scholarly journals Infrastructure, planning and the command of time

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (8) ◽  
pp. 1843-1866 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Marshall ◽  
Richard Cowell

Governments in many countries have sought to accelerate the time taken to make decisions on major infrastructure projects, citing problems of ‘delay’. Despite this, rarely has the time variable been given careful empirical or conceptual attention in decision-making generally, or in infrastructure decision-making specifically. This paper addresses this deficit by analysing decision-making on two categories of major infrastructure in the UK – transport and electricity generation – seeking both to generate better evidence of the changes to decision times in recent decades, and to generate insights from treating time as resource and tracking its (re)allocation. We find that reforms introduced since 2008 have done relatively little to alter overall decision times, but that there are marked and revealing changes to the allocation of time between decision-making stages. While public planning processes have their time frames tightly regulated, aspects led by developers (e.g. pre-application discussion) are not; arranging finance can have a bigger effect on project time frames, and central government retains much flexibility to manage the flow of time. Speed-up reforms are also sectorally uneven in their reach. This indicates how arguments for time discipline falter in the face of infrastructure projects that remain profoundly politicised.

Evaluation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Martha Bicket ◽  
Dione Hills ◽  
Helen Wilkinson ◽  
Alexandra Penn

Central government guidance seeks to ensure and enhance the quality of practice and decision-making across – and sometimes beyond – government. The Magenta Book, published by HM Treasury, is the key UK Government resource on policy evaluation, setting out central government guidance on how to evaluate policies, projects and programmes. The UK Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus was invited to contribute its expertise to the UK Government’s 2020 update of the Magenta Book by developing an accompanying guide on policy evaluation and ‘complexity’. A small multidisciplinary team worked together to produce a set of guidance, going through multiple stages of work and drawing on a variety of sources including academic and practitioner literature and experts and stakeholders in the fields of evaluation, policy and complexity. It also drew on Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus’ own work developing and testing evaluation methods for dealing with complexity in evaluation. The resulting Magenta Book 2020 Supplementary Guide: Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation explores the implications of complexity for policy and evaluation and how evaluation can help to navigate complexity. This article, designed primarily for practitioners who might be interested in this guidance and how it was developed, describes the processes involved, particularly related to the interdisciplinary dialogue and consultation with other key stakeholders that this involved. It also briefly outlines the content and key messages in the guidance, with reflections on the experiences of the authors in developing the guide – including the challenges and insights that arose during the process, particularly around the challenges of communicating complexity to a broad audience of readers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (89) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Andrey F. Shorikov ◽  
◽  
Elena V. Butsenko ◽  

The article describes the functionality developed by the authors of an intelligent software system for optimizing adaptive control of business planning processes in the face of uncertainty. The results are based on a new method for optimizing adaptive project management using network economic and mathematical modeling. Based on this method, a methodology has been developed for solving the problem of optimizing adaptive control of business planning processes, which in the proposed intelligent software decision support system uses a block containing an adaptive control optimization model. As the objective function (evaluation functional) in the method used, the value of the length of the time period for the execution of the business plan, which needs to be minimized, is considered. The method used allows you to create a class of acceptable strategies for adaptive control of the implementation process for the business plan in question. Within the framework of this class of strategies, an optimal adaptive control strategy for the implementation of business planning processes is formed, the optimal time for its implementation and the optimal schedule for implementing the business plan as a whole, and the corresponding optimal adaptive control strategies are calculated. Application of the proposed new method in an intelligent software system allows for feedback and optimal time for the implementation of the business project as a whole. The developed intelligent system is designed to automate the modeling of business planning processes and optimize adaptive decision-making control during their implementation on the basis of network economic and mathematical modeling, as well as methods and tools for developing intelligent soft systems. The created system takes into account the existing specific technical and economic conditions and information support. The results obtained in this work can serve as the basis for creating intelligent instrumental systems for supporting managerial decision-making in the implementation of business planning processes in the face of information uncertainty and risks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 250 ◽  
pp. R89-R93
Author(s):  
Martin Donnelly

