Laying the Foundation: An Analytical Tool for Assessing Legal and Institutional Readiness for PES

This booklet has been created as an initial resource for public sector officials interested in fostering an environment in which PES transactions can occur. While PES legal and policy readiness is likely to look very different from one country to another -- depending on legal frameworks, as well as historical and current circumstances and pressures -- understanding policy options for getting ready for PES transactions is an important first step towards assessing readiness within a specific national and subnational context.This booklet offers an analytical framework for assessing legal and institutional readiness for PES transactions. It is divided into three sections based on timing and the order of addressing issues, with an eye to what will be most important to investors and buyers in payment for ecosystem services agreements. Specifically, the first level of preparing for PES agreements should be ensuring that fundamental or threshold conditions are in place for buyers to feel that there is sufficient stability in place to consider entering in these business arrangements. The second level of preparedness, while important for well-functioning PES, may be developed adaptively as needs and options become clearer via PES experience on the ground. Finally, level three includes non-urgent aspects that may be important to streamline or scale up PES, depending on the particular circumstances

A nomological network of e-government evaluation

An emergent epistemology has been developing in the field of e-government evaluation as disparate attempts are made in the literature to evaluate and measure different aspects of e-government. To formalize it, this paper proposes a nomological network as an organizing concept for plotting e-government evaluation research. It proposes different forms of evaluation, pre-evaluation, ex-ante, in-itenere, and ex-post as fulfilling different and complementary roles in e-government evaluation. E-Government concepts such as agenda, strategy, processes, and performance are plotted within the nomological network with matching modes of evaluation

A Developmental Perspective on College & Workplace Readiness

Reviews research on and identifies the physical, psychological, social, cognitive, and spiritual competencies high school graduates need to transition into college, the workplace, and adulthood. Includes strategies for meeting disadvantaged youths' needs

Measuring the Quality of Developmental Services for Young Children: A New Approach

Outlines performance measures for Medicaid and other agencies' assessment of developmental services, including screening and referring children with or at risk for developmental disabilities; interventions; and guidance for parents. Explores barriers

Measuring the Information Society in Europe: From Definitions to Description

Information Society (IS) indicators describe the level of information society development achieved in a particular society in quantitative terms. They can serve a range of purposes related to providing a view of the society’s state: for example, following the evolution of IS or benchmarking IS with other territories. By considering changes over time, IS indicators also comprise a critical tool in the monitoring, evaluation and improvement of IS policy. Inevitably, the primary benefit of indicators lies in this capacity to guide policy-makers into proactive thinking i.e. to focus their attention on future priorities. The aims of this article are to examine how the evolution of the information society has been measured, and to relate European territories with each other by these measures. Constructing a comprehensive set of IS indicators requires a sound definition of the Information Society to establish meaningful benchmarks and to measure change. The task becomes complicated as it seems that IS is more or less ‘undefined’ at the moment. This means that IS is what one wants it to be: countries held as “information societies†are those countries, which people think of being such – and not defined by, for example, achieving a level measured by some quantitative IS-related indicators. Tentative results show that despite this lack of a clear and single definition of Information Society (IS) one can derive some conclusions about what IS consists of by taking a look at previous IS projects having collected IS indicators. They indicate three different levels of IS. These levels range from the narrow technological and the intermediate techno-economic definitions to the broad, all-inclusive IS definition. The indicators used to measure IS can also be grouped by a lifecycle model. While there seems to be a lack of available consistent territorial data on IS, there is plenty of data available on the national level. Using this data and background variables the European state of IS is analyzed from a territorial perspective. This article is an outgrowth of the ESPON project “Identification of Spatially Relevant aspects of the Information Societyâ€.

Towards a network government? A critical analysis of current assessment methods for e-government

Contemporary public administrations have become increasingly more complex, having to cordinate actions with emerging actors in the public and the private spheres. In this scenario the modern ICTs have begun to be seen as an ideal vehicle to resolve some of the problems of public administration. We argue that there is a clear need to explore the extent to which public administrations are undergoing a process of transformation towards a netowork government linked to the systematic incorporation of ICTs in their basic activities. Through critically analysing a selection of e-government evaluation reports, we conclude that research should be carried out if we are to build a solid government assessment framework based on network-like organisation characteristics

A Conceptual Framework for Studying the Sources of Variation in Program Effects

Evaluations of public programs in many fields reveal that (1) different types of programs (or different versions of the same program) vary in their effectiveness, (2) a program that is effective for one group of people might not be effective for other groups of people, and (3) a program that is effective in one set of circumstances may not be effective in other circumstances. This paper presents a conceptual framework for research on such variation in program effects and the sources of this variation. The framework is intended to help researchers -- both those who focus mainly on studying program implementation and those who focus mainly on estimating program effects -- see how their respective pieces fit together in a way that helps to identify factors that explain variation in program effects and thereby support more systematic data collection on these factors. The ultimate goal of the framework is to enable researchers to offer better guidance to policymakers and program operators on the conditions and practices that are associated with larger and more positive effects

Measuring organisational readiness for patient engagement (MORE) : an international online Delphi consensus study

Date of Acceptance: 28/01/2015. © 2015 Oostendorp et al.; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedWidespread implementation of patient engagement by organisations and clinical teams is not a reality yet. The aim of this study is to develop a measure of organisational readiness for patient engagement designed to monitor and facilitate a healthcare organisation’s willingness and ability to effectively implement patient engagement in healthcarePeer reviewedFinal Published versio