The participatory process in the review of the Master Plan of Vitória (2014-2018)

The Federal Constitution of 1988 defined the Master Plan as a 'basic instrument' of urban development policy and subsequent legislation, which regulated the Urban Policy chapter (Estatuto da Cidade, Federal Law No. 10,257 / 2001), reinforced a set of participatory requirements in the availability and implementation of the corresponding policies. Based on this new institutional arrangement, this research paper analyzes a participatory structure in the process of reviewing the Master Plan for the municipality of Vitória, capital of Espírito Santo, in the period 2014-2018. The investigation took as an analytical parameter the participatory methodology proposed by the Ministry of Cities, whose distinguishing feature was the dissemination of democratic management instruments. The empirical analysis shows that several participatory mechanisms were implemented, such as public hearings of regional and social segments, thematic seminars, round tables, territorial assemblies, implementation of a collaborative website, involvement of the Municipal Council of the Urban Master Plan (CMPDU) and realization of the Municipal Conference on Urban Policy (Encontro da Cidade), in which the draft of the Master Plan bill was presented, discussed and voted on. Thus, the process incorporated the participatory methodology recommended by the Ministry of Cities and the corresponding legislation. The effectiveness of participation according to the guidelines of the City Statute is still an ongoing process, but the inclusion of democratic management mechanisms is a reality in Vitória, constituting an institutional advance.

REASSEMBLING TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER IN INDONESIA

This article aims to provide a dynamic picture of the technology transfer process in public research institutions in Indonesia that has been updated by establishing the National Research and Innovation Agency in August 2021. This body is directly under the President of the Republic of Indonesia based on Presidential Regulation number 78 of 2021. During the research period, there was a change in the landscape of technology transfer actors. Some of these changes are in line with the results of the analysis, namely increasing the role of GFRI and research and development agencies under the ministry. This change is referred to as technology transfer reassembly. The arrangement of technology transfer leads to a new form. The research was initiated in October 2017 using the AHP to determine the best institutional arrangement for integrating research. The AHP results show the rank of institutional arrangements from highest to lowest as Government Funded Research Institutes (GFRI) (0.27833), a research division under the Ministerial Office (0.24890), universities (0.17966), private R&D (0.13589) and foreign agencies (0.07214). Government Funded Research Institutes are the top choice of experts for having a significant role in the technology transfer process. The core function of GFRI in the technology transfer system is to plan, conduct and develop technology and they have contributed significantly to the policy-making process by providing information and policy recommendations. This research enriched the application of the recommendations by establishing the National Research and Innovation Agency as the most influential actor in building a national technology transfer system.

Analyzing the institutional and regulatory framework for operationalizing the blue economy in Bangladesh: Lessons from Australia

This study's overarching objective was to assess the suitability and applicability of the existing legal and institutional framework for managing the coastal and marine resources in Bangladesh. Besides, the legal and institutional arrangement of Australia was examined to adopt the best practices for Bangladesh. The glimpse of potential coastal and marine resources of Bangladesh was assessed to have an idea of the untapped resources' dimensions. Together with, the fundamental challenges faced by the artisanal and small-scale fishers in Bangladesh were critically scrutinized. The empirical data collection followed a multi-approach like mini-symposium, consultation workshops, focus group discussions, case studies, visiting, personal, and key informant interviews. The study revealed that the vast provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services of the Bay of Bengal, including its coast and mangrove, is mostly unexplored. The regulatory framework in Bangladesh is characterized by jurisdictional overlapping followed by the conflict of interests among the public institutes, which originated from the aged and fragmented laws and ambiguous business allocation; consequently, the artisanal and small-scale fishers suffer a lot. On the flip side, despite some limitations, Australia established sectoral governance enacting strong legislative measures. The local government and community’s right in resource management locally has been institutionalized in Australia, which remains fuzzy in Bangladesh. Taking lessons from Australia, Bangladesh can enact new sectoral laws followed by business reallocation for the line ministries. The study will help policymakers identify the bottlenecks rooted in Bangladesh’s existing regulatory and institutional framework.