Executive SummaryGovernment post-Brexit will face sustained and difficult challenges as the UK adjusts to its new situation. Yet these challenges risk being exacerbated by fundamental changes in UK political debate that are affecting the perceived legitimacy and effectiveness of the system and structures of government. These include erosion of the clear distinction entrenched for the last 150 years between political choices by elected representatives and impartial administration by the civil service; the disruption of traditional deliberative processes by digital and social media; and increased centralisation of decision-making in No. 10 Downing Street combined with inadequate scrutiny of that decision-making either by the Cabinet or by Parliament.The centralisation of executive power reduces its perceived legitimacy across the UK, with devolved government in Scotland and Wales seen as contingent on the Westminster Parliament and Northern Ireland under control by central government. Fiscally, the UK has become the most centralised democratic country in the world. As government faces up to the challenge of unwinding membership of the legal and regulatory framework developed during 45 years of EU membership, it is vital that the UK's political structures restore their legitimacy and efficiency.Necessary reforms start with greater transparency about how government really works today. A PM's Department should be created, separate from the Cabinet Office; senior appointments including the Chief of Staff and ‘Advisors’, as well as instructions from No. 10 to departments, should be subject to effective Parliamentary scrutiny. Legally entrenched structures are required to confirm that devolved powers cannot simply be overridden by the Westminster Parliament. Greater fiscal autonomy should be guaranteed to local government.Finally, politicians should choose either to recommit explicitly to the original system whereby the civil service remains separate from politics and take steps to make it effective; or acknowledge the drift towards greater political control of the civil service and introduce safeguards to minimise political abuse, for example by taking steps to increase scrutiny of appointments and expenditure.


2011 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. P. MORTIMER

SUMMARYIn January 1940 British Ministry of Health circular 1307 proposed the introduction of mass childhood diphtheria immunization. This was a policy reversal after a decade during which opportunities for diphtheria prophylaxis were ignored, or resisted on grounds of cost. Diphtheria toxoid was to be the first of many centrally funded childhood immunizations in the UK and it set a pattern that has now held good for over 70 years. The circumstances in 1940 were particularly fortuitous, and diphtheria toxoid has since given successive generations of children a lifetime's protection from the disease; but difficulties have been experienced in introducing and evaluating some of the more recent immunizations, and in maintaining and justifying them in the face of parental scepticism and academic or pressure-group opposition, however ill-founded this may have been. The task of decision-making with regard to new candidate vaccines demands a careful balancing against the costs of the expected benefits during the recipient's lifespan.


2019 ◽  
pp. 296-322
Author(s):  
Richard Rawlings

Welsh constitutional development in recent times is characterized by a convoluted and ongoing set of legislative transformations and by the emergence of a distinct policy approach not only for the sub-state polity itself but also under the banner of a ‘new Union’ for the United Kingdom as a whole. Examination of the design and dynamics of the Wales Act 2017 serves to illuminate the difficulties and rewards of the territorial constitutional journey, especially in terms of central government conservatism in the face of principled argument and of the scope afforded for home-grown democratic renewal. In terms of the extended Brexit process, where competing conceptions of the UK territorial constitution are brought to the fore, the Welsh Labour Government is seen combatting potentials for centralization under the rubric of a ‘UK internal market’, deal-making in the name of mutual benefit, and championing a new brand of shared governance in the UK. Today, the workings of the justice system in Wales are being examined on their own for the first time in two centuries by an independent commission established by the Welsh Government. With a new stage in the Welsh constitutional journey in prospect, a series of foundational questions is raised. This chapter reviews the key elements of the arrangements made for devolving legislative and executive power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, explaining how these arrangements have developed over time and are still doing so. Particular attention is paid to the implications of the result of the independence referendum in Scotland in September 2014, not just for Scotland but also for England. Consideration is given to how mechanisms for making devolution work more effectively might be devised and to what the effects might be on devolution if the UK’s membership of the EU or its commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights are seriously called into question.


Liquidity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-109
Author(s):  
Ellya Sestri

An increasingly rapid technological progress in the era of globalization in the business world, so do not rule out the possibility that a decision-making is something that is very vital in determining the decisions to be taken in the face of competitive business world. Decision making can be influenced by several aspects, this can affect the speed of decision making by the decision maker in which decisions must be quick and accurate. Lecturer Performance Assessment Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process is a decision support system that aims to assess faculty performance according to certain criteria. This system of faculty performance appraisal criteria to map a hierarchy, where each hierarchy will be performed pairwise comparison, the pairwise comparisons between criteria, so to get a comparison of the relative importance of criteria with each other. The results of this comparison is then analyzed to obtain the priority of each criterion. Once completed and performed an assessment of alternative options to be compared and calculated to obtain the best alternatives according to established criteria.


