Governing the clean development mechanism: global rhetoric versus local realities in carbon sequestration projects

Global agreements have proliferated in the past ten years. One of these is the Kyoto Protocol, which contains provisions for emissions reductions by trading carbon through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM is a market-based instrument that allows companies in Annex I countries to offset their greenhouse gas emissions through energy and tree offset projects in the global South. I set out to examine the governance challenges posed by the institutional design of carbon sequestration projects under the CDM. I examine three global narratives associated with the design of CDM forest projects, specifically North – South knowledge politics, green developmentalism, and community participation, and subsequently assess how these narratives match with local practices in two projects in Latin America. Findings suggest that governance problems are operating at multiple levels and that the rhetoric of global carbon actors often asserts these schemes in one light, while the rhetoric of those who are immediately involved locally may be different. I also stress the alarmist’s discourse that blames local people for the problems of environmental change. The case studies illustrate the need for vertical communication and interaction and nested governance arrangements as well as horizontal arrangements. I conclude that the global framing of forests as offsets requires better integration of local relationships to forests and their management and more effective institutions at multiple levels to link the very local to the very large scale when dealing with carbon sequestration in the CDM.

Technological change and the challenges for regional development: building social capital in less-favoured regions

The relevance of regional policy for less favoured regions (LFRs) reveals itself when policy-makers must reconcile competitiveness with social cohesion through the adaptation of competition or innovation policies. The vast literature in this area generally builds on an overarching concept of ‘social capital’ as the necessary relational infrastructure for collective action diversification and policy integration, in a context much influenced by a dynamic of industrial change and a necessary balance between the creation and diffusion of ‘knowledge’ through learning. This relational infrastructure or ‘social capital’ is centred on people’s willingness to cooperate and ‘envision’ futures as a result of “social organization, such as networks, norms and trust that facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, 1993: 35). Advocates of this interpretation of ‘social capital’ have adopted the ‘new growth’ thinking behind ‘systems of innovation’ and ‘competence building’, arguing that networks have the potential to make both public administration and markets more effective as well as ‘learning’ trajectories more inclusive of the development of society as a whole. This essay aims to better understand the role of ‘social capital’ in the production and reproduction of uneven regional development patterns, and to critically assess the limits of a ‘systems concept’ and an institution-centred approach to comparative studies of regional innovation. These aims are discussed in light of the following two assertions: i) learning behaviour, from an economic point of view, has its determinants, and ii) the positive economic outcomes of ‘social capital’ cannot be taken as a given. It is suggested that an agent-centred approach to comparative research best addresses the ‘learning’ determinants and the consequences of social networks on regional development patterns. A brief discussion of the current debate on innovation surveys has been provided to illustrate this point.

Integration of retrotransposons-based markers in a linkage map of barley

A deeper understanding of random markers is important if they are to be employed for a range of objectives. The sequence specific amplified polymorphism (S-SAP) technique is a powerful genetic analysis tool which exploits the high copy number of retrotransposon long terminal repeats (LTRs) in the plant genome. The distribution and inheritance of S-SAP bands in the barley genome was studied using the Steptoe × Morex (S × M) double haploid (DH) population. Six S-SAP primer combinations generated 98 polymorphic bands, and map positions were assigned to all but one band. Eight putative co-dominant loci were detected, representing 16 of the mapped markers. Thus at least 81 of the mapped S-SAP loci were dominant. The markers were distributed along all of the seven chromosomes and a tendency to cluster was observed. The distribution of S-SAP markers over the barley genome concurred with the knowledge of the high copy number of retrotransposons in plants. This experiment has demonstrated the potential for the S-SAP technique to be applied in a range of analyses such as genetic fingerprinting, marker assisted breeding, biodiversity assessment and phylogenetic analyses.

An ontology-based approach for data integration in regionally interoperable healthcare systems

In order to best utilize the limited resource of medical resources, and to reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical treatment, we propose to build an interoperable regional healthcare systems among several levels of medical treatment organizations. In this paper, our approaches are as follows:(1) the ontology based approach is introduced as the methodology and technological solution for information integration; (2) the integration framework of data sharing among different organizations are proposed(3)the virtual database to realize data integration of hospital information system is established. Our methods realize the effective management and integration of the medical workflow and the mass information in the interoperable regional healthcare system. Furthermore, this research provides the interoperable regional healthcare system with characteristic of modularization, expansibility and the stability of the system is enhanced by hierarchy structure.