Analyzing the institutional and regulatory framework for operationalizing the blue economy in Bangladesh: Lessons from Australia

This study's overarching objective was to assess the suitability and applicability of the existing legal and institutional framework for managing the coastal and marine resources in Bangladesh. Besides, the legal and institutional arrangement of Australia was examined to adopt the best practices for Bangladesh. The glimpse of the potential coastal and marine resources of Bangladesh was assessed to have an idea of the untapped resources' dimensions. Together with, the fundamental challenges faced by the artisanal and small-scale fishers in Bangladesh were critically scrutinized. The empirical data collection followed a multi-approach like mini-symposium, consultation workshops, focus group discussions, case studies, visiting, personal, and key informant interviews. The study revealed that the vast provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services of the Bay of Bengal, including its coast and mangrove, is mostly unexplored. The regulatory framework in Bangladesh is characterized by jurisdictional overlapping followed by the conflict of interests among the public institutes, which originated from the aged and fragmented laws and ambiguous business allocation; consequently, the artisanal and small-scale fishers suffer a lot. On the flip side, despite some limitations, Australia established sectoral governance enacting strong legislative measures. The local government and community’s right in resource management locally has been institutionalized in Australia, which remains fuzzy in Bangladesh. Taking lessons from Australia, Bangladesh can enact new sectoral laws followed by business reallocation for the line ministries. The study will help policymakers identify the bottlenecks rooted in Bangladesh’s existing regulatory and institutional framework.

Bringing the Full Picture into Focus: A Consideration of the Internal and External Validity of Charter School Effects

The authors of this chapter describe an institutional arrangement for education in the United States: the provision of education through “charter schools,” an experiment in liberalization and decentralization begun in the early 1990s. They address whether charter schools raise student achievement on average compared to students in traditional public schools. They report that the authors of small-scale randomized studies report quite positive effects, but that as the sample of schools increases, the reported effects decline in size and significance, from which they conclude that while charter schools do not generally harm student achievement, they do not have significantly positive effects for the average student. They do, however, more positively affect poor and minority students and students in some urban centers. This underlines the importance of examining school effects across different geographies and social groups and the key role external validity plays in drawing policy implications from educational research.

A study of the labor process from a technology transformation perspective: the case of internet virtual teams

This article presents an empirical study of the labor process of internet virtual teams. It argues that organizations with a “horizontally virtual and vertically real” structure face a dilemma in the virtual team labor process. While a culture of engineers, which embodies equality, liberty, and cooperation, is the cultural basis of the virtual team, management is bureaucratic, emphasizing individual interests and hierarchical features. The coexistence of the two leads to cooperation and division of labor in virtual teams. Essentially, this is a compromising institutional arrangement adopted by corporations to triangulate technology culture and managerial control to obtain surplus value. Based on the preceding discussion, this paper ends by proposing a new theoretical framework for studying the labor process under the technological conditions of the internet.

Negative Shocks and Political Parties’ Territorial Demands: The Institutional Roots of Party Competition

Why do political parties set an extreme or a more moderate position on the territorial dimension? Despite previous works have paid recent interest on the dynamics of the political competition on the territorial dimension, we know much less about the factors that lead to a centrifugal or a centripetal party competition on the same dimension. In this article, we offer a new way of understanding it: we argue that parties’ policy position on the decentralization continuum not only depends on the level of territorial decentralization, but also on the credibility of the institutional agreement established through the country’s constitutional rigidity. If the original territorial pact does not guarantee that the majority group will have its “hands tied” so that it does not reverse the territorial agreement, political parties will have incentives to adopt more extreme positions on the territorial dimension. We test this argument with a dataset covering around 460 political parties clustered in 28 European countries from 1999 to 2019 and by exploiting the fact that the 2008 economic crisis unleashed a shock on the territorial design. Our results confirm our expectations. We show that both the federal deal and the credibility of the institutional arrangement through constitutional rigidity are necessary conditions to appease parties’ demands on the territorial dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of how institutions shape political competition along the territorial dimension.

