INGOs' work. Though these problems have attracted significant attention within the academic literature, this article argues that existing explorations of INGO legitimacy have broadly conformed either to a top-down approach focused on global norms and institutions or a bottom-up approach focused on the local dynamics surrounding states and populations in the Global South. We suggest that this divide is is unhelpful for understanding the current predicament and propose a new approach, which pays closer attention to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down dimensions, and to historical context. This new approach can provide important insights into current debates about the future roles and internal structures of INGOs.

IR literature has proposed tangible and intangible criteria for defining and differentiating rankings of countries, albeit without much success. The literature's limited success is primarily due to the subjective, unclear and immeasurable qualities of these criteria. The differentiation between small powers and middle powers is particularly ambiguous. This article proposes an amalgamated method, which combines foreign policy behavior capabilities to characterize and separate small powers and middle powers. There is a relationship between capabilities and a country's global status ranking that also determines foreign policy behavior. This also underlines a complementarity between national capabilities and foreign policy objectives. Lower capabilities means a low-key/restrained foreign policy but do higher capabilities mean a more proactive/highly strung foreign policy? Increased capabilities boost the position of a country from a small power to a middle power but do not completely eliminate constraints imposed by great powers. This artide examines Turkey's experiences since the 1930s as an empirical narrative of the complementarity between power and level of influence.

The aim of this text is to make sense of the emerging political-institutional, territorial, and socio-ecological dynamics and contradictions of neo-extractivism in Latin America in the context of global capitalist development. In contrast to some existing literature, we argue that the term 'neo-extractivism' should not be restricted to countries with progressive governments but be applied to all Latin American societies that, since the 1970s and especially since the year 2000, depend predominantly on the exploitation and exportation of nature. We argue that the often vague usage of the term neo-extractivism can be strengthened when it is seen in line with dominant development models. Therefore we refer to regulation theory and its historical heuristic of different phases of capitalist development. This enables us to look at the temporal-spatial interdependencies between shifting socio-economic and technological developments, world market structures, and political-institutional configurations that characterize neo-extractivism across scales and beyond national borders.

In Indonesia, as in many other countries of the global South, processes to formalize rights over land have been implemented with the intention to reduce deforestation, decrease poverty and increase tenure security. Literature on de jure processes of land formalization is widely available. There is a gap, however, on the discrepancy of de jure land titling procedures and de facto strategies to legitimize land claims. Led by the theoretical concepts of "law as process" and "politics of scale", this study closes this gap by analyzing the impact of national tenure formalization processes on de facto local patterns of land titling. Using empirical material from 16 villages in Jambi province, we show that the outcomes of the state-led land reforms and land tenure formalization processes are imitated and translated into locally feasible actions. We refer to these translation processes as "mimicry of the legal". The land formalization endeavors fostering mimicry of the legal allow for resource exploitation and rent-seeking behavior.

It becomes essential when reasoning about the security risks to critical utilities such electrical power and water distribution to recognize that the interests of producers and consumers do not fully coincide. They may have incentives to behave strategically towards each other, as well as toward some third party adversary. We therefore argue for the need to extend the prior literature, which has concentrated on the strategic, adaptive game between adversary and defender, towards 3-player games. But it becomes hard to justify modelling a population of consumers as a single, decision making actor. So we also show how we can model consumers as a group of mutually-influencing, yet not centrally co-ordinated, heterogeneous agents. And we suggest how this representation can be integrated into a game-theoretic framework. This requires a framework in which payoffs are known by the players only stochastically. We present some basic models and demonstrate the nature of the modelling commitments that need to be made in order to reason about utilities' security risk.

Risk management is of paramount importance in the success of tunnelling works and is linked to the tunnelling method and to the constraints of the works. Sequencial Excavation Method (SEM) and Tun-nel Boring Machine (TBM) method have been competing for years. This article, part of a wider study on the influence of the â Safety and Healthâ criterion in the choice of method, reviews the existing literature about the criteria usually employed to choose the tunnelling method and on the criterion â Safety and Healthâ . This crite-rion is particularly important, due to the financial impacts of work accidents and occupational diseases. This article is especially useful to the scientific and technical community, since it synthesizes the relevance of each one of the choice criteria used and it shows why â Safety and Healthâ must be a criterion in the decision mak-ing process to choose the tunnelling method. ; Department of Science and Technology, Government of ...

