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This paper describes the challenges facing urban planning higher education institutions in the global South that engage with knowledge production, education and training and the ways they are tackling urban equality concerns. Drawing on interviews with urban pedagogues and practitioners, and examining institutional histories across Asia and Africa, we use a five-point framework to analyse these challenges: what to teach, how to teach, whom to teach, who teaches and where to teach. We find that different institutional arrangements and choices made by educators affect the answers to these questions in different ways. These questions are also closely connected to the questions of planning "for what", and planning education "to what end", and relate to concerns regarding values and processes and to outcomes for urban equality in the South. Considering these cases together offers an opportunity to contribute to a Southern dialogue on the evolution of planning education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paddy is an essential nutrient worldwide. Rice gives 21% of worldwide human per capita energy and 15% of per capita protein. Asia represented 60% of the worldwide populace, about 92% of the world's rice creation, and 90% of worldwide rice utilization. With the increase in population, the demand for rice is increased. So, the productivity of farming is needed to be enhanced by introducing new technology. Deep learning and IoT are hot topics for research in various fields. This paper suggested a setup comprising deep learning and IoT for monitoring of paddy field remotely. The vgg16 pre-trained network is considered for the identification of paddy leaf diseases and nitrogen status estimation. Here, two strategies are carried out to identify images: transfer learning and deep feature extraction. The deep feature extraction approach is combined with a support vector machine (SVM) to classify images. The transfer learning approach of vgg16 for identifying four types of leaf diseases and prediction of nitrogen status results in 79.86% and 84.88% accuracy. Again, the deep features of Vgg16 and SVM results for identifying four types of leaf diseases and prediction of nitrogen status have achieved an accuracy of 97.31% and 99.02%, respectively. Besides, a framework is suggested for monitoring of paddy field remotely based on IoT and deep learning. The suggested prototype's superiority is that it controls temperature and humidity like the state-of-the-art and can monitor the additional two aspects, such as detecting nitrogen status and diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme that was initiated by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) in 2009. ACCA seeks to catalyze and support community initiatives, citywide upgrading and partnerships between community organizations and local governments. By January 2012, it had helped fund initiatives in 708 settlements in 153 cities in 19 different Asian nations. In each city, small grants support community-led initiatives that encourage citywide networks to form, where members share skills with each other and learn to negotiate with their local governments. Further support was available as local governments engaged and then came to support this process, including the formation of jointly managed community development funds. The paper also describes how the design of ACCA drew on earlier work, and ends with a reflection on what has been learnt with regard to more effective ways of reducing urban poverty. This explores the two underlying dimensions: first, the creation of institutions based on relations of reciprocity; and second, the strengthening of relations between low-income community organizations such that they can create a synergy with the state. One key lesson is the need for financial systems that allow the urban poor to be the key agents in addressing their problems and in bringing in city governments to work with them. This collaboration can lead to the urban poor being recognized as legitimate and highly productive residents and citizens of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes people’s process, community networks and platforms of work between communities and professionals in Asia; also how these networks, which have reduced the isolation of low-income and disadvantaged communities, have built their confidence, produced finance to support their priorities, legitimized and capacitated their organizations and catalyzed effective action. Networked and informed community groups are increasingly able to lead development processes and work together with government agencies, politicians and other stakeholders, from academics to NGOs. By being unified through a common group or association, community members gain strength in numbers and shared financial capital, opening up many more opportunities than if they worked individually. By giving examples of national networks of the urban poor in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Mongolia and elsewhere, this paper seeks to demonstrate the value of networks in supporting a people’s process of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper suggests that what may appear to be insoluble problems of urban poverty and exclusion in Asian cities can be solved; and that the greatest force to do this already exists, in rough form, in the people who experience that poverty and exclusion themselves and have the greatest motivation