Somatechnics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Fiona K. O'Neill

In the UK, when one is suspected of having breast cancer there is usually a rapid transition from being diagnosed, to being told you require treatment, to this being effected. Hence, there is a sense of an abrupt transition from ‘normal’ embodiment through somatechnic engagement; from normality, to failure and otherness. The return journey to ‘embodied normality’, if indeed there can be one, is the focus of this paper; specifically the durée and trajectory of such normalisation. I offer a personal narrative from encountering these ‘normalising interventions’, supported by the narratives of other ‘breast cancer survivors’. Indeed, I havechosento become acquainted with my altered/novel embodiment, rather than the symmetrisation of prosthetication, to ‘wear my scars’,and thus subvert the trajectory of mastectomy. I broach and brook various encounters with failure by having, being and doing a body otherwise; exploring, mastering and re-capacitating my embodiment, finding the virtuosity of failure and subversion. To challenge the durée of ‘normalisation’ I have engaged in somatic movement practices which allow actual capacities of embodiment to be realised; thorough kinaesthetic praxis and expression. This paper asks is it soma, psyche or techné that has failed me, or have I failed them? What mimetic chimera ‘should’ I become? What choices do we have in the face of failure? What subversions can be allowed? How subtle must one be? What referent shall I choose? What might one assimilate? Will mimesis get me in the end? What capacities can one find? How shall I belong? Where / wear is my fidelity? The hope here is to address the intra-personal phenomenological character and the inter-corporeal socio-ethico-political aspects that this body of failure engenders, as one amongst many.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Harith Qahtan Abdullah ◽  
Abbas Fadel Atwan

The borders of Kurdistan represent an important point in Kurdish thought. They represent the hope of establishing their national state. The circumstances of the war on terrorism in Iraq and Syria have led to the emergence of what is known as a "propaganda" and the formation of a global front in its struggle. And with the signs of the collapse of the Syrian state and the weakness of the Iraqi state in the face of the "dashing" in the beginning. These circumstances led to the emergence of the role of the Kurdistan region in the confrontation "ISIS" and maintain the administrative border in the three provinces of Kurdistan in addition to the province of Kirkuk. That the circumstances of the war on terrorism created new international conditions on the Middle East arena, which will generate many problems between the Kurdistan region and the central government of Baghdad, as well as other problems between the region, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The war on terrorism has made countries free to fight the opposition groups under the name Terrorism by their classification. The Turkish side is fighting the PKK within the borders of the Kurdistan region, and this war can develop in a post-"warlike" phase. The war in Syria is also contradictory to vision and not resolved to a specific side and Iran's position on developments is encouraging.


Author(s):  
Sri Handayani Sianipar ◽  
Fince Tinus Waruwu ◽  
Lince Tomoria Sianturi

Ulos batak toba is one of indonesia traditional fabric, precisely the traditional cloth of the batak toba. From time to time the ulos fabric was growing in terms of  type and motif. One of the companies that produces ulos batak is cv. Ala dos roha. The authors conducted this study aimed at predicting the amount of production of ulos batak to produced later. The author uses the previous request, inventory and production data using fuzzy logic tsukamoto. The final result of the calculation with this method will be more effective and efficient so as to speed up the decision making time to predict the amount of production to be produced next.Keywords: prediction, amount of  production, method of tsukamoto


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tayana Soukup ◽  
Ged Murtagh ◽  
Ben W Lamb ◽  
James Green ◽  
Nick Sevdalis

Background Multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) are a standard cancer care policy in many countries worldwide. Despite an increase in research in a recent decade on MDTs and their care planning meetings, the implementation of MDT-driven decision-making (fidelity) remains unstudied. We report a feasibility evaluation of a novel method for assessing cancer MDT decision-making fidelity. We used an observational protocol to assess (1) the degree to which MDTs adhere to the stages of group decision-making as per the ‘Orientation-Discussion-Decision-Implementation’ framework, and (2) the degree of multidisciplinarity underpinning individual case reviews in the meetings. MethodsThis is a prospective observational study. Breast, colorectal and gynaecological cancer MDTs in the Greater London and Derbyshire (United Kingdom) areas were video recorded over 12-weekly meetings encompassing 822 case reviews. Data were coded and analysed using frequency counts.Results Eight interaction formats during case reviews were identified. case reviews were not always multi-disciplinary: only 8% of overall reviews involved all five clinical disciplines present, and 38% included four of five. The majority of case reviews (i.e. 54%) took place between two (25%) or three (29%) disciplines only. Surgeons (83%) and oncologists (8%) most consistently engaged in all stages of decision-making. While all patients put forward for MDT review were actually reviewed, a small percentage of them (4%) either bypassed the orientation (case presentation) and went straight into discussing the patient, or they did not articulate the final decision to the entire team (8%). Conclusions Assessing fidelity of MDT decision-making at the point of their weekly meetings is feasible. We found that despite being a set policy, case reviews are not entirely MDT-driven. We discuss implications in relation to the current eco-political climate, and the quality and safety of care. Our findings are in line with the current national initiatives in the UK on streamlining MDT meetings, and could help decide how to re-organise them to be most efficient.


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