Knowledge-based clinical pathway for medical quality improvement

Clinical pathways have been adopted for various diseases in clinical departments for quality improvement as a result of standardization of medical activities in treatment process. Using knowledge-based decision support on the basis of clinical pathways is a promising strategy to improve medical quality effectively. However, the clinical pathway knowledge has not been fully integrated into treatment process and thus cannot provide comprehensive support to the actual work practice. Therefore this paper proposes a knowledgebased clinical pathway management method which contributes to make use of clinical knowledge to support and optimize medical practice. We have developed a knowledgebased clinical pathway management system to demonstrate how the clinical pathway knowledge comprehensively supports the treatment process. The experiences from the use of this system show that the treatment quality can be effectively improved by the extracted and classified clinical pathway knowledge, seamless integration of patient-specific clinical pathway recommendations with medical tasks and the evaluating pathway deviations for optimization.

Interface vulnerability and knowledge of the subjunctive/indicative distinction with negated epistemic predicates in L2 Spanish.

Much recent research in SLA is guided by the hypothesis of L2 interface vulnerability (see Sorace 2005). This study contributes to this general project by examining the acquisition of two classes of subjunctive complement clauses in L2 Spanish: subjunctive complements of volitional predicates (purely syntactic) and subjunctive vs. indicative complements with negated epistemic matrix predicates, where the mood distinction is discourse dependent (thus involving the syntax-discourse interface). We provide an analysis of the volitional subjunctive in English and Spanish, suggesting that English learners of L2 Spanish need to access the functional projection Mood P and an uninterpretable modal feature on the Force head available to them from their formal English register grammar, and simultaneously must unacquire the structure of English for-to clauses. For negated epistemic predicates, our analysis maintains that they need to revalue the modal feature on the Force head from uninterpretable to interpretable, within the L2 grammar.With others (e.g. Borgonovo & Prévost 2003; Borgonovo, Bruhn de Garavito & Prévost 2005) and in line with Sorace's (2000, 2003, 2005) notion of interface vulnerability, we maintain that the latter case is more difficult for L2 learners, which is borne out in the data we present. However, the data also show that the indicative/subjunctive distinction with negated epistemics can be acquired by advanced stages of acquisition, questioning the notion of obligatory residual optionality for all properties which require the integration of syntactic and discourse information.

Location, control and innovation in knowledge-intensive industries

The rising share of intangibles in economies worldwide highlights the crucial role of knowledge-intensive and creative industries in current and future wealth generation. The recognition of this trend has led to intense competition in these industries. At the micro-level, firms from both advanced and emerging economies are globally dispersing their value chains to control costs and leverage capabilities. The geography of innovation is the outcome of a dynamic process whereby firms from emerging economies strive to catch-up with advanced economy competitors, creating strong pressures for continued innovation. However, two distinct strategies can be discerned with regard to the control of the value chain. A vertical integration strategy emphasizes taking advantage of ‘linkage economies’ whereby controlling multiple value chain activities enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of each one of them. In contrast, a specialization strategy focuses on identifying and controlling the creative heart of the value chain, while outsourcing all other activities. The global mobile handset industry is used as the template to illustrate the theory.

Pragmatic oriented data interoperability for smart healthcare information systems

Smart healthcare is a complex domain for systems integration due to human and technical factors and heterogeneous data sources involved. As a part of smart city, it is such a complex area where clinical functions require smartness of multi-systems collaborations for effective communications among departments, and radiology is one of the areas highly relies on intelligent information integration and communication. Therefore, it faces many challenges regarding integration and its interoperability such as information collision, heterogeneous data sources, policy obstacles, and procedure mismanagement. The purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of data, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability of systems integration in radiology department, and to develop a pragmatic interoperability framework for guiding the integration. We select an on-going project at a local hospital for undertaking our case study. The project is to achieve data sharing and interoperability among Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). Qualitative data collection and analysis methods are used. The data sources consisted of documentation including publications and internal working papers, one year of non-participant observations and 37 interviews with radiologists, clinicians, directors of IT services, referring clinicians, radiographers, receptionists and secretary. We identified four primary phases of data analysis process for the case study: requirements and barriers identification, integration approach, interoperability measurements, and knowledge foundations. Each phase is discussed and supported by qualitative data. Through the analysis we also develop a pragmatic interoperability framework that summaries the empirical findings and proposes recommendations for guiding the integration in the radiology context.

Developing a knowledge management system using an ontological approach in global organisation

This paper introduces an ontology-based knowledge model for knowledge management. This model can facilitate knowledge discovery that provides users with insight for decision making. The users requiring the insight normally play different roles with different requirements in an organisation. To meet the requirements, insights are created by purposely aggregated transnational data. This involves a semantic data integration process. In this paper, we present a knowledge management system which is capable of representing knowledge requirements in a domain context and enabling the semantic data integration through ontology modeling. The knowledge domain context of United Bible Societies is used to illustrate the features of the knowledge management capabilities.

