39,337 research outputs found
challenges to multi-level capacity building
Communities facing the effects of climate change are actively trying to boost
their resilience. At the same time, governments are mainstreaming climate
change into their development frameworks. Close examination of current
practice, however, points at a disconnect between government policy and
community initiatives. This study explores how strengthening specific
capabilities at various levels can ensure synchronization of policy and
practice and further community resilience in face of climate change. Choosing
an approach that appreciates the interplay of top-‐down and bottom-‐up
logics towards performance under stress, it illust rates that understanding
resilience in terms of capacity opens the door to practical thinking on
policies as well as practices. Evidence is taken from case studies in Chile
and Vietnam to show how governments can play an enabling role when connecting
their efforts to initiatives taken by communities. At the same time,
top-‐down structures, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), can help
to break silos between different (inter)national political agendas and
underscore the need to link top-‐down and bottom-‐up approaches to ensure
resilience. This paper contends that improving communities' adaptive capacity
demands bridging the disconnect between multiple levels of policy and
practice. In doing so, different, and too often conflicting, values,
interests, and political agendas need to be aligned. Moreconcretely, we found
that resilience, as an emergent property of human systems, can be enhanced
when government and local stakeholders work together in a number of specific
areas. For instance, combining multi-‐stakeholder platforms in which diverse
actors – ranging from policy-‐makers to researchers to community
representatives – translate lessons learned at the community level intolocal
and national policy, with initiatives aimed at strengthening capacitiesand
ensuring access to relevant assets at the community level
Harnessing Higher-Order (Meta-)Logic to Represent and Reason with Complex Ethical Theories
The computer-mechanization of an ambitious explicit ethical theory, Gewirth's
Principle of Generic Consistency, is used to showcase an approach for
representing and reasoning with ethical theories exhibiting complex logical
features like alethic and deontic modalities, indexicals, higher-order
quantification, among others. Harnessing the high expressive power of Church's
type theory as a meta-logic to semantically embed a combination of quantified
non-classical logics, our work pushes existing boundaries in knowledge
representation and reasoning. We demonstrate that intuitive encodings of
complex ethical theories and their automation on the computer are no longer
antipodes.Comment: 14 page
Institutions and Rules.
This short statement has three aims. First, it suggests that rules and institutionsare a convenient and productive entrypoint for analysing capitalism and mainstream proposals for its reform. But it also suggests that analyses cannot stop there if adequate critiques and alternative strategies are to be developed. Above all we need to move beyond rules and institutions to examine the microfoundations of institutions in particular subjectivities, cognitive frames, modes of calculation, norms of conduct, and forms of embodiment; and to study the macro-contexts that emerge from interaction among institutions and shape this interaction in a complex dialectic of path-shaping and path-dependency. It also suggests how to move beyond rules and institutions. Second, this statement proposes a distinctive theoretical approach based on a combination of trans- and post-disciplinary modes of inquiry. It argues that these can inform both our collective intellectual endeavours and also provide the basis for a critical popular pedagogy. And, third, it identifies some key issues for a research agenda on the political and ethical dimensions of contemporary economic activities. In the spirit of the PEKEA project, our statement is not concerned to provide yet another critique of orthodox economics (for which, see Hodgson 1989; North 1990; Rutherford 1994). Instead we emphasize the socially embedded, socially regularized nature of market economies and address changing economic norms and modes of calculation. This leads us to approach capitalism very broadly in terms of the overall ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized and strategically selective institutions, organizations, social forces and actions that are involved in sustaining the wage-relation, a labour process and more general system of production organized in terms of profitand- loss, and a complex balance between competition and cooperation among different capitals. Seen in these terms capitalist relations of production are not just economic but is also (always, necessarily) extra-economic. In pursuing these ideas should help to provide a clearer account of the inherently political aspects of contemporary capitalism
A Framework for Combining Defeasible Argumentation with Labeled Deduction
In the last years, there has been an increasing demand of a variety of
logical systems, prompted mostly by applications of logic in AI and other
related areas. Labeled Deductive Systems (LDS) were developed as a flexible
methodology to formalize such a kind of complex logical systems. Defeasible
argumentation has proven to be a successful approach to formalizing commonsense
reasoning, encompassing many other alternative formalisms for defeasible
reasoning. Argument-based frameworks share some common notions (such as the
concept of argument, defeater, etc.) along with a number of particular features
which make it difficult to compare them with each other from a logical
viewpoint. This paper introduces LDSar, a LDS for defeasible argumentation in
which many important issues concerning defeasible argumentation are captured
within a unified logical framework. We also discuss some logical properties and
extensions that emerge from the proposed framework.Comment: 15 pages, presented at CMSRA Workshop 2003. Buenos Aires, Argentin
Internal representation and factional faultlines as antecedents for board performance in social enterprises
There is an increasing scholarly interest in how social enterprises manage their hybrid nature. As hybrid organizational forms, social enterprises combine mission-driven social goals and revenue generating activities in a variety of organizational constellations and in diverse institutional contexts. Acknowledging the potentially conflicting demands that institutional environments impose on social enterprises there is an increasing research interest in the existence and proliferation of these conflicting demands at the organizational level. Some researchers have pointed to the importance of particular management practices and governance characteristics – such as authority relations and internal representation – as mechanisms to deal with the conflicting demands at the organizational level. This paper adds to this stream of literature by taking into account the organizational level dynamics of internal representation and the proliferation of factional groups in the boards of directors of hybrid organizational forms and their impact on board performance, ultimately influencing
the organizational performance
Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support
A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering
of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The
overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and
governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal
framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic
combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic
higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of
powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model
finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent
agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations,
with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same
time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further
ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the
LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence
that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure
Combining Spatial and Temporal Logics: Expressiveness vs. Complexity
In this paper, we construct and investigate a hierarchy of spatio-temporal
formalisms that result from various combinations of propositional spatial and
temporal logics such as the propositional temporal logic PTL, the spatial
logics RCC-8, BRCC-8, S4u and their fragments. The obtained results give a
clear picture of the trade-off between expressiveness and computational
realisability within the hierarchy. We demonstrate how different combining
principles as well as spatial and temporal primitives can produce NP-, PSPACE-,
EXPSPACE-, 2EXPSPACE-complete, and even undecidable spatio-temporal logics out
of components that are at most NP- or PSPACE-complete
Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability
Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate
mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software
specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems.
Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually
prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each
of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that
attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with
state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling
language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software
modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows
capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control
models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language
is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for
modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling
behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive
syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover
hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property
patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it
against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL,
Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using
a single notation for the purpose
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