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This chapter introduces the challenges women face in their efforts to participate in key decision-making in time and space. The chapter presents the legal and policy tools that could be utilized to enable women contribute significantly to peace negotiations, dialogs, mediations and agreements. Tools used in the evaluation or setting of policy guidelines for such peace-making processes are illustrated. The chapter observes that, while some of the barriers to women’s inclusion in peace negotiations remain the same as the barriers to their inclusion in high-level political positions, including norms and customs that have kept women subordinate to men, there are other more mundane reasons, such as: lack of information about the timing and location of formal and informal negotiations, particularly closed door negotiations that excluded women; difficulties in obtaining visas to attend negotiations; national laws or traditions that restrict women’s movements; and a lack of access to communication technologies and networks.

Smart cities are often criticized for preoccupation with technology, for ignoring the negative effects of technology, for irrelevance to the needs of the poor, and for ubiquitous data collection creating perfect conditions for surveillance societies and autocratic states. In response, cities pursue smartness and sustainability simultaneously, becoming global (by participation in global digital networks) and local (by addressing local needs and circumstances) at the same time. In the pursuit of smart sustainable cities, they make explicit policy decisions about how technology should serve their residents, businesses and visitors, and avoid disrupting them. Many decisions are about standards—which standards should be followed and how, and increasingly, standards and policy guidelines are adopted by cities from international organizations, circumventing national authorities. This chapter reviews international standards and policy guidelines published by international standards organizations or intergovernmental bodies, with stated goals to support member states in the development and management of smart sustainable cities. We conducted the review through exploratory research and comparative policy analysis. The result could be used to raise awareness and address knowledge needs among city managers, policy analysts, and smart city researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the major institutional trust mechanisms that facilitate the adoption of cloud services among South African SMEs. By drawing from Giddens’ (1990) institutional trust theory and the existing IT trust literature, we developed a conceptual model to improve our understanding of the role of institutional trust between SMEs and cloud service providers. The model was also deployed as a sensitizing framework to deepen our understanding of how institutional trust factors influence SME cloud service adoption decisions. A qualitative field study based on 12 semi-structured interviews of SMEs and cloud service providers in South Africa suggests that the insights gleaned from concepts, such as design faults and operator failure, can be translated into useful policy guidelines for cloud service providers, state institutions and regulatory bodies that are working to improve the trustworthiness of the cloud ecosystem. Despite the belief held by experts that there is a need to strengthen institutional mechanisms in the cloud ecosystem, the relative advantage of cloud over alternative technology remains the primary motivational factor of SME adoption. The SMEs in this study were unaware of the risks involved in cloud adoption and are content to mimic the behavior of their peers when adopting cloud services. Other social actors in society will have to play a prominent role in evaluating and strengthening institutional trust in the cloud ecosystem.

This study aims to explore the existence of environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs) in urban water and energy use patterns at regional scale based on a wide data set of 336 municipalities in the Guadalquivir River Basin. A systematic analysis of the relationships between urban water-energy use patterns and indicators of economic development (i.e. income and employment) is carried out. Additionally, this study takes into account other determinants that might also have an impact on the urban use of these resources, such as population density, age and educational level. Results contribute to a better understanding of the socio-economic factors driving urban demands for energy and water, thus also offering policy guidelines to guarantee the sustainable management of both resources.

On 27 December 2016, the Information Office of China’ State Council released the new version of the country’s 5-year policy guidelines for national space activities. Published in the form of a government White Paper, the document highlights the major developments of the past 5 years (2011–2015) and provides a comprehensive description of the programmatic intentions for the sector over the period 2016–2020.

There have been several changes recently in the regulation of vocational education in Estonia which have challenged the management competences of school principals. This chapter introduces the legal regulation of the vocational education system in Estonia and the qualification requirements for principals and gives an overview of strategic development goals and policy guidelines for the vocational education and training system. In order to understand the management challenges for principals deriving from the legal and policy framework of a school, the case of Tallinna Majanduskool, from here on Tallinn School of Economics, is chosen to illustrate how external changes can serve as an opportunity for daring principals to initiate innovation activities and implement developments necessary for competitiveness in the education market.

Big data analytics is a fast evolving phenomenon, and understanding its impact on service systems is a key research priority for service science. However, there is very little knowledge related to the potential ethical implications associated with the use of big data analytics in service today. This chapter therefore aims to identify some ethical implications that can arise in data-driven service systems. It is relevant to those who use big data to generate new value propositions, and for those who cocreate value in this context. The chapter also aims to inform managerial and policy guidelines for implementing, and ethically benefiting from, big data analytics in service.

e-Learner support and retention can often be an afterthought when designing e-learning experiences. In this chapter, the authors discuss the main differences between e-learners and traditional on-campus students and share methods for thinking intentionally about the support services for e-learners. The authors outline the accreditation and policy guidelines that shape learner success initiatives at institutions of higher education and offer a comprehensive overview of the kinds of services and systems recommended by accrediting bodies as well as the student support components that are typically offered in e-learning units. Because an important component of providing student success services is networking and collaborating with academic departments and other institutional partners, the authors describe some of the more typical partnerships between e-learning units and various campus stakeholders in the provision of student success services and programs. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the growing trends of predictive modeling and real-time data analytics and concrete strategies that e-learning leaders can use in the development of strong student success models.

