Suchergebnisse

This article aims to evaluate PAANEEAC (Projet d'appui au développement des associations nationales pour l'évaluation environnementale en Afrique Centrale), the program to support the development of national associations (NAs) for environmental impact assessment (EIA) in Central Africa. PAANEEAC's objective is to improve the governance of investment decisions through strengthening capacities for EIA. From the literature explaining the failure of donor-induced capacity development programs, the article deduces conditions for success. The empirical assessment of PAANEEAC is based on document review, extensive interviews, and observations. It concludes that PAANEEAC managed to create platforms in which stakeholders meet with the common objective of improving EIA systems, and that this led to measurable, albeit modest improvements in EIA systems. Furthermore, PAANEEAC met most of the success conditions, which was instrumental for its performance.

AbstractIs the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) a challenge for the World Bank and other traditional multilateral development banks (MDBs)? This paper provides an initial assessment of the potential benefits and risks of NDB and AIIB by examining their motivations, scale, structures, rules and first projects. It identifies areas in which the new MDBs can complement the World Bank and other traditional MDBs and discusses ways in which they can undermine the latter. It suggests ways in which the two types of MDBs can further their cooperation in development financing.

PurposeIn this paper, the authors aim to look at the relationship between divergent national corporate social policies as embedded in corporate governance regimes and the development of the firm's organizational capabilities. More specifically, the authors illustrate how the different systems of corporate governance developed in the USA and Germany are major resource-based factors on the decision to develop production-related organizational capabilities. The authors develop an integrative framework, drawing on both the corporate governance, as well as strategic management literatures, to explain idiosyncrasies and commonalities in capability development. In the aggregate, this would lead to differential corporate social and economic performance between Germany and the USA.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper that develops a framework to link national corporate social policy as embedded in governance systems to corporate social and economic performance.FindingsCorporate governance systems – embodying divergent corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientations vis-à-vis the firm's stakeholders – can be viewed as determinants of group-specific resources that will not be transferable across different nation-states, leading to divergent corporate social and economic performance.Originality/valueThe analysis emphasizes that CSR is an essential element of corporate governance. The authors highlight that regulatory, normative and cognitive institutional structures and orientations help to utilize and configure important firm-specific, industry-specific and country-specific resources and capabilities. This framework also contributes to recent developments in the corporate governance and management literatures that position CSR as a central element of corporate governance institutions.

China has experienced significant social, economic and political transformations since its economic reform started in the late 1970s. Considerable changes in its policy-making and implementation approaches have also emerged. Confronted with the intensified tension between the call for efficiency and strong pressure to improve social welfare, the Chinese government had no choice but to become instrumentally pragmatic in adopting different governance strategies to address the increasingly complex social, economic and political developments. Thus, neoliberal tenets were introduced. This article sets out to examine, against the wider policy context, how neoliberal tenets, particularly its emphasis on market principles, have been injected in higher education governance. This article aims to explore how the multi-faceted dynamics shaped the development of transnational higher education and influenced the governance of Sino-foreign cooperation universities.