to change it. It notes how most government programmes and formal development interventions ignore this force or seek to suppress it, so it remains a potential, not an actual, force for change. The paper describes how the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme, using a few simple tools and conditions and a modest, flexible budget, is trying to unlock that force at scale, opening up new space, new collaborations and new possibilities that are beginning to resolve these problems. The paper describes several of the tools and conditions that are part of the ACCA intervention – the support for collective processes, partnerships, finance and land tenure; for many initiatives on the ground; for moving to work at city scale; for communities prioritizing what gets support; and for building a platform for negotiation and partnership in each city. These are helping people to solve their problems and pave their own literal and metaphorical pathways to freedom, and to legitimate and valued citizenship in their cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes how the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme seeks to use finance to augment community-driven development processes in 19 nations and enable their scaling up to the city and national levels. The lack of accessible and flexible finance is a key stumbling block for the majority of community development processes in Asia. The paper begins by examining how this programme approaches the issue of finance in the wider context of community-driven upgrading, and elaborates the role that community networks can play in encouraging collective activities. It then explains how community finance leads to the establishment of community development funds (CDFs), financial platforms made up of contributions from different sources, including community savings, ACCA seed funds and contributions from local/national government or other actors. These both encourage collaboration and increase the scale of what can be done. The paper gives examples of how CDFs can operate at different levels: locally, between groups of communities with shared problems and goals; on a citywide scale (107 citywide funds are now in operation); or at a national level, as in the Philippines, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the comparative research we present here as the introduction to a set of case studies, we first assess the quality of democratic procedures, content and outcomes in eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region on the basis of quantitative and qualitative data. Second, we investigate whether, to what extent, and how democratic qualities relate to one another. These investigations are carried out by applying an analytical framework that we developed elsewhere. In contrast to our previous empirical findings demonstrating that all the qualities go hand in hand, that participation and competition are the main determinants of democratic qualities, and that the democratic qualities form a funnel of causality, the present study suggests a different set of conclusions. In the Asia-Pacific region, the democratic qualities are weakly related to one another, do not form a funnel of causality, and participation and competition are not the main drivers of democratic quality. The data presented in the empirical section of the paper claim the existence of an Asia-Pacific exceptionalism. By carefully examining the cases included in our sample, we provide a detailed explanation for why, at least as far as democratic qualities are concerned, the Asia-Pacific region may be exceptional and unique. We reach the conclusion that responsiveness could be achieved by a transition from a rule by law – often coupled with the prominence of patronage, patrimonialist practices and privileges for the elite – to a proper rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how to make pro-poor climate change adaptation more effective in the city of Chittagong. Drawing on discussions with residents in informal settlements and interviews with staff from government agencies, NGOs and donors, it shows the lack of connection between the formal institutional structure for disaster preparedness and the groups most at risk from extreme weather disasters and their community level actions. There is no clear definition of roles among local government agencies with regard to climate change adaptation. Although there is a donor-funded programme to reduce poverty and disaster risks, this is not being implemented in the settlements most at risk from landslides. Neither are there any measures underway to address the needs of the residents in these high risk settlements, in part because of the financial weakness of local government. Nor is there much support for this from national government – since national climate change adaptation policy does not consider urban adaptation and strengthening urban government capacity to reduce the vulnerability of the extreme poor as a priority. NGOs undertake programmes for community-based disaster risk reduction but their scale and scope are limited by not being integrated into local government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses ecological issues concerning urban development. It addresses the conflicts associated with the achievement of less ecologically damaging patterns of urban development. Observations on progress of water and sanitation in urban areas in Asia and Africa are presented. The factors behind city growth are also cited.

