IN A 3-YEAR COOPERATIVE PROJECT CARRIED OUT BY THE URBAN INSTITUTE AND THE ATLANTA PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM, A TECHNIQUE FOR ANALYZING COMPUTERIZED TEST DATA WAS DEVELOPED FOR THE PURPOSE OF COMPARING STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN SCHOOLS WITH SIMILAR STUDENT POPULATIONS. THE EXPERIMENT IF ORGANIZATIONAL MILLEN DOES NOT FAVOUR CHANGE, ADMINISTRATION CANNOT EFFECTIVELY DEAL WITH SUCH DATA.
Rural small-farmer households in Asia are characterized by a high degree of mobility of household members between places (pluriactivity) and sectors (plurilocality). These features are not well captured in Census and other large-scale statistics, or in common conceptions of 'occupation', 'farm' and 'household'. As climate change brings increasing risks and unpredictability to smallholder farming, pluriactive rural livelihoods can be important in the adaptation of poor and marginal rural groups to the vagaries and risks of climate change, while smallholder farming itself can be an important counter to climate change. Family farming, according to the Global Action Plan of the UN Decade of Family Farming 2019-2028, can contribute to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. A revitalized smallholder farming depends not only on active support from governments, but also on the emergence of a new generation of young men and women interested in farming. Will there be a next generation of smallholder farmers? Or will smallholder farming be abandoned by the new generations, leaving big capital and the multinationals to take over? Recent research shows that while many young rural men and women indeed aspire to non-farming futures, they also have a clear idea of what is needed to make farming a more attractive option, especially: access to land, to markets, and government support, and combining farming with other income sources, reflecting the pluriactive and plurilocal character of sustainable rural livelihoods.
"Having served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards, former business school dean and university president White has a surprising message--many directors don't understand their roles as stewards. Rather than seeing boards as mere vehicles for oversight and basic monitoring, he shows, in detail and with hundreds of real-world anecdotes, how boards can do better"--
"Having served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards, former business school dean and university president White has a surprising message--many directors don't understand their roles as stewards. Rather than seeing boards as mere vehicles for oversight and basic monitoring, he shows, in detail and with hundreds of real-world anecdotes, how boards can do better"--
India's waste is growing fast; so is its research, and so is the informal economy in which it is embedded. Here research on a small-town waste economy (WE) is situated in the literature on urban informal waste, making three contributions. First, an analytical grid is placed over this small-town formal-informal waste economy in terms of its circuits of capital in the generation of waste. These comprise factory production, physical and economic distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Second, field evidence for this waste economy is used to interrogate the three prevailing approaches to theorising informality, revealing how social and economic segmentation can simultaneously drive all three theorised relationships in a complementary fashion. Third, the municipal government's fragmented architecture and informal bureaucratic behaviour reveal not only severely compromised management capacities but also the local state's paradoxical dependence on, and distance from, the informal waste economy.
International audience ; This paper is entitled « Contracts For Regulating Environmental Damage From Farming: A Principal- Agent Approach » and explores the use of agency theory in the procurement of environmental public goods. The voluntary participation basis of many European agri-environmental schemes, combined with heterogeneity in the farm population and policy makers' lack of information about individual farms, poses a contract design problem. In particular, undifferentiated payment contracts and contracts that are amenable to « cheating » by farmers can lead to inefficiencies. Agency theory can assist in the design of contracts to overcome this situation. This paper presents a simple theoretical two-producer model, together with a simulated numerical example, to demonstrate the potential advantages of using agency theory in this manner. The results indicate how over-payment to farmers can be reduced. The increasing policy and funding importance of agri-environmental objectives suggest that further research in this field is merited.
