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To achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5 for gender equality by 2030, it is crucial for health and development professionals and governmental officials to understand how legal systems empower or oppress populations on the basis of gender worldwide, including opportunities and challenges of statutory provisions created by legal pluralism. Using Ethiopia as a case study, this paper examines how local laws applied in Sharia and Customary Dispute Resolution courts impact gender equality and the health of women and girls inspite of the inculcation of human rights statutes into national legislation, including the Constitution. We identify several key issues with the substantive law and its enforcement. First, laws which have been instituted at the national level to improve gender equally have been poorly enforced at the local level. Second, there is a sustained enforcement of laws that oppress women and that protect male perpetrators of gender-based violations. Third, local courts limit female representation and uphold patriarchy. To improve the health of women and girls, stakeholders must take into consideration the ways in which legal systems uphold harmful gender norms and obstruct and/or advance progress towards equal representation, opportunities, and constitutionally-mandated protections for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects of public agency relocation on the growth of local employment. The South Korean government has recently relocated 154 public agencies from the Seoul Metropolitan Area to local cities, called "Innovation Cities." This policy was formulated to foster decentralization and regional development. However, only a few studies have examined the impact of this relocation. The innovation cities seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation, and the effects of decentralization. In this study, we evaluated the effects of relocation by using the synthetic control method and applying panel data gathered from 2006 to 2018. The unit of analysis is the small tier of local authority, and the outcome variable is the number of workers within each regional jurisdiction. To investigate counterfactuals, we determined control groups by selecting specific covariates of local employment. The results show that the increase in local employment was mostly caused by the migration of public agency employees to the destination areas. Spillovers are limited and influenced by regional characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its nonstate 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a 'mini-public' ideology that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the workload and lack of a critical mass of trained operational researchers within their ranks, health systems and programmes may not be able to dedicate sufficient time to conducting operational research (OR). Hence, they may need the technical support of operational researchers from research/academic organisations. Additionally, there is a knowledge gap regarding implementing differentiated tuberculosis (TB) care in programme settings. In this 'how we did it' paper, we share our experience of implementing a differentiated TB care model along with an inbuilt OR component in Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. This was a health system initiative through a collaboration of the State TB cell with the Indian Council of Medical Research institutes and the World Health Organisation country office in India. The learnings are in the form of eleven tips: four broad principles (OR on priority areas and make it a health system initiative, implement simple and holistic ideas, embed OR within routine programme settings, aim for long-term engagement), four related to strategic planning (big team of investigators, joint leadership, decentralised decision-making, working in advance) and three about implementation planning (conducting pilots, smart use of e-tools and operational research publications at frequent intervals). These may act as a guide for other Indian states, high TB burden countries that want to implement differentiated care, and for operational researchers in providing technical assistance for strengthening implementation and conducting OR in health systems and programmes (TB or other health programmes). Following these tips may increase the chances of i) an enriching engagement, ii) policy/practice change, and iii) sustainable implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new consensus has emerged which stipulates that the Eurozone problems are caused by a lack of embeddedness of the euro in proper financial and fiscal unions. This paper reviews the debates on the Eurozone's state of disembeddedness and argues that it is not enough to embed the monetary union in scaled-up financial and fiscal unions. For the euro problems to disappear it needs to be embedded in social Europe. The transfer of policy prerogatives at the supranational level does not make the structure embedded, but the substance of the policy measures. From a Polanyian perspective, the extent of the Eurozone dis/embeddedness depends not on the level of centralization of policymaking, but on the interplay between the two forgotten Polanyian principles: improvement and habitation. This paper tries to assess the extent of dis-embeddedness through these two principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the responsibilities and membership of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England in the light of devolution of employment and skills responsibilities. Through the theoretical lens of 'hollowing out' and a direct comparison with the late-Thatcherite Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) of the 1990s, the paper argues that LEPs represent a fresh, market-driven attempt by the government to alter the institutional framework for meeting local labour market needs through 'local business leadership'. However, through a synthesis of publicly available data across all LEPs, the paper shows that while LEPs assume important strategic and practical roles, their structure, resourcing and sectoral affiliations are poorly aligned for the engagement of local employers. Rather, it is argued, LEPs may be characterised as distant business elites, with only weak connections to local employment and skills priorities. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of distant and elite LEPs boards for future employment and skills policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a theoretical framework to study collective social capital at the local scale using social network analysis. To do so, it develops a review on empirical research that found evidence regarding the impact of networks on the performance of cities and regions. Eight network topologies are identified with collective social capital: size and composition, connectivity, closeness, clustering, small world, openness, centralization and heterophily. The paper inquires into the effects of these properties concluding that they influence two aspects that are highly relevant for territorial development: they facilitate the diffusion of information and they foster cooperation among actors. Results help tracing roots among three different academic fields: literature on social capital, local and regional economics, and social network analysis. Furthermore, the article suggests a framework to obtain relevant conclusions regarding political and economic aspects of territorial capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approximation-based nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) approach for decentralised adaptive tracking of uncertain interconnected pure-feedback nonlinear systems with unmatched time-delayed nonlinear interactions and external disturbances. Compared with the existing approximation-based NDO approach for uncertain interconnected nonlinear systems where the centralised design framework was proposed, the main contribution of this paper is to develop a decentralised and memoryless NDO-based adaptive control scheme in the presence of unknown time-varying delayed interactions and disturbances unmatched in the control inputs. The recursive design methodology is derived to construct the decentralised NDO and controller where the function approximators used in the decentralised NDO are employed to design the decentralised adaptive controller. From the Lyapunov stability theorem using Lyapunov--Krasovskii functionals, it is shown that all signals of the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded and the tracking errors converge to an adjustable neighbourhood of the origin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Novice principals experience intense work situations and various solutions have been suggested to handle them. This paper explores western Swedish novice principals' attitudes toward support in their leadership. Specific questions addressed are whether the principals believe that two approaches, the so-called heroic and distributed approaches, could improve their job satisfaction, pedagogical leadership and relationships within their schools. The research provides novel contributions as it combines a scenario-based experiment with follow-up interviews to provide new insights regarding school leadership. The results clearly demonstrate that novice principals experience intense working situations. Moreover, they show that the principals significantly favor the heroic leadership approach for promoting job satisfaction and facilitating relational aspects of their work. However, for mitigating the loneliness associated with a leadership role, the principals significantly favor the distributed leadership approach. Thus, the results raise questions about previous suggestions that distributed leadership is a panacea for principals' intense work situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing literature on the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution. Yet, while this literature focuses mainly on single case studies, there remains a gap in our comparative understanding of the workings of federalism as a tool to end violent conflicts, as well as the conditions under which it may succeed in bringing peace to war-torn countries. By discussing core themes that emerge when looking at single case studies and relevant theories on the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution, we highlight the importance of three main issues in our understanding of the workings of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution: (1) The role of centralization, decentralization and recentralization in the management of diversity and to accommodate the demands of different groups; (2) Contestation of the state, identity, the idea of federalism and other key issues in societies, in which ownership over the state is contested and fought over; and (3) Third-party intervention, geopolitics, and geoeconomics in the management of diversity. By bringing together existing debates on the topic of federalism and conflict resolution, and positioning the papers in this special issue within these debates, some of the complexities but also promises of the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many examples of collaborative action research being used to promote school change. Reflecting on evidence gathered as a result of collaborative inquiry led by a teacher in a primary school in Cyprus over a 3-year period, this paper examines what is involved in using such an approach within a centralised education system. In so doing, it exposes the social and political challenges involved, whilst at the same time throwing light on possibilities for overcoming these problems in order to facilitate school-led change. In this context, frequent staff changes presented particular barriers, and recent increases in migration into the country were seen to add further challenges, whilst at the same time opening up new possibilities for stimulating innovations through collaborative action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2004 to 2012, 37 well-preserved Byzantine shipwrecks were discovered during construction of two underground train stations at Yenikapı, Istanbul. Despite its complexity, archaeology is rarely studied through organisational and management lens. This paper investigates the Yenikapı rescue excavations using two innovative analytical frameworks for archaeology – the Heritage Chain and Structure Conduct Performance analysis – which highlight the crucial but too often