In the National Mid-Term Development Plan for2014-2019, the Government of Indonesia has an ambitious plan to allocate 12.7 million ha of state forests for local communities and indigenous peoples through social forestry projects. Recently, President Joko Widodo has taken a strong step toward fulfilling the promise by handing of 13,000 ha to nine customary communities. He underlined that it is a beginning of the big thing. The policy is a strong political will; it is the first time that customary land rights are legally recognized. Over the years, uses of forest resources by local people were prevented (Maryudi 2011; Maryudi &Krott 2012a). Webb (2008: 26) argues that in many economically-developing countries, traditional forest uses are often labelled as illegal since the governments favour corporate-based/ industries forestry as development strategies. The policy breakthrough is a result of long struggles to main streaming social forestry, nearly 50 years after Jack Westoby's anthropocentric views regarding forestry and forest management. Before his death, Westoby stated: "a clear forest policy is one condition of a truly social forestry.all forestry should be social". His thinking seemed to repudiate the idea of forest-based industrial development (Leslie 1989). As he claimed, the enormous expansion in the utilisation of the tropical forests had limitedly done for the people that continued to live in chronic poverty. At the same time, the application of the industrial forestry in the developing world led to environmental crisis of rapid forest destruction (Westoby 1969). Westoby's address to the 1978's World Forestry Congress further inspired forest policy makers across the globe, including in Indonesia, to formulate strategies that can tackle both problem in one single package of forest problem (Maryudi et al. 2012). We have since witnessed experiments and pilot projects translating the alternative thinking on the ground,also as manifestation of decentralization anddevolution policy (Sahide et al. 2016a). In Indonesia,however, social forestry is often understood as only involvement of local people in forest management that generate subsistent livehood (Maryudi & Krott2012b). Numerous pilot projects and programs failed to address the central issue of power relations and decision-making authority (Maryudi 2014; Sahide etal. 2016b). In most cases, external actors remain powerful in shaping the programs; they try to skew the outcomes of decision-making processes in their direction (Schusser et al. 2015; Schusser et al. 2016;Mery et al. 2010). Local communities, who are supposedly the core actors, remain peripheral; social forestry has yet to produce the intended outcomes as a result.What does that mean in relation to the new promise by the Indonesian government to rural communities? Rights and access are two central keywords for social forestry. There might be arguments that in social forestry programs in Indonesia, local people have been granted with different types of rights so that they can benefit from the forest resources. Such is not always the case. Quite often, local communities are not able to benefit from the forests despite being given the rights (see Maryudi2014). As such, conflicts persist even in forests where social forestry is implemented (see Maryudi et al.2015). Ribot and Peluso (2003) distinguish access from property. To them, access is defined as "a bundle ofpower" whereas property is defined as "a bundle ofrights".The new policy clearly needs new approach so that we do not repeat the same mistakes and consequences. New forest governance structure is needed. Local communities should have explicit mandate and legal authority(Krogman & Beckley2002) and power "to influence decisions regarding management of forests, including the rules of access and the disposition of products" (McDermott &Schrekenberg 2009:158). Thus, genuine social forestry entails the following characteristics (Charnley & Poe2007: 1) the degree of responsibility and authority for forest management is formally vested by the state to the local communities, 2) a central objective of forest management is to provide local communities with social and economic benefits from the forest, and 3)ecollogically sustainable forest use is a central management goal, with forest communities taking some responsibility for maintaining and restoring forest health.

The crisis which started in 2008 looks like it is never going to end. Nearly nine years after the meltdown of the financial system and the violent recession followed by the euro crisis in 2012, recovery has been weak in the Euro Area. This elusive recovery has had dramatic consequences. In 2016, 16.2 million people in the Euro Area were unemployed. This is more than 2.5 million fewer than the high of 19 million in 2013, but it is still far from the 11.7 million unemployed in 2007 before the Great Recession kicked in. Moreover, 8.8 million people were long-term unemployed in 2015 and among them 5.7 million belong to the category "very long-term unemployed" (defined as 24 months or more of unemployment)

After 2010, the UK Government's espousal of a Localist agenda reflected a rejection of the regional level as the most appropriate scale for sub-national governance. The development of a more explicitly city regional level of governance is illustrated in the creation of City Deals which have given some of England's largest cities increased autonomy to allocate the dividend of local economic growth. More recently, Combined Authorities, within which larger city-regions such as Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool and the North-East of England have been tasked to undertake transport, economic development and other functions. In assessing this contemporary reshaping of metropolitan governance this article draws upon political economy, spatial and institutional approaches that highlight how austerity, competing spatial imaginaries and the historical evolution of central-local relationships within the UK state have combined to produce a particularly 'disorganised' approach to contemporary devolution in England. It contends that while the city region remains the dominant spatial narrative, the on-going process of rescaling at the sub-national state level falls well short of being a coherent, clearly thought-out and permanent transfer of powers and fiscal responsibilities to a uniformly defined scale of governance.

The unifying theme of the papers in this series is a concern for understanding the everyday practice of governance in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) health systems. Rather than seeing governance as a normative health system goal addressed through the architecture and design of accountability and regulatory frameworks, these papers provide insights into the real-world decision-making of health policy and system actors. Their multiple, routine decisions translate policy intentions into practice – and are filtered through relationships, underpinned by values and norms, influenced by organizational structures and resources, and embedded in historical and socio-political contexts. These decisions are also political acts – in that they influence who accesses benefits and whose voices are heard in decision-making, reinforcing or challenging existing institutional exclusion and power inequalities. In other words, the everyday practice of governance has direct impacts on health system equity. The papers in the series address governance through diverse health policy and system issues, consider actors located at multiple levels of the system and draw on multi-disciplinary perspectives. They present detailed examination of experiences in a range of African and Indian settings, led by authors who live and work in these settings. The overall purpose of the papers in this series is thus to provide an empirical and embedded research perspective on governance and equity in health systems.

