Assessing the Harmony of Supply Chain Actors in Live Animal Export: The Case of Gurage Zone, Ethiopia

This article aims to study the harmony of supply chain actors in Live Animal Export at Gurage Zone, Ethiopia. This problem is relevant and researches in this sense can help policies that aim to improve the functioning of supply chains. Harmony of supply chain is the collaboration level of supply chain participants which is measured in terms of common planning and action guidelines they have, how they share information and generally the overall relations they have one another. Being descriptive in design, the study has targeted main live animals supply chain actors who are 719 producers, 6 traders and 2 exporters in Gurage zone from whom 257 producers were randomly chosen as a sample and all the traders and exporter have been used directly from whom questionnaires were collected from. The findings have proved that there is relatively consistent flow of information throughout the supply chain actors in live animals export in Gurage zone. Additionally there have been seen that there is a culture of planning jointly among the chain actors followed by having common updating means in case of plan fails to meet the expectations even though there exists problems of sitting for evaluation of actions made by the chain elements which is the key for future improvement of the export business. Finally it has been found that the overall harmony of the chain actors is attractive with some reservations.

Minecraft as a Tool for Engaging Children in Urban Planning: A Case Study in Tirol Town, Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of Minecraft’s game environment for urban planning with older and younger children in a public school in Tirol town, Brazil. Minecraft is employed as an innovative tool to tackle the present lack of engagement and involvement of key societal actors such as children and young people in urban planning. Thus, how can games support children to co-design their future city? Which heritage values do they represent graphically in the game environment? Geogames are games that provide a visualization of a real spatial context and in this study, Minecraft is the tool which we use to explore youth engagement. We designed two experiments, which tested Minecraft as a geogame environment for engaging young people in urban planning. These experiments were conducted with children, who emerged as active emancipated actors to bring their values to the planning practice. The playtesting results revealed the potential of Minecraft to keep children engaged in the design workshop, as well as their relevant ludic ability to co-create walkable, green, and interactive places. New research questions arose about the potential of creating a culture of planning among children in order to motivate other social actors to share responsibilities for sustainable development and management.

The Visual Culture of Planning

Over the course of the twentieth century, American planners deployed an array of visual techniques to analyze, represent, and promote the American city. Early planners looked to maps of poverty, disease, ethnicity, war, and land use, as well as archaeology, world’s fairs, and the photography of social reform. They became adept at combining drawings, diagrams, and charts to map information and make visual arguments for urban transformation. These techniques were tools of cultural critique and anticipation that shaped American understandings and expectations of cities. This essay surveys the imagery of urban planning as a prompt to historians to pay close attention to the visual culture of urban planning.

How far does a whole family approach make a difference

This article reports findings from a study to support the inclusion of a Whole Family Approach (WFA) within policy and provision for children and families conducted in one large northern local authority in England. In recent years mainly from research and good practice elsewhere WFA had been seen to offer opportunities to focus on shared needs, developing strengths and assessing risk factors. The principal aim was to design an evaluation framework to enable partners to assess and measure progress in the delivery of a WF strategy. Methods included individual interviews with professionals and managers (N=22) on knowledge and experience of WFA, for example their understanding of multi-agency work, along with their evidence of adopting a WFA approach. Findings demonstrate the process of how an evaluation framework was constructed based on adapting preexisting outcome-focused 'models' used to evaluate functions of partnership-working along with indigenous sources. The first type of 'model' entailed a number of dimensions including Vision and Strategy, Partnership Dynamics, Impact and Performance Measurement. The second had two key features: it drew upon the idea of realist evaluation, a paradigm used by practitioner researchers where the focus is upon identifying mechanisms that explain how an action affects outcomes in particular contexts; and the 'model' had been applied extensively to an analysis of family intervention projects. What has emerged is an evaluation framework characterised by a number of key 'signifiers' each of which is populated by a series of questions. The framework embraces introducing changes to the culture of planning and delivering services, placing building family strengths at centre-stage.