overlooked role of practices (or emerging strategies) in public policy, helping identifying strengths and weaknesses of the project. In this sense, two elements of the system seem fundamental: its extreme centralisation and its ongoing process of decentralisation. The research, based on a phenomenon-driven approach to management of archaeological and cultural heritage projects, highlights how Turkey's uncertain legal environment for rescue archaeology led to emergent, ad hoc management and funding solutions that mixed state and private involvement in novel ways through a multi-level outsourcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study on the implementation of the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan in the Royal Docks, a regeneration project in the East of London. On paper, the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan advances the shift from traditional flood control to flood resilience, because of its long-term horizon, estuary-wide approach, and emphasis on floodplain management. In practice, however, we identify three frictions between vision and reality: a lack of local ownership of the plan, a lack of clear guidance for floodplain management, and limited capacities with local authority. These frictions suggest an ongoing 'public-public divide' in decentralized governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited information exists on funding models for interprofessional education (IPE) course delivery, even though potential savings from IPE could be gained in healthcare delivery efficiencies and patient safety. Unanticipated economic barriers to implementing an IPE curriculum across programs and schools in University settings can stymie or even end movement toward collaboration and sustainable culture change. Clarity among stakeholders, including institutional leadership, faculty, and students, is necessary to avoid confusion about IPE tuition costs and funds flow, given that IPE involves multiple schools and programs sharing space, time, faculty, and tuition dollars. In this paper, we consider three funding models for IPE: (a) Centralized (b) Blended, and (c) Decentralized. The strengths and challenges associated with each of these models are discussed. Beginning such a discussion will move us toward understanding the return on investment of IPE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the turbulent times facing trophy hunting in Tanzania, East Africa. It reviews the industry’s contentious history, and illustrates the ominous politics that are emerging out of the country’s recent neoliberal schemes, Wildlife Management Areas. Through the decentralisation that comprises WMAs, the rural communities who co-inhabit trophy hunting spaces are finding new ways to limit, resist, and sometimes, eliminate it. As argued in this paper, trophy hunting in Tanzania faces a momentous convergence of aggrieved histories, and neoliberal reforms that shift authority to rural communities. It amounts to turbulent times and what I call, fighting history today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the plans for, and outcomes of, police organizational reforms in the Scandinavian countries. The reforms share a number of similarities, among them drastic reductions in the number of police districts, more Governmental oversight, increased reliance on performance indicators, and claims that these reforms are to be understood as decentralizations that will increase police ability to service citizens and meet the demands of local communities. The paper argues that the reforms are primarily to be understood as examples of centralization, and that local policing has suffered as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper introduces a decentralized approach to optimizing the flood reduction efficiency of multiple detention reservoirs in urban areas. The flood reduction effects of a detention reservoir system were regionally assessed, and a new model was then created using an optimization technique which involved coupling extraordinary particle swarm optimization with a flood simulation engine, Storm Water Management Model, EPA-SWMM, to identify optimal outlet designs for a detention reservoir system. When applied to the To Lich drainage network (Hanoi, Vietnam) the proposed method outperformed the present design, reducing flooding under the design flood event. The performance of the approach was verified by comparing it with the overall objective function of total flooded volume for different design floods. The better performance of the decentralized optimization approach described here, in terms of local and regional flood management, illustrated its effectiveness for urban flooding reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the sociological analysis of power through the study of the structuration and retrieval of information on the internet. The main argument of the paper is that, paradoxically, in an age when the availability of information has increased exponentially, there is a risk that diversity in the use of sources for the construction of knowledge becomes more restricted than in the past and that information search moves towards greater objectification and centralisation. Knowledge management systems increasingly shape the ways in which we think about the questions we ask and how we try to answer them, which raises fundamental and largely neglected questions for education policy. The paper illustrates these trends with particular reference to the use of Google and Google Scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dutch planning, there has always been an important role for spatial concepts. Their role has arguably changed with the recent decentralization of planning to the regional and local level. At the national level, guiding concepts of a more procedural nature have replaced the more substantive and place-based spatial concepts, leaving more room for regional and local interpretation. At the regional and local level, spatial concepts are still in use, but this seems to be in a more communicative, negotiating and developing role than before. In this paper, we analyse how place concepts are used to exercise power, mobilize recourses and frame meaning over the use of the peri-urban areas, in the changing Dutch planning