The relationship between urbanization and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or between city size and productivity. The potential of urbanization to promote growth is likely to depend on how conducive the infrastructure and institutional settings are. Removing barriers to rural–urban mobility may enable economic growth, but the benefits will be much larger with supportive policies, markets and infrastructure investments. Cities should use realistic population projections as the basis for investing in public infrastructure and implementing supportive land policies. Governments should seek out ways of enabling forms of urbanization that contribute to growth, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability, rather than encouraging (or discouraging) urbanization per se. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how resilience thinking and, in particular, its emphasis on learning has been applied in 10 cities in Vietnam, India, Thailand and Indonesia. Applying a “shared learning” approach in the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) has helped to create or strengthen networks, build appreciation for complexity and uncertainty among stakeholders, provide a space for deliberating concepts such as vulnerability and resilience, and build knowledge and capacities for stakeholders to engage and represent their own interests. Shared learning approaches face considerable challenges navigating politicized urban environments, in which the nature and value of existing systems − and therefore the value of building resilience − are contested. This article suggests that deliberate, strategic intervention by facilitators may contribute to more transformative change on behalf of equitable, socially just outcomes – and thus cautions against seeing urban climate vulnerability as a technical challenge, or shared learning as a “toolkit” for building resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Climate change will affect the health of urban populations. It represents a range of environmental hazards and will affect populations where the current burden of climate-sensitive disease is high - such as the urban poor in low- and middle-income countries. Understanding the current impact of weather and climate variability on the health of urban populations is the first step towards assessing future impacts. In this paper, we have reviewed the scientific evidence for the effects of temperature, rainfall and extreme events on human health, in particular the impacts of heat waves and floods. The methods for assessing the risks of climate change are undergoing development, and there is a need to shift the focus from global and regional to local studies. Sectoral approaches to climate change impact assessments often ignore the effects on health. There is a need to better describe the risks to health from extreme weather events as well as improve the effectiveness of public health interventions. Improving the resilience of cities to climate change also requires improvements in the urban infrastructure, but such improvements may not be achieved quickly enough to avoid an increased burden of disease due to global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outlines the tradition of scholarly communication in four East and Southeast Asian countries. Compares the similarities and differences in history and current conditions of research and publication practices in China, Japan, Korea, and Myanmar. Highlights challenges brought up by the advances of information and communication technologies. By analyzing existing imbalances in the development, the paper evaluates various solutions implemented or proposed by these countries. It discovers that each country has its own characteristics of scholarly communication, making the world diverse and colorful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural change in Asia among India, China, and Pakistan has been intense and is directly associated with the instability that has resulted. As these governments move forward on their regional and global power cycles, what points of non-linearity (critical points) yet await the region and the larger system, and with what effect? The article calls for management of the foreign policy role such that comparative calm is sustained in the midst of structural change and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia was an active member of the Colombo Plan for aid to South and Southeast Asia, beginning in 1951 as a loosely organized umbrella of multiple bilateral aid agreements between Commonwealth countries and quickly expanding in geographical reach and membership. Towards the end of the 1950s, as members of this ‘plan’ geared up for a new wave of aid projects, they also attached new importance to information activities associated with aid. In this Australian case study, journalists were thrust to the fore of story-generation relating to Australia’s involvement in the Colombo Plan. These written stories, and also still and moving images, were aimed at both domestic Australian audiences and also overseas audiences. Thus began some of the first important steps in what today is called ‘public diplomacy’, and what, at the time, was a new experiment in foreign policy and reputation-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information is presented about a conference sponsored by the Special Libraries Association on cooperation among information professionals in Asia. Topics discussed include rural information services, digital libraries and archival preservation, information literacy, and global business trends. Speakers included information professionals such as Jack W. Plunkett, Krishan Lal, and Stephen Abram.

The similarities and differences between the experiences of prisoners of war and civilian internees of the Japanese have largely been overlooked by studies of Japanese-held prisoners. This article aims to provide this critical comparative perspective by examining the experiences of prisoners of war and civilians in four key theatres of the war in British Asia: Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Borneo. It draws largely, however, on the intriguing case study of the Lintang Camp in Borneo (Sarawak) where prisoners of war were imprisoned alongside civilian internees during the war. It argues that there were overarching similarities and constraints to both sets of experiences, but key differences in Japanese wartime policies and a variety of other factors such as combatant status, class, rank, active agency, leadership, and gender also contributed to how captivity was experienced during this tumultuous period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the existing 276 international river basins, the increase in water variability projected by most climate change scenarios may present serious challenges to riparian states. This research maps the institutional resilience to water variability in transboundary basins and combines it with both historic and projected variability regimes, with the objective of identifying areas at potential risk of future hydropolitical tension. To do so, it combs existing international treaties for sources of institutional resilience and considers the coefficient of variation of runoff as a measure of past and future water variability. The study finds significant gaps in both the number of people and area covered by institutional stipulations