Higher education engagement in leadership development: using autobiographical narrative to understand potential impact

The paper explores the lived experience of leadership learning and development in a single case study of an entrepreneur participating in a major leadership development programme for owner-managers of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Based on autobiographical research, it provides a rich contextual account of the nature and underlying influences of leadership learning throughout the life-course, and as a consequence of participation in the programme. Whilst the paper should interest scholars, policy makers, and those concerned with programme development, it may also resonate with entrepreneurs and help them make sense of their experience of leadership development.

Public–private partnerships in Russia: dynamics contributing to an emerging policy paradigm

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are new in Russia and represent project implementation in progress. The government is actively pursuing PPP deployment in sectors such as transportation and urban infrastructure, and at all levels including federal, regional and especially local. Despite the lack of pertinent laws and regulations, the PPP public policy quickly transforms into a policy paradigm that provides simplified concepts and solutions and intensifies partnership development. The article delineates an emerging model of Russia’s PPP policy paradigm, whose structure includes the shared understanding of the need for long-term collaboration between the public sector and business, a changing set of government responsibilities that imply an increasing private provision of public services, and new institutional capacities. This article critically appraises the principal dynamics that contribute to an emerging PPP policy paradigm, namely the broad government treatment of the meaning of a partnership and of a contractual PPP; a liberal PPP approval process that lacks clear guidelines and consistency across regions; excessive emphasis on positive PPP externalities and neglect of drawbacks; and unjustifiably extensive government financial support to PPPs. Whilst a paradigm appears to be useful specifically for the policy purpose of PPP expansion, it may also mask inefficiencies such as higher prices of public services and greater government risks.

How much flower-rich habitat is enough for wild pollinators? Answering a key policy question with incomplete knowledge

In 2013, an opportunity arose in England to develop an agri-environment package for wild pollinators, as part of the new Countryside Stewardship scheme launched in 2015. It can be understood as a 'policy window', a rare and time-limited opportunity to change policy, supported by a narrative about pollinator decline and widely supported mitigating actions. An agri-environment package is a bundle of management options that together supply sufficient resources to support a target group of species. This paper documents information that was available at the time to develop such a package for wild pollinators. Four questions needed answering: (1) Which pollinator species should be targeted? (2) Which resources limit these species in farmland? (3) Which management options provide these resources? (4) What area of each option is needed to support populations of the target species? Focussing on wild bees, we provide tentative answers that were used to inform development of the package. There is strong evidence that floral resources can limit wild bee populations, and several sources of evidence identify a set of agri-environment options that provide flowers and other resources for pollinators. The final question could only be answered for floral resources, with a wide range of uncertainty. We show that the areas of some floral resource options in the basic Wild Pollinator and Farmland Wildlife Package (2% flower-rich habitat and 1 km flowering hedgerow), are sufficient to supply a set of six common pollinator species with enough pollen to feed their larvae at lowest estimates, using minimum values for estimated parameters where a range was available. We identify key sources of uncertainty, and stress the importance of keeping the Package flexible, so it can be revised as new evidence emerges about how to achieve the policy aim of supporting pollinators on farmland.

Chronic Diseases: Chronic Diseases and Development 2 Health, agricultural, and economic effects of adoption of healthy diet recommendations

Transition to diets that are high in saturated fat and sugar has caused a global public health concern as the pattern of food consumption is a mayor modifiable risk factor for chronic non-communicable diseases Although agri food systems are intimately associated with this transition, agriculture and health sectors are largely disconnected in their priorities policy, and analysis with neither side considering the complex inter relation between agri trade patterns of food consumption health, and development We show the importance of connection of these perspectives through estimation of the effect of adopting a healthy diet on population health, agricultural production trade the economy and livelihoods, with a computable general equilibrium approach On the basis of case studies from the UK and Brazil we suggest that benefits of a healthy diet policy will vary substantially between different populations, not only because of population dietary intake but also because of agricultural production trade and other economic factors

Health in Brazil 6 Health conditions and health-policy innovations in Brazil: the way forward

Brazil is a large complex country that is undergoing rapid economic, social, and environmental change In this Series of six articles, we have reported important improvements in health status and life expectancy, which can be ascribed largely to progress in social determinants of health and to implementation of a comprehensive national health system with strong social participation. Many challenges remain, however. Socioeconomic and regional disparities are still unacceptably large, reflecting the fact that much progress is still needed to improve basic living conditions for a large proportion of the population. New health problems arise as a result of urbanisation and social and environmental change, and some old health issues remain unabated. Administration of a complex, decentralised public-health system, in which a large share of services is contracted out to the private sector, together with many private insurance providers, inevitably causes conflict and contradiction. The challenge is ultimately political, and we conclude with a call for action that requires continuous engagement by Brazilian society as a whole in securing the right to health for all Brazilian people.

The perception of accessibility in Web development by academy, industry and government: a survey of the Brazilian scenario

Accessibility has become a serious issue to be considered by various sectors of the society. However, what are the differences between the perception of accessibility by academy, government and industry? In this paper, we present an analysis of this issue based on a large survey carried out with 613 participants involved with Web development, from all of the 27 Brazilian states. The paper presents results from the data analysis for each sector, along with statistical tests regarding the main different issues related to each of the sectors, such as: government and law, industry and techniques, academy and education. The concern about accessibility law is poor even amongst people from government sector. The analyses have also pointed out that the academy has not been addressing accessibility training accordingly. The knowledge about proper techniques to produce accessible contents is better than other sectors`, but still limited in industry. Stronger investments in training and in the promotion of consciousness about the law may be pointed as the most important tools to help a more effective policy on Web accessibility in Brazil.

Modeling and illustrating requirement prioritization in public e-service development from a value-based perspective

A major problem in e-service development is the prioritization of the requirements of different stakeholders. The main stakeholders are governments and their citizens, all of whom have different and sometimes conflicting requirements. In this paper, the prioritization problem is addressed by combining a value-based approach with an illustration technique. This paper examines the following research question: How can multiple stakeholder requirements be illustrated from a value-based perspective in order to be prioritizable? We used an e-service development case taken from a Swedish municipality to elaborate on our approach. Our contributions are: 1) a model of the relevant domains for requirement prioritization for government, citizens, technology, finances and laws and regulations; and 2) a requirement fulfillment analysis tool (RFA) that consists of a requirement-goal-value matrix (RGV), and a calculation and illustration module (CIM). The model reduces cognitive load, helps developers to focus on value fulfillment in e-service development and supports them in the formulation of requirements. It also offers an input to public policy makers, should they aim to target values in the design of e-services.

Implementing Policy Management through BDI

The requirement for Grid middleware to be largely transparent to individual users and at the same time act in accordance with their personal needs is a difficult challenge. In e-science scenarios, users cannot be repeatedly interrogated for each operational decision made when enacting experiments on the Grid. It is thus important to specify and enforce policies that enable the environment to be configured to take user preferences into account automatically. In particular, we need to consider the context in which these policies are applied, because decisions are based not only on the rules of the policy but also on the current state of the system. Consideration of context is explicitly addressed, in the agent perspective, when deciding how to balance the achievement of goals and reaction to the environment. One commonly-applied abstraction that balances reaction to multiple events with context-based reasoning in the way suggested by our requirements is the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture, which has proven successful in many applications. In this paper, we argue that BDI is an appropriate model for policy enforcement, and describe the application of BDI to policy enforcement in personalising Grid service discovery. We show how this has been implemented in the myGrid registry to provide bioinformaticians with control over the services returned to them by the service discovery process.