context. This paper focuses on two competing place concepts for overlapping green urban fringe areas in The Hague Region, which have been promoted by different actor constellations and which represent different visions about the meaning of these peri-urban areas. The case study allows conclusions about the changing role of spatial concepts in Dutch spatial planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a decentralised tracking control (DTC) scheme is developed for unknown large-scale nonlinear systems by using observer-critic structure-based adaptive dynamic programming. The control consists of local desired control, local tracking error control and a compensator. By introducing the local neural network observer, the subsystem dynamics can be identified. The identified subsystems can be used for the local desired control and the control input matrix, which is used in local tracking error control. Meanwhile, Hamiltonian-Jacobi-Bellman equation can be solved by constructing a critic neural network. Thus, the local tracking error control can be derived directly. To compensate the overall error caused by substitution, observation and approximation of the local tracking error control, an adaptive robustifying term is employed. Simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DTC scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses teacher autonomy in the case of the Swedish teaching profession since the 1980s. It is argued that deregulation, decentralization, and marketization reforms of the 1990s have indeed increased teacher autonomy, but in some respects also led to a increase of complexity in the Swedish school system. In order to handle this complexity, the state intensified a standardization of schooling, which restricts teacher autonomy today. Relevant the paper's understanding is that teacher autonomy is always about control, exerted internally by the profession itself and facilitated externally by state standards. The article argues that the restriction of teacher autonomy in recent times is also related to a simplified understanding of the phenomenon in the reforms of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the context of fiscal decentralization, we use cross-sectional data of 242 Chinese cities in 2005 to explore the major factors contributing to the decline of public investment. The main finding is that a city government appears to reduce its own infrastructure spending as a response to the rise of infrastructure spending of its neighboring cities, revealing evidence of positive spillover effects of public infrastructure expenditure. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a new perspective for understanding the decline in public investment. In addition, this paper sheds some light on the ongoing debate on the nature of government competition in China and has important implications for policy makers in making fiscal arrangements among government tiers in a decentralized economy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: During the past decade scholars have noted growing ideological polarization between Democratic and Republican Party elites in the United States. This trend has occurred in a party system traditionally characterized as decentralized. This paper examines whether the trend towards partisan polarization noted by scholars at the national level has affected state party systems in similar ways. Are some state party systems more polarized than others? The paper uses a classification scheme of state party systems developed by David Mayhew to try to explain interstate differences in partisan polarization. The paper concludes that states with political environments that supported pragmatic and non-ideological traditional party organizations are less polarized in the modern era than states without such environments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper focuses on the iconoclasticism of water as a plentiful resource and the near universalization of decentralizing institutions to manage it. The authors explore two agro-pastoral regions - Ambovombe District (Madagascar) and Tana River District (Kenya) - and consider institutional change, particularly the disengaging state, the lack of fiscal and administrative support throughout decentralization, community responses, and informal private markets. This paper concludes that decentralization holds the potential to increase accountability of the resource management process, improve governance and leadership accountability, and maximize the resource in a sustainable fashion. However, what we are seeing instead through the process of decentralization are the states exiting from the water governance process too rapidly and without concern for the culturally embedded social and economic norms, and the growing gap between new institutions and the needs, desires, and capacity of participants in the new systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common knowledge that the Australian wine industry has enjoyed remarkable success over the past three decades in terms of production and export growth, innovation and reputation for consistent quality. The centralisation of resources and infrastructure, as well as the nationally-oriented funding and R&D agendas, are usually cited as providing the foundation for this success. Yet in more recent years it is this same nationally-focused centralisation that is increasingly at odds with a rapidly changing international wine landscape and therefore, the organisational and innovation requirements of the firms that must respond to these changes. This paper explores these issues within the theoretical context of what it has termed domain inertia—an industry-level dislocation between organisation and firm imperatives. Arguing that neither traditional organisational nor innovation-based change theories deal with the complexities of industry-level inertia, the paper attempts to move beyond orthodox theoretical parameters. In so doing, it adopts a somewhat unique theory that places organisational and innovation inertia within a widening domain of discordant industry-level imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between micro-economic business models, economic structure, and locally sustainable prosperity. In this respect, the paper