Between Commemoration and Living Memory: Symbolic Acts of the Teutonic Knights in Light of Cultural Theory

The present article investigates the function of ritual acts as a form of communication vis-à-vis cultural meaning in the life of the Teutonic Knights. As a condensed form of communal expression, rituals exhibit an acute potential to render present collective identity and shape the lives of the communities that practice them. Such potential is manifest in the institutional arrangement of the Teutonic Order in various forms with particular reference to their dual standing in society, insofar as they drew upon the societal models of the oratores and the bellatores. Particularly relevant to the current study, considerations of cultural historian and social analyst Jan Assmann regarding symbolic acts and collective living memory assist in creating the theoretical framework for the study’s deliberations. With Assmann’s insights in mind, ritual is understood as a communicative vector of cultural meaning – so to speak – of living memory. The analysis then turns to an examination of select representative examples from diverse scenarios in the existence of the Teutonic Knights, thereby taking into account internal, public, and participatory contexts of symbolic moments. The study thus explores how, while rituals can commemorate memorialised events from the past, they are also able to enact the living memory of a collective entity, ultimately claiming that the examined symbolic acts exhibited both communicative and transformative potential.

Retrospect and Outlook of Research on Regional Haze Pollution in China: A Systematic Literature Review

Regional haze pollution, a severe atmospheric environmental problem, has profoundly harmful effects on the ecological environment, public health and the quality of economic development, and has accordingly attracted considerable attention from policymakers, researchers and the public. This article comprises a systematic literature review of the existing research on the theoretical mechanism, empirical analysis and institutional arrangement of regional haze pollution. As a result, it is found that various studies from multiple disciplines have touched upon the relevance of haze issues, including theoretical and experimental research on its formation, evolution and mechanisms from the perspective of the natural sciences, as well as empirical analysis and policy research on governance strategies, effects and mechanisms from the perspective of the social sciences, yet a systematic review and critical assessment synthesizing the above research is urgently needed. Future directions and research prospects are highlighted, showing that it is necessary to supplement and improve the theory and practice concerning the identification, measurement and assessment of haze pollution, as well as regional controlling strategies and policy implementation assessments. In short, in this review, we have aimed to help integrate the theoretical and empirical consensus in multidisciplinary fields, thereby promoting the accurate analysis, fine management and the development of precise policies in regards to regional haze pollution.

Research On Medical Insurance Policies Against Serious Illness Among Urban And Rural Residents In Shanghai Based On Micro-Simulation

Background: Urban and rural residents’ basic medical insurance (URRBMI) is an institutional arrangement for rural residents and unemployed urban residents in China. The serious illness medical insurance system (SIMIS) was established to provide additional medical cover. There are two ways in which medical expenses are covered. One is based on large expenses and provides proportional compensation for the individual’s own expenses after the URRBMI payment; the other is to pay for the treatment of some serious diseases after the URRBMI payment. At present, the SIMIS payment method in China is based on large expenses, and only a few areas, such as Shanghai, pay according to the treatment of serious diseases. This study aims to simulate and analyse the effect of the two payment methods on SIMIS in Shanghai. Methods: We developed a micro-simulation model to predict the number and characteristics of SIMIS participants among urban and rural residents in Shanghai and to simulate the process of medical treatment, medical consumption, and medical insurance payments for each insured person from 2020 to 2025. We then summarised and analysed the payment compensation effect, and compared it with Shanghai’s current policies.Results: Under the current financing standard, the payment of SIMIS according to high expenses is not sustainable and the compensation is insufficient and cannot effectively prevent or alleviate poverty.Conclusions: The policy of designing SIMIS according to national guidelines does not meet the development needs of Shanghai. Shanghai should take the current policy of paying compensation according to the treatment of serious illness as the policy basis, consider the security needs of patients with large medical expenses outside the scope of protection, and adjust policies appropriately to prevent poverty caused by illness.