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An estimated 90% of all confirmed COVID-19 cases occur in rural and urban areas around the world, where all industries and sectors have been severely impacted. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and intensified many of the difficulties and uncertainties local governments face in carrying out their responsibilities. Apart from restoring normalcy, local governments in the National Capital Region face specific challenges, as they must double their efforts and interventions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as restore and reinforce community resilience in both short and long-term response and action. Local government plays a significant role in providing social services in normal times and ensures that these public services are accessible in times of adversity and distress, as well as acting as first responders in disaster prevention, rescue, and restoration. While the world has not yet crossed everyone, and some issues remain unresolved, the author agrees that unprecedented decisions and good practices from neighboring countries should have been taken to protect citizens, especially the most vulnerable. The author examined and reviewed the various mechanisms used by various local governments in Metro Manila, as well as the SDG framework, to analyze the challenges and good practices for local responses to the pandemic and mitigating its effects. The author finds that identifying the challenges faced by various local governments in Metro Manila as well as how they deal with these challenges and recognizing their good practices would aid local governments in long-term sustainability planning and development.

Brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailers in India are constantly devoting their time, effort, energy, and money in discovering and adopting retailing theories, models, and frameworks that are practiced by the B&M retailers in the developed countries that have matured markets and consumers. This is a clear example of a serious timing issue. We believe the Indian market and consumers are moving towards the same maturity levels, but it is still a long way to go as the Indian consumers belong to the widest variety of religions, regions, languages, cultures, sub-cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds with divergent needs. In addition to expecting world-class overall store-image, they yet require retailers to facilitate honest and authentic human-led engagement. This means, thoughtful and logical integration of existing theories aligned to, the Indian market; consumer's maturity level; divergent consumer needs are crucial, and this is the core of our theory. The ToR-b adopts elements of retailing theories that are known and suitable for retailing in the Indian context, in addition to identifying (i) new elements influencing honest and authentic humanled engagement; higher consumer-level customization; higher levels of consumer-orientation, (ii) significance of their association and determination with return on investment, (iii) their role in influencing the long-term sustainability of a retailer, and most importantly (iv) their ability to enhance interest among existing and potential employees, investors, and consumer's minds with a particular retailer. Insights from multiple empirical and qualitative studies, field experiments, and evaluation of consumer-level transactions involved in building this theory made us strongly believe that the overall phenomenon of B&M retailing in India is truly complex and complexity is necessary to an adequate description of a phenomenon. We hope that in addition to laying a foundation for new directions to guide future research on Indian retailing, our theory will ...

Malawi faces mounting challenges in meeting the growing demand for food, water, and energy to satisfy the needs of a rapidly growing population. Relying on secondary data, the paper argues that while the existing policy initiatives have increased food production to a certain extent, the demand for water and energy has also increased, leading to degradation of the resource base, and contributing to an increase in water-related diseases. Despite the inherent interconnections between water, energy and food production, agencies often work in a fragmented and isolated way. Poor sectoral coordination and institutional fragmentation have triggered the unsustainable use of resources and threatened the long-term sustainability of food, water, and energy security in the country, posing challenges to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the country. Consequently, this paper substantiates that a nexus approach can enhance understanding of the interconnectedness of the sectors and strengthen coordination among them. However, it requires but it requires a major shift in the decision-making process towards taking a holistic view, and development of institutional mechanisms to coordinate the actions of diverse actors and strengthen complementarities and synergies among the three sectors. The framework for cross-sectoral coordination and managing the nexus challenges is also suggested. ; https://grassrootsjournals.org/jelp/0102m00234.html#status

