Suchergebnisse

Regardless of the crucial role of civil society in social innovation, European Union (EU) social innovation concepts emphasized market-economic features rather than social by prioritizing social business over social movements. By emphasizing the economic features of social innovation, social enterprises, as ventures with both social and economic goals, are frequently associated with social innovation, especially in the developed economies. As an EU member country, Slovenia needed to adjust its policies to the EU social innovation concepts. Bearing in mind the EU interpretation of social innovation and the significance of state policies for its development, our aim is to investigate the policy framework conditions for the development of forestry-based social innovation initiatives in Slovenia. We found out that the prevalent economic understanding of social innovation reflects in Slovenian policy documents by equating social innovation with social enterprise. In this sense, the view of social innovation as both growth engine and a way for solving societal problems translates into explicit statements on social innovation in cohesion policy documents and progresses by operationalization of social innovation through indicators solely on social enterprise. Within the regulatory framework on social entrepreneurship, social enterprise is defined strictly with respect to legal forms, activities, profit sharing and governance, imposing barriers to the registration and development. Similarly to cohesion policy, the Rural Development Programme embraces a market-oriented understanding of social innovation and focuses explicitly on social enterprise. Forest policy documents do not explicitly mention social innovation or social enterprise. This is reasonable for documents adopted before 2011 when social innovation and social enterprises became a part of the prevailing discourse in Slovenia. However, newly adopted forest policy documents also do not integrate either social innovation or social enterprise. As forestry-based ...

Negotiation is any process through which the players on their own try to reach an agreement. It is a task that has a broad spectrum of practical applications to a variety of social, economic, and politic phenomena. When it comes to complicated problems such as negotiations with a large number of issues, finding good agreements is however a tough challenge for human beings, especially in the case that they lack negotiation experience, opponent information, and the available negotiation time is limited. In order to overcome these limitations, there exists considerable interest in automating their negotiation process by means of software agents to assist humans in the decision-making process. Automated negotiation therefore provides people with a realistic alternative solution. This chapter first overviews forms, protocols, and three main approaches of automated negotiation, namely, heuristic, game theoretic, and argumentation approaches. Then, the focus is on the study of complex practical negotiation — multiissue negotiation that runs under real-time constraints and in which the negotiating agents have no prior knowledge about their opponents' preferences and strategies. Finally, two classes of state-of-the-art negotiation agents for complex negotiation are presented, namely, the agents based on regression techniques and the agents based on transfer learning to support its decision-making process during negotiation.

One feature of globalisation is the increasing spread of international standards. In general, standards define benchmarks and rules for production. They can stem from a variety of sources ranging from NGOs to industries and governments. This article focuses on standard setting by international standards development organisations. We explore into the global regimes that govern standards for wooden products that are used in construction. Although the regimes are under the notion of 'self-regulation', such forms of 'private' governing are questionable from a democratic perspective. The article explores the composition and interest distribution of the actors steering standardisation in construction. Construction is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Since recently wood has been promoted as a means of carbon storage we focus on the norms that internationally are the most dominant with the intention to regulate sustainability and carbon efficiency for wood use in construction. Standardisation in this emerging field is still under development. The article aims to draw a comprehensive picture of the institutionalised rules and processes that up to now are globally most influential. In conclusion the process is best described as a 'regulation of self-regulation' taking place mainly under the institutional umbrella of the private actors CEN and ISO, with some influence from governments. Adapted from the source document.