Implementing integrated water resources management locally in rural catchments: Lessons from eastern Sudan

Sudan is a vulnerable and challenging environment as a result of its climate, hydrology, and hydrogeology. Other entrenched human factors, such as authoritarian rule, limited historical investment in rural water services and the gradual decline of national institutions make it particularly difficult. This has manifested itself today into low levels of water supply coverage particularly amongst rural communities. Trust between rural communities in Kassala and government institutions has also declined for those left behind in rural hinterlands. Providing sustainable and resilient water services in rural Sudan is difficult work, not least because of high rainfall variability, inadequate infrastructure and the lack of continuous external support to communities when problems arise. This paper describes efforts to strengthen links between water resources management and WASH, and the challenges faced when national institutions responsible for water resources and water supply are weak. It documents recent efforts to ensure water supply services can provide water year round and increase collaboration between rural communities and mandated government authorities. It is intended to be read by government personnel, non-governmental organisations and other staff that are directly involved in implementing integrated water resource management programmes in complex environments.

Beyond the FAIRness of COVID-19 Data: What about Quality?

Different datasets have been deployed at national level to share data on COVID-19 already at the beginning of the epidemic spread in early 2020. They distribute daily updated information aggregated at local, gender and age levels. To facilitate the reuse of such data, FAIR principles should be applied to optimally find, access, understand and exchange them, to define intra- and inter-country analyses for different purposes, such as statistical. However, another aspect to be considered when analyzing these datasets is data quality. In this paper we link these two perspectives to analyze to what extent datasets published by national institutions to monitor diffusion of COVID-19 are reusable for scientific purposes, such as tracing the spread of the virus.

Multistakeholder Agency: Stakeholder Benefit Alignment and National Institutional Contexts

The alignment among multiple stakeholder benefits is a valuable performance indicator for the benefits generated by a firm for various stakeholders. Our research seeks to augment stakeholder-agency theory with an institutional perspective to analyze how national institutions affect stakeholder benefit alignment. We suggest that the current development of stakeholder-agency theory has overlooked the alignment of different stakeholders’ benefits and the external institutional contexts as critical determinants in ensuring such alignment. We conceptualize stakeholder benefit alignment as a positive relationship between different stakeholder groups’ benefits, and propose an institutional framework grounded in relative stakeholder salience. Using this framework, we argue that stakeholder benefits are better aligned when national institutions enhance the ease of withdrawal, legal protection, and private enforcement for intrinsically less salient stakeholders, and when a long-term oriented culture characterizes a society. We found supportive evidence by employing a meta-analytic approach based on 530 correlations from 94 primary studies representing 23 economies. Our study adds new insights to the stakeholder-agency literature by conceptualizing and quantitatively examining the degree of alignment across different stakeholder benefit dimensions, focusing on national formal and informal institutions as boundary conditions.

Climate Change Inaction and Post-Reality

Blame for climate change inaction is rarely directed at a fundamental cause, the excessive complexity of society. It has given rise to post-truth, which has been largely reduced to unflattering stereotypes of the public, and post-trust, by which the public see their national institutions as increasingly distant and ineffectual. The two comprise post-reality, by which confidence in the truth is weakened by distance from its source, a pervasive remoteness leads to a lack of accountability and indifference, and much scholarship and institutional practice is similarly prejudiced. A gross lack of proportion goes unnoticed in discourse that is innumerate, the more readily accepted by those (including many of those in public life) with a higher education that closes the mind to technical matters and thus to the seriousness of climate change. Regarding climate change inaction as an applied problem suggests a renewed emphasis on authentic public education and on activism outside the traditional ambit of scholarship.

Collaborative Advantage and National Patterns of Innovation

Chapter 3 develops the main argument of the book and shows how globalization caused persistent and consequential divergence of national institutions and industrial specializations over time. It proposes that globalization led to a set of benefits for firms, most importantly new opportunities for firms to specialize because of the ability to collaborate with others. The ability to enter new industries through specialization shaped firms’ responses to national industrial policies: even where governments aimed at the creation of comprehensive national industries, firms responded with narrow competitive strategies that built on existing skills and repurposed legacy institutions of the domestic economy.

NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS ESTABLISHED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PARIS PRINCIPLES, ENGAGED INTO THE PROMOTION AND PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE SYSTEM OF INTERNAL MEANS OF SECURITY

The purpose of the article is to clarify the place of national institutions engaged in the promotion and protection of human rights in the system of domestic means created in accordance with the Paris Principles. Research methods is the general methods of scientific cognitivism as well as concerning those used in legal science: methods of analysis and synthesis, formal logic, comparative law etc. The concept of understanding of the organizational and legal guarantees of human and citizen's rights has been improved in the constitutional law science, namely: the classification criterion for division into groups is the possibility/non possibility of exercising any kind of state coercion in the course of jurisdictional/ non jurisdictional activity; representative body (body responsible for ensuring Ukraine's representation in the European Court of Human Rights and coordinating the implementation of its decisions), bodies of the state executive service, private executors are the elements of the system of organizational and legal guarantees of human and citizen's rights; by classification criterion – the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms is the primary function of the authority-guarantor or similar body of some other kinds of functions – it is substantiated that national institutions engaged into the promotion and protection of human rights belong to the group of authority-guarantor of special competence established specifically to provide guarantees, human rights and fundamental freedoms. It is proposed within the group of authority-guarantor of special competence established specifically to ensure the guarantees of human rights and fundamental freedoms, to distinguish a sub-group of national institutions engaged into the promotion and protection of human rights: 1) human rights commissions; 2) human rights ombudsmen; 3) anti-discrimination ombudsmen (commissions); 4) human rights institutes (centers); 5) human rights advisory committees; 6) comprehensive human rights institutes.