The term "freedom of expression" is quite broad and holistic. It includes, within its ambit, not only the conventional freedom of speech and freedom of media, but also the freedom of thoughts, cultural expression, conscience, and intellectual inquiry. Freedom of expression ensures an individual's right to express his/her views openly within the domain of constitution, which also contains the right to be criticial of the prevailing injustices, illegal, anti-social activities, and incompetence and failure of ¬¬¬the government. All this is with a guarantee of safety and without any apprehension or fear of retaliation. Freedom of expression, in contemporary times, also embraces the right to be informed and seek information by the public, to express opinions, and advocate amendments, including changing the regime without resorting to violent means through peaceful measures available in the public domain, with reasonable restrictions. In the past decade and half, Turkish experience as a transitional democracy presents an interesting case study to explain as to how the state of freedom of expression is causally related to the failure of the EU-driven reform process undertaken by the ruling AKP (Turkish: Adaletve Kalkınma Partisi) since the year 2002, when the party won the Parliamentary elections in Turkey for the first time. The issue about the press freedom and freedom of expression in Turkey has for very long time, attracted a great amount of scholarly attention and provoked extensive debate both inside and outside Turkey. Although Turkey remains one of the rare democracy in the West Asia, a region with strong monarchic and semi-monarchic tradition of government, a series of development in the past years has raised several interrogations about the qualitative and quantitative aspects of democracy in Turkey under the AKP.

The aim of this study was to reveal if there is literature about who's still playing Pokémon Go two years after game launch, and whether players report the AR-aspect as part of the reason they're still engaging in the game. Investigating the phenomenon covered widely by news and social media from this angle could be of interest of public health workers with the ambition to replicate the success. We ran a systematic search resulting in 22 articles included, published between 2016-2018. The results revealed that the main part of the included studies were conducted just around game launch (July 2016) and within the first six months Pokémon Go was out "in the wild". AR was in general not questioned about, and there exists different and vague understandings of what augmented reality actually is. We were not able to identify the typical long-term player engaging with the game, and to what extent AR was a part of the prolonged success. The search also revealed a lack of longitudinal studies (with larger, more representative participant groups) about general social and mental health implications of playing the game. The studies imply a successful combination of several game aspects - whether playing for the adventure and discovering new places, family bonding, general game flexibility, "to pass time", a bit of nostalgia – or just for fun. Further studies are needed to understand of which importance it is to implement an AR- or location-based-feature, the importance of branding, what app/game mechanics appeal to the general and how deeply immersive experiences through a mobile screen are able to affect us, dragging us into an augmented world – and keeping us there. ; M-FOL

Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a politically initiated financing scheme from the Research Council in Norway aiming for long term, high quality and innovative research, contributing towards solving the big challenges of our society. Two evaluations conclude that this scheme is a success. These evaluations does not however pay much attention to the role of the administration in that regard. This master-thesis investigate how administrative leaders in the CoE contribute towards goal achievement. This has not previously been studied. For the data collection individual interviews was chosen, because they provide an open and investigative approach, well suited to gather relevant information. The analysis are based on organizational theory for public organizations, theories about organization types and previous research regarding the role of administrative personnel in research and higher education. The administrative leaders in CoE work in the interface between academic work and administration. My research shows that most of them have an academic background. They are highly educated, on master or PhD level, and some have research experience beyond that. Most of them have relevant work experience with a good overview of how the research and university systems work. The administrative leaders can further be recognised by their ability to create a good work environment and their social integration skills. This is very important in CoE, not the least because the centres depends heavily on recruitment of international research staff. In this regard good language skills and intercultural competence are also important. These leaders contribute to goal achievement through relieving the researchers and facilitating research related tasks, like conferences and meeting places, and haveing a good overview and ensure internal and external information flow. They also organize social activities and function as a central hub or connector. The administrative leader role demands a mix of knowledge and competencies, resembling the role of the classic middle range leader in the professional bureaucracy of today. With a great variety of different assignments coupled with being a connector for tasks and functions, both vertical and horizontal in the organization. In addition the administrative leader in a CoE also works close with the research leaders and the research activities at the centre. CoE are organized as time-limited projects with high demands and expectations. My study shows that the administration apparatus in CoE is important for goal achievement, but also that it is necessary with one 100% administrative leader or coordinator in a CoE, in order to take care of and coordinate the interests of the centre, both internally and in relation to the host institution. These CoE administrative leaders are a highly selected group regarding qualifications and background, which is something to be aware of when planning these kinds of research units, but also concerning the status- and role of administrative research personnel in general. ; publishedVersion