takes as a premise the contention that sustainable mobility requires a sustainable industry to create the vehicles and business models to deliver that mobility. The interactions between locality and scale are explored within the context of the anti-globalisation discourse. Thereafter, the paper provides a brief outline of some business models from the automotive industry where alternatives to the monolithic and centralised structure of the mainstream industry have been proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following growing concerns about the future of many town centres in the UK, this paper considers the factors that contribute to measuring and understanding their continuing health. Recognising that past studies have tended to concentrate on measures of relative performance between towns, the paper presents a methodology for analysis at the micro level, distinguishing between both the relative and the absolute performance of different areas within individual town centres. Using the key indicators of town centre viability and vitality, as outlined in recent government planning guidance, the paper uses case-study data to develop a time-series model for tracking changes in the health of different areas of a town centre. Although the predictive capability of this model is currently limited by the lack of suitable data, the paper shows that relatively simple measures of vitality and viability can be useful tools in understanding the changing dynamics of the health of town centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations for the sharp difference in the economic growth performance of Russia and China under economic reform vary widely. There is a debate over which institutional characteristics are conducive to good growth performance: decentralization and competition among local governments or centralization of control over performance targets. Yet there has been little systematic empirical effort to test the implications of these theories for the behavior of firms. This paper uses data from surveys of firms conducted by the World Bank in 2012 to analyze differences in business–government relations in Russia and China. The findings suggest that differences in levels of administrative decentralization help account for differences in business–government relations in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, many universities have been moving in the direction of a more hierarchical and centralised structure, with top-down planning and reduced local autonomy for departments. Yet, the management literature over this period has stressed the numerous benefits of flatter organisational structures, decentralisation and local autonomy for sections or departments. What might explain this paradox? And why have academics remained strangely quiet about this, meekly accepting their fate? This proposition paper critically examines the dangers of centralised top-down management, increasingly bureaucratic procedures, teaching to a prescribed formula, and research driven by assessment and performance targets, illustrating these with a number of specific examples. It discusses a number of possible forces driving these worrying developments, and concludes by asking whether academics may be in danger of suffering the fate of the boiled frog. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Diagnosability property ensures that a predefined set of faults are diagnosable by a centralized diagnoser built using a global model of the system, while co-diagnosability guarantees that these faults are diagnosed in decentralized manner using a set of local diagnosers. A fault must be diagnosed by at least one local diagnoser by using its proper local observation of the system. The aim of using decentralized diagnosis approaches is to overcome the space complexity and weak robustness of centralized diagnosis approaches while at the same time preserving the diagnostic capability of a centralized diagnosis. However, co-diagnosability property is stronger than diagnosability property. If a system is co-diagnosable, then it is diagnosable, while a diagnosable system does not ensure that it is co-diagnosable. Therefore, the challenge of decentralized diagnosis approaches is to perform local diagnosis and to verify that it is equivalent to the centralized one without the need for a global model. In this paper, an approach is proposed to obtain co-diagnosable decentralized diagnosis structure of discrete event systems without the use of a global model. This approach is based on the synchronization of local diagnosis decisions in order to solve the ambiguity between local diagnosers. This synchronization allows obtaining local diagnosis equivalent to the global one without the use of a global model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, digital redesign (DR) techniques are presented for a decentralised controller of large-scale sampled-data systems. To improve the performance of the previous DR technique, the state-matching error is defined and directly minimised by using the state-matching error cost function. Also, the discretisation error of the interconnection term is eliminated through an exact discrete-time design approach. Sufficient conditions of the proposed DR techniques are obtained in the Lyapunov sense and are converted into optimal problems with linear matrix inequalities. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Health care costs incurred prior to the appropriate patient–provider transaction (i.e., transaction costs of access to health care) are potential barriers to accessing health care in low- and middle-income countries. This paper explores these transaction costs and their implications for health system governance through a cross-sectional survey of adult patients who received their first diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) at the three designated secondary health centres for TB care in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. The patients provided information on their care-seeking pathways and the associated costs prior to reaching the appropriate provider. Of the 452 patients, 84% first consulted an inappropriate provider. Only 33% of inappropriate consultations were with qualified providers (QP); the rest were with informal providers such as pharmacy providers (PPs; 57%) and traditional providers (TP; 10%). Notably, 62% of total transaction costs were incurred during the first visit to an inappropriate provider and the mean transaction costs incurred was highest with QPs (US$30.20) compared with PPs (US$14.40) and TPs (US$15.70). These suggest that interventions for reducing transaction costs should include effective decentralisation to integrate TB care with services at the primary health care level, community engagement to address information asymmetry, enforcing regulations to keep informal providers within legal limits and facilitating referral linkages among formal and informal providers to increase early contact with appropriate providers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In India, the pressing concern in education is with bringing in at least 32 million children estimated to be out of school, to meet the goal of Universal Elementary Education (UEE). Support for decentralisation of public services is widespread because of the equity and efficiency benefits associated with it. In particular, decentralisation is seen to facilitate the matching of services with local preferences, thus increasing the chances for policy goals to be met. This proposition is examined in the context of research carried out in a village of Raichur district in India, where poor households' 'preferences' with reference to school timings are analysed with a view to reflecting on their implications for education policy and management. The paper attempts to address the following concerns: how homogeneous are local preferences? What if these run counter to policy interests? Can aspects of services be selectively decentralised, or does the 'production' of the sector as a whole require to be rethought? The paper concludes with some thoughts on the importance of processes of 'preference' articulation, and the need to recognise preferences implicit within policy intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 30 years has seen significant developments in the Australian housing sector for people with disabilities. Despite much change in the sector, and advancements in disability services, the range of current supported housing options for younger Australian adults with a neurological disability remains vastly under-developed. This is despite a widely accepted and endorsed recognition that, as is the general population, people with all forms of disability have a right to housing of their choice. This paper presents a timely critique of the key actions made by the Australian disability and housing sectors and subsequently proposes a more informed approach to supported housing design and development: one that is based on a comprehensive understanding of consumer housing priorities and preferences, and is conducive to a person’s biopsychosocial health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efforts in sustainable natural resource management have given rise to decentralization of forest governance in the developing world with hopes for better solutions and effective implementation. In this paper, we examine how spatially sensitive participation is realized from policy to practice in the process of establishing participatory forest management in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Our policy–practice analysis shows that the policies in Zanzibar strongly support decentralization and local level participation has in practice been realized. However, the policy does not emphasize participatory process design nor address the possibilities of using spatial information and technologies to ensure wider participation. Thus, the practices fall short in innovativeness of using site-sensitive information with available technologies. Reflecting the Zanzibari Community Forest Management Agreements (CoFMA) context with examples of participatory use of spatial information and technologies in other parts of the world, we discuss ways to improve the Zanzibari CoFMA process towards increased participation, communication, local sense of ownership and more sustainable land management decisions, and argue for the future implementation of CoFMA as a spatially sensitive participatory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deployment of wind power induces deep changes in landscapes and territories. The politicization of wind power generates new ad hoc collectives. In the French case, because of the institutional framing resulting from landscape and wind power policies (centralization, feed-in tariffs, private developers), collectives of emerging wind power landscapes are regularly set apart from wind power planning processes. This paper explores the extent to which these recompositions and new collectives could be part of emerging wind power potentials. The empirical evidence stemming from our case studies shows that wind power technology, like any other technology, is not endowed with a potential per se. Wind power potentials differ - 'capitalistic', 'controversial', 'negotiated', 'conditional' - depending on planning processes and inherited configurations. The notions of striated space and smooth space enable us to adopt a relational perspective on these emerging collectives and to account for the role of inherited sociogeographical configurations and planning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the problem of semi-global decentralised output feedback control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. Based on the ideas of the homogeneous systems theory and the adding a power integrator technique, we first design a homogeneous observer and an output feedback control law for each nominal subsystem without the nonlinearities. Then, using the homogeneous domination approach, we relax the linear growth condition to a polynomial one and construct decentralised stabilisers to render the nonlinear system semi-globally asymptotically stable. Two simulation examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the control scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The promotion of ‘critical citizenship’ has become a key objective of official school curricula around the world. Using an analytic framework developed by the authors, this paper identifies the diverse conceptions of critical citizenship that