Enabling Democratic Local Governance through Rural E-Municipalities in Kyrgyzstan

2015 ◽  
pp. 1009-1033
Author(s):  
Zamira Dzhusupova

This chapter presents a case study on rural e-municipalities in Kyrgyzstan as an enabling tool for facilitating and supporting democratic local governance. The authors examine the case based on their action research and discuss key findings in terms of challenges of implementing and sustaining ICT-enabled local governance observed throughout the life cycle of the real life project. The case presentation is guided by the conceptual framework built on an extensive literature review. Key findings and lessons drawn from this case study can guide policy makers and practitioners in other developing countries in designing and implementing similar initiatives with careful consideration of national development context, enabling political, administrative, and legal environment, governance structure and decentralization policies, institutional framework, and strength of rural municipalities and local communities. This chapter's possible contribution to research includes improving understanding of the implementation and sustainability issues of rural e-municipality as one of the critical e-governance initiatives at the grassroots level.

Author(s):  
Zamira Dzhusupova

This chapter presents a case study on rural e-municipalities in Kyrgyzstan as an enabling tool for facilitating and supporting democratic local governance. The authors examine the case based on their action research and discuss key findings in terms of challenges of implementing and sustaining ICT-enabled local governance observed throughout the life cycle of the real life project. The case presentation is guided by the conceptual framework built on an extensive literature review. Key findings and lessons drawn from this case study can guide policy makers and practitioners in other developing countries in designing and implementing similar initiatives with careful consideration of national development context, enabling political, administrative, and legal environment, governance structure and decentralization policies, institutional framework, and strength of rural municipalities and local communities. This chapter’s possible contribution to research includes improving understanding of the implementation and sustainability issues of rural e-municipality as one of the critical e-governance initiatives at the grassroots level.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen De Waegemaeker ◽  
Eva Kerselaers ◽  
Maarten Van Acker ◽  
Elke Rogge

Purpose As policy makers address the issue of climate adaptation, they are confronted with climate-specific barriers: a long-term horizon and a high degree of uncertainty. These barriers also hamper the development of spatial planning for climate adaptation. So how can spatial planners encompass these barriers and steer the general debate on climate adaptation? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This research analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of an international design workshop on climate adaptation, and drought issues in particular. Design workshops are originally an educational setting but they are increasingly employed as a tool to explore alternative futures on a complex, real-life design problem. The case study illustrates how climate-specific barriers emerged throughout the design workshop and clarifies how they were encompassed by the participating design students. Findings The research clarifies the added value of a design workshop on climate adaptation. The paper highlights specific promising characteristics of the design workshop: the visualization of future adaptation challenges and the current water system, the focus on a regional project instead of sectoral adjustments and the integration of the adaptation challenge with other socio-economic goals. In the case study Flanders, however, the necessary participation of climate experts and policy makers of other domains proved challenging. Originality/value The paper argues that a design workshop has the potential to enrich the debate and policy work on climate adaptation. In many countries with low-planning tradition, however, additional tools are needed to help set the “adaptation agenda.”


Author(s):  
Smart Dumba

Background: Literature on the negative socio-economic and environmental externalities generated by informal public transport (IPT) in developing countries is vast, vibrant and growing fast. These externalities include but are not limited to noise, air and land pollution, accidents and, more importantly, a source of congestion (human and vehicular) because of poor driver behaviour. In this article, the research does not seek to reinstate these, but rather, it argues that poor driver behaviour is a dependent variable to some regulatory policy stimuli. Yet, an extensive literature survey has shown that the driver behaviour and urban transport regulation linkage remain little explored.Objective: The purpose of this article was to unpack the relationship between informal public transport driver behaviour and the prevailing regulatory framework.Method: Based on a case study of Harare, Zimbabwe, the researcher adopted a mixed-methods paradigm and interrogated the prevailing urban public transport regulatory regimes and applied professional judgement, oral interviews backed by some quantitative data and relate these to obtaining IPT driver behavioural characteristics.Results: Poor driver behaviour exhibited by IPT were generated, exacerbated and or eased by the prevailing regulatory policy. This is well depicted through an IPT driver behaviour and regulation loop reinforcing diagram.Conclusion: Following this argument, the article cautions policy makers and urban managers alike that direct approaches and interventions when trying to regulate IPT poor driver behaviour and its secondary negative effects will be futile as long as the regulatory policy remains the same. Failure to recognise and connect the dots between IPT driver behaviour and policy partly explains why globally, the IPT sector has proved difficult in prohibiting, restructuring or even formalising it.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Ortiz-Troncoso

Open source projects may face a forking situation at some point during their life-cycle. The traditional view is that forks are a waste of project resources and should be avoided. However, in a wider technological and organisational context, forks can be a way to foster the creation of a software ecosystem. Either way, forking is explicitly allowed by open source licenses. Notwithstanding, methods for quantifying the evolution of forks are currently scarce. The present work attempts to answer the question whether a real-life project has forked. It does so by considering code and organisational characteristics of the project, and analysing these characteristics by applying methods ported from biological phylogenetics. After finding that the project is forked, implications for project governance are discussed.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1311
Author(s):  
Mahsa Mesgar ◽  
Diego Ramirez-Lovering ◽  
Mohamed El-Sioufi