State-controlled protected areas (PAs) have dominated conservation strategies globally, yet their performance relative to other governance regimes is rarely assessed comprehensively. Furthermore, performance indicators of forest PAs are typically restricted to deforestation, although the extent of forest degradation is greater. We address these shortfalls through an empirical impact evaluation of state PAs, Indigenous Territories (ITs), and civil society and private Conservation Concessions (CCs) on deforestation and degradation throughout the Peruvian Amazon. We integrated remote-sensing data with environmental and socio-economic datasets, and used propensity-score matching to assess: (i) how deforestation and degradation varied across governance regimes between 2006–2011; (ii) their proximate drivers; and (iii) whether state PAs, CCs and ITs avoided deforestation and degradation compared with logging and mining concessions, and the unprotected landscape. CCs, state PAs, and ITs all avoided deforestation and degradation compared to analogous areas in the unprotected landscape. CCs and ITs were on average more effective in this respect than state PAs, showing that local governance can be equally or more effective than centralized state regimes. However, there were no consistent differences between conservation governance regimes when matched to logging and mining concessions. Future impact assessments would therefore benefit from further disentangling governance regimes across unprotected land. ; This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/I019650/1); Cambridge Political Economy Society; Cambridge Philosophical Society; St John's College; and the Geography Department at the University of Cambridge.

Across leading environmental challenges—fire management, climate change, deforestation – there is growing awareness of the need to better account for diverse stakeholder perceptions across complex, multi-level governance arrangements. Perceptions often condition behavior, compliance and engagement in ways that impact environmental outcomes. We illustrate the importance of, and approaches to, examining perceptions across scales of governance (e.g. international, national, local) and sectors (e.g. civil society, government, corporate) through the example of Indonesian peatland fires. Peatlands are crucial global carbon stocks threatened by land use change and fire and subject to a range of policy interventions that affect many different stakeholder groups. Peatland drainage and conversion to plantation agriculture has been associated with severe, uncontrolled peat fires that present significant climate, public health and economic risks. Peatland fire management has become a domestic and international priority, spurring intensely contentious debates, policies and legal proceedings. Previous fire management interventions (FMI) are numerous yet have suffered widespread implementation failures. Against this backdrop, our manuscript provides a thematically and methodologically novel analysis of how diverse stakeholders, from local farmers to international policy makers, perceive peatland fires in terms of, i) how they prioritize the associated benefits and burdens, and ii) the perceived effectiveness of FMI. We adopt an innovative application of Q method to provide needed insights that serve to quantify the areas of contention and consensus that exist among the stakeholders and their multi-dimensional perspectives. We show that many of the contemporary FMI were perceived as among the most effective interventions overall, but were also the most controversial between groups. Clear consensus areas were related to the shared concerns for the local health impacts and the potential of government support for fire-free alternatives as a solution pathway. Improved understanding of stakeholder perceptions has potential to: give voice to marginalized communities; enable transparent mediation of diverse priorities; inform public education campaigns, and shape future policy and governance arrangements.

International audience ; Supported by the omnipresent State in the past, French music education leans increasingly towards a more liberal and competitive model. In the current context of a decentralized economy and European integration, music conservatories are called upon to contribute to regional and municipal development and enhance European student mobility. How do conservatories react to the restructuring of the competitive field? How do they affect European territorial cohesion? Are they managing adaptive or hybrid strategies with new conceptions of music education? Alternatively, do they gradually move away from the marketplace and become an obsolete and difficult heritage to maintain? To answer these questions, it is necessary to analyze the current balance of power among the different elements of the French multi-level system of conservatories, including communal, inter-communal, departmental, regional, national and European institutions. By combining different sources of spatial and statistical data, this paper contributes to constructing a comparative institutional geography of French multi-level territorial divisions. Extraction and treatment of the small data with SPSS statistical software allowed us to build a number of small-scale datasets that were merged to broader geographical databases from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). The geographical units that structure the INSEE databases (the zip and district codes, codes of regions, departments, GPS coordinates) made possible the location of each conservatory within municipal, departmental, regional and national spaces. A cartographic approach to studying music conservatories allows the identification of problems that deserve further detailed qualitative and statistical study in the future.