are promoted, by comparing the official school curricula for citizenship in England and France. The analysis goes beyond the dichotomous distinctions prevalent in comparisons of education in the two countries, especially those that focus on the contrasting degrees of centralisation–decentralisation, and suggests that there were significant differences in the goals promoted in their curricula with regard to four key dimensions: ideology, the collective, the individual and action. While these differences reflect historical, political, social, economic and cultural differences between the two nations, the analysis indicates a lack of symmetry across the levels of the curriculum, which contributed to the significant spaces that were found to exist which have the potential for teachers and students to creatively interpret how critical citizenship can be understood and implemented in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws parallels between the market trend in the English NHS and Polanyi's (1957) The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press: Boston (originally published in 1944 in the United States as The Great Transformation, Rinehart: and Co: New York, and in 1945 in England as Origins of our time, Gollancz: London) account of how the rise of markets provokes a self-protective counter-reaction that tries to re-embed economic relations in social relations. We report findings from a qualitative study of NHS contracting, which examines the recent move to harder-edged contracts with greater use of financial penalties and incentives. In practice, use of these techniques tended to be confined to nationally-mandated sections of the contract rather than emerging from local bilateral agreements, and when things went wrong the parties relied more on cooperative behaviour than on the provisions of the contract to find solutions. Making the current contracting system work depended more on existing relational networks than on the incentive structures created by recent 'marketisation' initiatives, but the inability of the market to evolve as expected has encouraged policy makers to publish plans for further radical reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the incremental approach to the marketisation of the English National Health Service (NHS) since the introduction of an 'internal market' in 1990 until the 2010 White Paper, 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill published in January 2011. The introduction of a competitive market for a universal, tax-financed health system requires fundamental changes in regulation in order that market bureaucracy can be substituted for direct management. The components of reform are insufficiently captured by the framework of hierarchies and networks in new public management theories of decentralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, 'decentralisation' has become an increasingly prominent theme in Sub-Saharan African development theory and practice, particularly around woodland management. Although much research has illuminated challenges arising in project design and implementation, 'external' threats to decentralised resource management initiatives have received little attention. At the same time, however, there has been a massive increase in foreign, particularly Chinese, corporate investment in the extraction of African resources. This paper examines the importance of the interaction between these two trends to local livelihoods and resource management through a case study of illegal logging by Chinese companies in Sierra Leone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the notion of citizenship and ethnicity as forms of belonging in the context of globalisation. The discussion draws on a case study focusing on a Fulfuldephone servile group from Northern Benin called the Gando. Since pre-colonial times, their servile status ascribed by birth has been an argument for placing them at the margins of their society and excluding them from political participation. While still claiming their belonging to the nation-state of Benin and the Fulbe's culture, the Gando have progressively built a new social identity that is showing to be a new ethnic group. In the context of the decentralisation reform implemented in 2002-2003, the Gando have taken the opportunity to access local power; they conquered municipal power in the 2003 and 2008 local elections. In doing so they opened the gates to a full citizenship that in the context of today's Benin means a clientelistic citizenship. Contrary to recent literature focused on the simultaneous emergence of belonging dynamics and violent conflicts in the context of recent globalisation in developing countries, the author argues that belonging dynamics do not necessarily imply violent conflicts and exclusion dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While economic research on environmental policy is mainly concerned with instruments, political science concentrates on actors. The issue of centralisation needs to be analysed using a multidisciplinary approach because it is connected with both actors and instruments. Linking the Advocacy Coalition Framework with an economic approach, the paper first develops an innovative model in order to understand the mechanisms of centralisation and decentralisation in the different phases of policy processes. Focusing on environmental policy, the idea is developed that environmental policy needs the push of centralisation in order to institutionalise the prevailing social norm, but then should be organised decentrally to account for regional differences. The examples of air pollution, climate change and urban sprawl are used to test the explanatory power of the theoretical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building project development approval process is increasingly complex and fraught with conflict due to the rise of the sustainable urban development movement and inclusive decision making. Coupled with this, government decision-making decentralization has resulted in a fragmented and over-regulated compliance system. Problems arising from the process include wasted resources, excessive time delays, increased holding and litigation costs, inadequate planning coordination, high levels of advocacy costs and a