Tension and conflict are endemic to any upgrading initiative (including basic infrastructure provision) requiring private land contributions, whether in the form of voluntary donations or compensated land acquisitions. In informal urban contexts, practitioners must first identify well-suited land for public infrastructure, both spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding claimed rights and preventing conflicts. At the same time, they need to defuse existing tensions over land ownership and land use rights while negotiating for the potential use of a unit of land for infrastructure. Even in the case of employing participatory methods, land negotiations are never tension-free. Despite the extensive literature on linkages between urban poverty, inefficient land management systems, and land disputes, in both rural and urban settings, land negotiations for community-scale infrastructure retrofit projects (e.g., neighbourhood roads, water and sanitation infrastructure) are yet to be fully explored. Drawing on a case study of a live green infrastructure retrofit project in six informal settlements in Makassar, Indonesia, we establish links to exchange theory, collective action, and negotiation theory to build a reliable analytical framework for understanding and explaining the land negotiations in small-scale infrastructure retrofit practices. We aim to describe and assess the fundamental conditions for land negotiations in an informal urban context and conclude the paper by summarising several key strategies developed and used in the case study area to forge land agreements.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahendhiran Nair ◽  
Santha Vaithilingam

Urban-poverty is a major concern for policy-makers in the developing world. If measures are not taken to address urban-poverty, it will result in growing social problems, which can lead to economic and political instability. It is widely recognized that ICT is a leap-frogging technology that can close the knowledge-divide and income gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. In this study, we examine if ICT diffusion can improve the income level of urban-poor communities in Malaysia. Three types of ICT were considered in this study, namely mobile phones, computers and internet. The study was conducted using survey data for 434 respondents from selected urban-poor communities in the Klang Valley region in Malaysia. The empirical analysis showed that all three ICTs enhanced the income level of this marginalised community. This provides evidence that ICT diffusion strategies should be an integral part of national development plans to address urban-poverty in developing countries.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110057
Author(s):  
Sangmin Kim

As the concept of social innovation gains increasing credence in the public consciousness, a number of questions have become increasingly prominent in the relevant discourse: what does social innovation mean at the local level? How can social innovation be promoted? In particular, what kinds of social and institutional arrangements are needed to facilitate socially innovative activities and practices in neighborhoods and communities? To address these questions, this paper first outlines the related theories and literature as an overview of the notion of social innovation. Next, to provide an example of a promising approach to social innovation at the local level, the paper develops a theoretical discussion on the interface between local social innovation and participatory local governance arrangements, and proposes a process model of local social innovation as an analytical framework for a case study of a district-level initiative in Seongbuk-gu in Seoul, South Korea. By examining the governance structure and socially innovative strategies utilized in this locality, the case study demonstrates how the local participatory governance system can furnish an enabling environment for socially innovative ideas and strategies. Lastly, along with a look at some of the unique aspects of the case, the paper discusses contributions of this study to the theory and practice of social innovation, along with implications for other cases that may consider the governance approach to social innovation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1943
Author(s):  
Jan Nicolai Hennemann ◽  
Bernd Draser ◽  
Katarina Repkova Stofkova

This article addresses the question of why initiatives in the field of green business and sustainable development often fail. Therefore, it dismantles some typical patterns of failure and shows—as a case study—how these patterns can be challenged through an innovative educational concept: the green business and sustainable development school. The applied methodology is a real-life project that is designed through methodological elements stemming from business model canvas, theory U, stakeholder participation, and design thinking. The results of the school initiative are discussed and evaluated by four distinctive stakeholder groups and the school’s supporting potential to overcome typical patterns of failure in the green business and sustainable development arena by the younger generation in the future is outlined. This article concludes with ideas to enhance the school concept to reach even more stakeholder-groups and increase its reliability and viability.


2013 ◽  
Vol 218 ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Hổ Đinh Phi ◽  
DUY NGUYỄN KHÁNH

During the past ten years, economic growth in Vietnam changed positively in the direction of a modern industrial economy. Accordingly, economic structure also experienced changes in which manufacturing and service sectors accounted for a bigger share in the GDP. The government and most researchers are therefore very interested in economic structural change. This structural change in Vietnam as a whole requires the same change in local economies. However, some provinces did not catch up with the national development yet. Thus, in order to facilitate structural change on the whole economy, it is necessary to clarify what economic structural change aims at, and identify a quantitative model for measuring impact of such change, which becomes a real challenge to Vietnam?s researchers and policy makers. To help solve this problem, the authors conducted a case study in B?n Tre to seek practical evidence. The results, based on regressive model, VAR model and Granger causality test, show that economic structural change impacts on the level of economic growth, labor productivity and the quality of life. This research also lays the foundation for a model for forecasting impacts of economic structural change.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Ortiz-Troncoso

Open source projects may face a forking situation at some point during their life-cycle. The traditional view is that forks are a waste of project resources and should be avoided. However, in a wider technological and organisational context, forks can be a way to foster the creation of a software ecosystem. Either way, forking is explicitly allowed by open source licenses. Notwithstanding, methods for quantifying the evolution of forks are currently scarce. The present work attempts to answer the question whether a real-life project has forked. It does so by considering code and organisational characteristics of the project, and analysing these characteristics by applying methods ported from biological phylogenetics. After finding that the project is forked, implications for project governance are discussed.


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