Suchergebnisse

Disparities in health care, education and employment, housing and social welfare have long been documented in Northern Canada. These disparities have been linked to colonialism, ineffective social policy, uneven development and the high costs of service delivery and infrastructure in northern regions. This literature review aims to present a comprehensive understanding of existing research on the current state of soft infrastructure and its deficits in Canada's North and near-North regions. This scoping review contributes to a larger project led by the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy and their Northern Corridor Research Program, a project which aims to evaluate the establishment of permissible corridors in Canada. These corridors provide defined multi-modal rights-of-way with accompanying regulatory and governance structures. Specifically, the term "soft infrastructure," for the purposes of this review, refers to health care, housing, education, employment, jobs training and emergency services. The implications of these deficits in terms of economic and social opportunities in northern regions are discussed in relation to current research. Additionally, the ways in which these deficits relate to current hard infrastructure assets and deficits are assessed based on the reviewed literature. Finally, the costs, benefits and opportunities associated with the proposed Canadian corridor with regards to soft infrastructure deficits and needs are addressed.

The ability of firms, industries, and regions continually to translate information and knowledge into viable new products, services, and production processes in the face of constantly changing technology and market conditions is increasingly at the core of competitive success in the contemporary economy. Such economic learning is ultimately dependent on the ability of individuals to learn, and yet most of the literature in this area has focused on firms and organizational learning processes, and is only beginning to engage seriously with people's learning processes. This paper explores the links between social learning processes and dynamics of innovation in Silicon Valley, arguing that cross-firm, occupationally based, 'communities of practice' provide a critical context for individuals to learn and maintain the competencies they need to be successful in the region's dynamic but volatile economy. These cross-firm occupational learning communities in many cases are being built through the activities of formal professional associations, which are playing an increasingly important role in providing the organizational infrastructure to sustain these learning communities. Using a case study of an association of women in Internet design and development occupations, the author illustrates the value of such communities in supporting individual and collective learning processes. These findings suggest that economic development strategies could productively be focused on identifying, strengthening, and expanding access to such cross-firm occupational learning communities.

In the Global South, inadequate infrastructure at the village level is considered as the major constraint for the economic empowerment of socio-economically deprived communities, living marginal life at the remotest part of the state. Whenever we talk about infrastructure development, normally road transport systems, health care services, education facilities and business opportunities come in our mind. In this article, these are considered as the hard infrastructure that someone can perceive. The article, however, also examines about soft infrastructure or the knowledge development, institutional structures including socio-political configurations and other societal issues related to livelihood generations that can play an imperative role for the financial enhancement of a society, particularly which is belonging at the bottom level. Defining infrastructure in a new direction, the article presents how both soft infrastructure in terms of knowledge development and hard infrastructure in terms of post-harvest advanced storage system for minor forest products can boost-up livelihood generation for economically deprived communities, living at the forest fringe areas in the Global South with an example from the south-western part of West Bengal, India.

"Soft costs" such as permitting costs, siting costs, utility interconnection application costs, opportunity costs, the cost of delays, and so on create significant overhead for EV charging station network operators. Those costs are ultimately passed on to EV drivers, making it more difficult for EVs to reach cost parity with ICE equivalents. But the soft costs of deploying charging infrastructure are poorly understood, unpredictable, very hard to quantify, and almost entirely undocumented in the literature. Our original research, based on 24 interviews with a variety of stakeholders as well as existing literature and publicly available information on utility procurements, identifies some major categories of soft costs that need to be investigated further. This research should inform future legislation and harmonization of regulations and processes in order to reduce the total system cost of charging infrastructure.

Without realizing the importance of soft infrastructure, hard infrastructure cannot ensure a significant impact on sustained economic development. Unfortunately, Central Asia and Caucasia regions have continued to rely on a physical development model that has resulted in generating revenue but has failed to embed a sustained growth pattern in these countries. This paper highlights where Central Asia and Caucasia regions stand in terms of physical and soft infrastructure. A gradual improvement in physical infrastructure is observed, however, the infrastructure development pattern is uneven. Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic are catching up with the rest of the region. The utilization of infrastructure depends on regional infrastructure connectivity which shows gradual improvement but still faces challenges, for example, mandatory transloading, corruption and inappropriate practices, containerization availability, and multi-transport mode delays. To overcome infrastructure development and connectivity challenges, massive infrastructure investment is required but is currently quite low. To tap infrastructure financing, appropriate financing strategies like developing public-private partnerships, attracting foreign direct investment, and exploring the possibility of the bond market are required. To improve the infrastructure development landscape, and resolve infrastructure connectivity and financing issues, the region requires an appropriate institutional and regulatory environment.

Conventionally how states 'infrastructured' was based around the monocentrism of the positive state. The progressive liberalisation of infrastructure over the past three decades has given rise to polycentric national infrastructure systems (NIS). This polycentric NIS exhibits a higher degree of structural, spatial and operational complexity with the state being one player though it still plays a prominent role not just through its own activities but also in seeking to steer the system to meet its territorial objectives. This is done through the formal interaction between hard and soft infrastructure (with the later characterised by themes of sustainability, consistency and criticality) components of the NIS. These themes are explored through an analysis of the UK's National Infrastructure Plan where – it is argued – the formation of the UK NIS is characterised by a strategy of sustainable polycentrism though this strategy has yet to deliver the investment anticipated.