The September 2012 consultation document, Reforming Key Stage 4 Qualifications (DfE, 2012a), set out the government's proposals for changes to the examination system at age 16. The Secretary of State said in the House of Commons that these reforms were radical, and others commented that they composed the biggest change in the examination system in a generation. This warrants an analysis of the research literature relevant to the proposals. We address each of the following issues raised in the consultation document in turn, and present research evidence in each case. - How England competes in international test scores - The claim that there has been grade inflation - The proposals to raise the level of challenge in examinations - Familiarity with examination materials - The desire to increase students' motivation - The plan for students only to be tested at the end of the course, rather than within a modular system - The proposal that the use of controlled assessment should be restricted - The proposal that examinations should not be tiered

Countries that are reliant upon commodity exports periodically face large adverse price shocks. Given past volatility, the present high world prices for commodities may be a precursor to such shocks. Unsurprisingly, adverse price shocks reduce the growth of constant-price GDP and we analyze which structural policies help to minimize these losses. Structural policies are incentives and regulations that are maintained for long periods, contrasting with policy responses to shocks, the analysis of which has dominated the literature. We show that structural policies have large effects. In particular, policies which enable flexibility in labour markets and which ease the entry and exit of firms, are particularly well-suited to shock-prone commodity exporters. We show that these gains are systematically unrealized. Indeed, we find a political economy paradox that the larger are the gains from good structural policy, the worse are the policies actually adopted. We account for this paradox in terms of the lack of responsiveness to the needs of the economy that resource rents induce.

Homes in multiple occupancy (HMOs) – residential properties containing common areas shared by several households – are a growing feature of the housing landscape across the United Kingdom. They have often been subject to political stigmatization as a result, in part, of comprising poor quality dwellings. This paper uses a 'spaces of exception' framework to explore the juridical and material mechanisms involved in the rise of fuel poverty among people living in HMOs. Having analysed evidence from interviews, census data and the secondary literature pertaining to the English context, we highlight the processes that have led to the biopolitical othering of this housing stock in institutional and infrastructural terms. We argue that the expansion and persistence of fuel poverty in HMOs are promoted not only by the disproportionate concentration of low-income residents in relation to the rest of the PRS, but also by the socio-technical configurations that underpin this type of housing. Fuel poverty can thus be seen as the joint outcome of broader practices of legal, political and material delegitimization.

Joel Barkan was an important figure in Africanist political science and one of the world's leading experts on East Africa. He died suddenly in January 2014 while on holiday in Mexico, aged seventy-two. At the time, he was still involved in myriad projects both academic and policy oriented, his energies undimmed. In addition to contributing to the literature on African politics, Barkan was a passionate friend of Africa, inspiring students on all sides of the Atlantic to study the continent. Following his death, a headline in the best selling Kenyan newspaper, The Daily Nation, read "In Memory of Joel Barkan: A Scholar Who Believed in Kenya's Greatness." This ASR Forum explores the lasting legacy of his wide-ranging work on a number of countries including Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, and a broad range of political institutions and phenomena. The articles contained in this forum demonstrate the continued significance of Barkan's work and its important implications for how we study elections, legislatures and development around the world, not just in Africa.

The problems related to governance system such as management irregularities or fraud, unaccountable finan-cial practices, and poor public service deliveries have raised some questions to the effectiveness of Units of Government Internal Audit (GIA). The complexity of role and function of GIA, which are both directly and indirectly influenced by the stakeholders and relevant environment, need an appropriate research using sys-temic context. The objective of this study was to identify and establish priority strategy in developing effective internal audit system. This research was based on qualitative approaches with systems methodology whichwas started with literature study, in-depth interview and focus group discussion (FGD). Then, the study was continued with analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with experts representing the stakeholders. The study showed that to enhance the effectiveness of GIA, it is important to have priority strategy to streng then the governance system, risk management, and control. The role of the stakeholders and management maturity are the key requirements to successful and an effective of GIA System.