Reviews the polcies necessary to provide a prosperous economy. Provides historic episodes, such as the Roosevelt “new deal”, the Eienhower large public works policy of prodcing the interstat highway program, etc. to show the success of Keynes’ policies when they are enacted. Then uses Keynes theory to provides policy guidelines for a policy of universal health insurance that will contribute to making thev U.S. a prosperous economic system.

This chapter investigates the role of water users associations (WUAs) in managing the Fergana Valley’s irrigation system at a local level. WUAs were established in the Uzbek section of the Fergana Valley only from the early 2000s onwards and are generally not regarded as having been effective to date, although individual instances of modestly successful WUAs indicate their future potential as viable entities for collective modes of water management. This chapter begins by explaining the origins, purpose and structure of WUAs in the Fergana Valley as set out in policy guidelines and then contrasts this with a study of how they are working in practice. In the concluding section, the effectiveness of WUAs in the Uzbek section of the Fergana Valley is assessed in terms of criteria derived from the literature. This chapter reveals that Uzbekistan’s WUAs lack the funding, water user representation and resources to tackle the major structural problems confronting Fergana Valley’s post-socialist irrigation system. Their heavy dependence on powerful institutional regimes for irrigation and for agriculture also severely restricts their action. There exist important exceptions, where WUAs are exploring innovative ways of coping with the enormity of their tasks, in isolation and in collaboration, but these represent only a small minority of WUAs in the region and are, to a large extent, dependent on temporary donor funding.

With increasing recognition of the multidisciplinary nature of managing assets, many organisations that depend on engineered artifacts like infrastructure, equipment, machinery, and plant are curious to benchmark performance against an international standard like ISO 55000. In this regard, engineering asset management (EAM) performance depends on how well employees execute their duties as they implement policy guidelines for managing such engineered assets. This paper describes a firm level study of the influence of human resources on the implementation of asset management policies. Employees’ attitude, cognition and mental preferences are proposed as useful constructs for evaluating human dimensions in engineering asset management (EAM).

The focus of the present paper is on the development of a participatory methodological framework, founded on the scenario-based planning approach and participatory evaluation tools for planning the integrated development of a specific region, the Region of Sterea Ellada—Greece. Towards this end, particular emphasis is placed upon the sustainable exploitation of natural and cultural resources for the spatial planning of alternative tourist development paths, which are effectively integrated into the local economic structure and its future perspectives. The proposed framework results in the synthesis of scenario-specific policy guidelines which, by taking into consideration variables of the internal and external environment of the study region and the particular decision contexts these outline, support policy makers by providing a range of policy directions and policy measures that can serve effective decision making within each specific decision context. Moreover, the participatory evaluation approach adopted in the proposed framework, supports public and stakeholders’ engagement in the decision making processes, rendering them thus more pluralistic, legitimized and transparent, which in turn are to the benefit of the planning process, the final policy decisions and their implementation at the local level.

Antibiotic resistance is considered to be one of the most significant public health concerns of the twenty-first century. Although traditionally the propagation of antibiotic resistance was considered to be limited to hospitals and other clinical environments, there is a growing realization that it is also associated with anthropogenically impacted environmental reservoirs. Wastewater treatment plants are considered to be significant reservoirs of antibiotic resistance because they combine extremely high levels of fecal- and environmental-derived bacteria with residual concentrations of antibiotic compounds believed to induce selection. These bacteria are primarily congregated in dense biofilms that are “hot spots” for horizontal gene transfer, which can facilitate inter- and intraspecies transfer of antibiotic genes, potentially resulting in the development of multidrug-resistant strains. Several studies have demonstrated that although wastewater treatment plants significantly reduce bacterial concentrations, relatively high levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and resistance genes are still present in effluents released to aquatic and soil environments and that under certain circumstances these resistance elements may persist for long periods of time in downstream environments. These elements may have significant epidemiological ramifications, especially when effluents enter drinking water and food webs; and henceforth, antibiotic resistance genes have recently been characterized as contaminants of emerging concern. This chapter summarizes current understanding of antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment plants and downstream environments, presents knowledge gaps that need to be bridged in order to better understand the potential ramifications of this phenomenon, overviews the effect of disinfection treatments on antibiotic resistance elements, and finally discusses policy guidelines that should be implemented in the future to reduce the risks of antibiotic resistance from wastewater treatment plants.

This paper views industrial clusters as complex systems composed of multiple interdependent dimensions, firms and enterprises, organizations. A literature review is used to construct a life-cycle framework for assessing cluster dynamics and guiding related policy development. The framework is erected on seven dimensions along with measures and development related patterns associated with the different life-cycle stages. Examples of policy guidelines are provided across all seven dimensions and by stage of cluster development. Finally, a case study of the South Korea shipbuilding cluster is provided in an effort to illustrate how the framework can be used to analyze cluster dynamics and to guide related policy responses. Conclusions and future research opportunities are presented in the final part of the paper.