to deal with variability in South America and Asia. At present, high potential risk for hydropolitical tensions associated with water variability is identified in 24 transboundary basins and seems to be concentrated mainly in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2050, areas at greatest potential risk are more spatially dispersed and can be found in 61 international basins, and some of the potentially large impacts of climate change are projected to occur away from those areas currently under scrutiny. Understanding when and where to target capacity-building in transboundary river basins for greater resilience to change is critical. This study represents a step toward facilitating these efforts and informing further qualitative and quantitative research into the relationship between climate change, hydrological variability regimes, and institutional capacity for accommodating variability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Disasters have tragic consequences, and people with the least resources at hand to rebuild their lives are often the worst affected. The traditional response to disasters is to provide immediate relief, without considering how the process of rebuilding lives and communities can be a positive opportunity for change. This opportunity can be facilitated in two ways: first, by having a clear understanding of how disaster survivors are not victims but agents for change; and second, by providing the tools and techniques to facilitate the change process. Case studies from Asia demonstrate how disaster-affected communities have rebuilt not only their homes but also their livelihoods, and have been empowered as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies the effects of conflict onset on asset markets applying the event study methodology. The authors consider a sample of 101 internal and inter-state conflicts during the period 1974—2004 and find that a sizeable fraction of them has had a significant impact on stock market indices, exchange rates, oil and commodity prices. This fraction is inconsistent with pure chance, that is, with the selected probability of type-I errors in our tests of statistical significance. The results suggest that, on average, national stock markets are more likely to display positive than negative reactions to conflict onset. When the authors distinguish between internal and inter-state conflicts, they find that the fraction of significant results is higher for international conflicts. When the authors classify events according to the region where they occur, they find that Asia and the Middle East are the regions where conflicts tend to have the strongest effects. Finally, the article reports evidence that abnormal returns would have accrued to investors systematically exploiting conflict onset to implement conflict-driven strategies. Results are robust to selecting a subset of high-intensity conflicts and to expanding the time window over which conflict events are defined. The findings of the article confirm the economic importance of the effects of conflicts on asset markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on recent liberal peace and Asian security research, this article assesses the relevance of prominent 'Kantian' hypotheses for understanding the international politics of Asia. While there is some evidence that the dynamics of war and peace are different in Asia than in other parts of the world, this does not mean that liberal theories are irrelevant. There is at best weak support for the pacific effects of democracy or international institutions in Asia. But liberal expectations, and those of some Asia analysts, about the importance of economic interdependence for reducing conflict in Asia are robustly confirmed. This result obtains even with a control for the simultaneous trade-dampening effect of conflict using structural equations. But the strong intra-Asian effect of trade interdependence does not translate into a robust pacific effect between Asian states and those outside the region. A more nuanced picture emerges: the democratic peace appears most relevant for interactions between Asian states and the rest of the world. The findings show that analysts can rely neither on beliefs that Asia is sui generis nor on purely realist models as guides to Asian security issues. Kantian and realist theories are both relevant. The results also indicate that some common assumptions of analysts, especially regarding the importance of alliances and institutions, are not in accord with the regularities of conflict and peace in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Asian crisis of 1997-98, policy-makers invested much energy in designing a new international financial architecture. However, many of the policy proposals that have emerged from think tanks and the multilateral agencies have proven unworkable or politically unpalatable. The debate focuses on state-led initiatives. But the assumption that public policy is by definition an output of public institutions is difficult to sustain in an era of global change. This article considers specialized forms of intelligence gathering and judgment determination which seem increasingly important as sources of governance in this era of financial market volatility: Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's, the major bond rating agencies. More specifically, we examine a proposal of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to reform the existing capital adequacy framework by incorporating banks' own internal ratings and external bond ratings from the rating agencies, in order to calculate bank risk-weighted capital requirements. The article identifies a series of negative implications from the use of private rating agencies as a substitute for state-based regulation, premised on the organizational incentives that shape the ratings industry. Cementing these organizational incentives into the emerging financial architecture will, we argue, lead to negative social and economic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a profile of the work of the Urban Governance Initiative (TUGI), a regional project of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) which seeks to promote and support good governance in Asia and the Pacific. Visions of the UNDP-TUGI; Projects launched by UNDP-TUGI; List of strategic partners of the UNDP-TUGI for execution and implementation.

Discusses the establishment of a British Military Administration (BMA) led by Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten after Japan surrendered Malaya and Singapore in August 1945. Proclamation to reimpose British rule; Revival of interest in the attempted European 'recolonization' of Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender; Political contest between Mountbatten and Major-General Herbert Ralph Hone.

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The article reports that the National Library Board, Singapore (NLB) will serve as the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions' (IFLA) Regional Office for Asia and Oceania. The Regional Manager will be Tan Keat Fong; she is a librarians with thirty years of career experience. Fong has worked to improve collaboration between international and local libraries. The National Library of Singapore contains the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, Central Lending Library and the Drama Centre.