Knowledge intensive processes characteristics and improvement: a banking best practice example

This paper identifies characteristics of knowledge intensive processes and a method to improve their performance based on analysis of investment banking front office processes. The inability to improve these processes using standard process improvement techniques confirmed that much of the process was not codified and depended on tacit knowledge and skills. This led to the use of a semi-structured analysis of the characteristics of the processes via a questionnaire to identify knowledge intensive processes characteristics that adds to existing theory. Further work identified innovative process analysis and change techniques that could generate improvements based on an analysis of their properties and the issue drivers. An improvement methodology was developed to harness a number of techniques that were found to effective in resolving the issue drivers and improving these knowledge intensive processes.

The mentoring of overseas trained teachers

Much research has been undertaken into the value of mentoring for beginning teachers. Less research has been done into the mentoring of Overseas Trained Teachers (OTTs). The studies that have been done suggest that mentors’ lack of cultural knowledge and of the pedagogical challenges faced by OTT-mentees may inhibit the integration of such teachers into school life. It may be that effective tailor-made training cannot be provided for OTTs by mentors whose skills or knowledge are insufficient. Lack of understanding of the cultural diversity of mentees may result, as studies show, in mentors failing to address relevant issues during the mentoring process. This study investigates the experiences of OTTs of mentorship in England, and suggests the importance of mentors having understanding of their culturally diverse OTT mentees. The implications of these findings in the context of recent teacher-training policy developments in England are discussed.

Operating models for a multi-polar world: balancing global integration and local responsiveness

Purpose – Multinationals have always needed an operating model that works – an effective plan for executing their most important activities at the right levels of their organization, whether globally, regionally or locally. The choices involved in these decisions have never been obvious, since international firms have consistently faced trade‐offs between tailoring approaches for diverse local markets and leveraging their global scale. This paper seeks a more in‐depth understanding of how successful firms manage the global‐local trade‐off in a multipolar world. Design methodology/approach – This paper utilizes a case study approach based on in‐depth senior executive interviews at several telecommunications companies including Tata Communications. The interviews probed the operating models of the companies we studied, focusing on their approaches to organization structure, management processes, management technologies (including information technology (IT)) and people/talent. Findings – Successful companies balance global‐local trade‐offs by taking a flexible and tailored approach toward their operating‐model decisions. The paper finds that successful companies, including Tata Communications, which is profiled in‐depth, are breaking up the global‐local conundrum into a set of more manageable strategic problems – what the authors call “pressure points” – which they identify by assessing their most important activities and capabilities and determining the global and local challenges associated with them. They then design a different operating model solution for each pressure point, and repeat this process as new strategic developments emerge. By doing so they not only enhance their agility, but they also continually calibrate that crucial balance between global efficiency and local responsiveness. Originality/value – This paper takes a unique approach to operating model design, finding that an operating model is better viewed as several distinct solutions to specific “pressure points” rather than a single and inflexible model that addresses all challenges equally. Now more than ever, developing the right operating model is at the top of multinational executives' priorities, and an area of increasing concern; the international business arena has changed drastically, requiring thoughtfulness and flexibility instead of standard formulas for operating internationally. Old adages like “think global and act local” no longer provide the universal guidance they once seemed to.

Knowledge process outsourcing in financial services: The vendor perspective

This research reports the findings from a study on nine knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) vendors working in the financial services industry. It delineates financial business processes along a low to high-end continuum. Findings suggest that KPO vendors are gradually moving along the value pathway offering more complex intellectual value activity based products and services to clients. However, they face many challenges including gaining the confidence of potential clients about outsourcing knowledge-intensive work, and finding effective solutions to mitigate outsourcing risk. Our paper concludes by developing a taxonomy of KPO scenarios to provide a backdrop for further academic research and to illustrate current practice.

Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience (SHEAR) scoping study: Annex 3 - Early warning system and risk assessment case studies

This report provides case studies of Early Warning Systems (EWSs) and risk assessments encompassing three main hazard types: drought; flood and cyclone. The case studies are taken from ten countries across three continents (focusing on Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean). The case studies have been developed to assist the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to prioritise areas for Early Warning System (EWS) related research under their ‘Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience’ (SHEAR) programme. The aim of these case studies is to ensure that DFID SHEAR research is informed by the views of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and communities engaged with Early Warning Systems and risk assessments (including community-based Early Warning Systems). The case studies highlight a number of challenges facing Early Warning Systems (EWSs). These challenges relate to financing; integration; responsibilities; community interpretation; politics; dissemination; accuracy; capacity and focus. The case studies summarise a number of priority areas for EWS related research: • Priority 1: Contextualising and localising early warning information • Priority 2: Climate proofing current EWSs • Priority 3: How best to sustain effective EWSs between hazard events? • Priority 4: Optimising the dissemination of risk and warning information • Priority 5: Governance and financing of EWSs • Priority 6: How to support EWSs under challenging circumstances • Priority 7: Improving EWSs through monitoring and evaluating the impact and effectiveness of those systems