divisive politicized approval process. In Australia, despite attempts by government and industry associations, numerous problems are still unresolved. Design managers increasingly assume a liaison role during the approval phase. There is a long tradition of planning theory literature which provides context for understanding the knowledge-power-participation relationship for this paper. This study investigated the policy, process and practice conflicts during the approval stage in achieving sustainable urban developments. Three regional local government areas within one state jurisdiction and observations from detailed structured focus group interviews involving 23 stakeholders, proposers and assessors were analysed to explore this conflictual environment. As a result of regulatory fragmentation and excessive consultation, various persuasion tactics have been developed by all stakeholders of which 'reciprocity' and 'authority' were identified as the most common. Two challenges for design managers were thus identified: first, the emergence of the role of a by default central informal arbitrator across conflicting planning instruments; and, second, as a navigator through a set of persuasion tactics. An inclusive knowledge-based design management framework for sustainable urban development is proposed considering Habermas' communicative planning theory, Foucaltian governance and discursive powers thesis and Cialdini's persuasion theory, as well as being grounded in the key empirical results from this study, using various types and sources of knowledge as an authoritative persuasion tactic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China, the same as her Western counterpart countries, has been experiencing educational decentralization over the last two decades. Such a policy shift, however, brings with it issues of “managerialism”, “accountability” and “competition”, all of which are becoming part of the common language in the educational lexicon. These newly imposed strictures have been theorized to influence teachers' daily practice in certain ways and also their views about their roles and responsibilities. It is said teachers have had to redefine their professionalism due to the invasion of this “audit culture” in education. However, research on this particular area has not devoted significant attention to the voices of teachers. This paper uses interview data from 75 teachers in Guangdong Province of China to find out whether policy changes have necessitated teachers to develop strategies to cope with new educational demands and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research examining the conditions under which private businesses implement 'workplace support practices' to facilitate job retention among workers hired from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). Most welfare 'leavers' enter the workforce but many face personal and structural 'barriers' that are not adequately resolved or even identified until after they have been placed into jobs. Thus, private-sector businesses often function as de facto job readiness trainers although many are either unwilling or unable to fulfill this role. Policymakers must recognize this reality and develop strategies that facilitate employer engagement as partners rather than mere customers in implementing welfare to work programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We prove a number of results on betweenness and closeness centrality and centralization. In particular, we prove the much used normalization expression for closeness centrality first given by Freeman (1979), correcting an error in the justification given in his paper. We explore the relationship between betweenness and the cutting number and use these results to prove and correct some centrality and centralization formulae first proposed by Borgatti and Everett (1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines "decentralization" as a management strategy on the quality of protected area management in Ecuador. Two cases are analyzed--the Cajas National Park and the Condor Bioreserve Watershed Protection Area--to see how decentralization influences conservation success. This study describes the recent agreement between the Ministry of the Environment and the Cuenca Municipality for the management of Cajas National Park, and the cooperative multi-sectoral partnership for the management of the Condor Bioreserve. Advantages and disadvantages of both alternatives are presented. Evidence shows that a critical component to effective decentralization is for the Ministry of the Environment to provide clear rules to the responsible third party managers of the protected areas, whether these third party managers are local governments or multi-sectoral groups. Recommendations are made to help guide future decentralization efforts. First, a clear distinction between a protected area manager and a resource user must be provided in the regulatory framework if conflicts of interest, which might ultimately undermine effective conservation, are to be avoided. Second, public organizations should be officially encouraged to become involved in protected area management. And third, the interrelationship of national and international nongovernmental organizations needs to be maintained or strengthened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the issue of order coordination between a supplier and multiple retailers in a decentralized multi-echelon inventory distribution system where the supplier provides a product to multiple retailers who experience static demand and standard inventory costs. Specifically, we propose and analyze a new policy where a manufacturer, who outsources production to an Original Equipment Manufacturer, offers a price discount to retailers when they coordinate the timing of their orders with the manufacturer's order cycle. We show that our proposed policy call lead to more efficient supply chains tinder certain conditions, and present a straightforward method for finding the manufacturer's optimal price discount in this decentralized supply chain. A numerical experiment illustrates the managerial implications of our model as well as conditions when a manufacturer should consider adopting such a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]