113,176 research outputs found

    The Political Economy Of Sanitation: How Can We Increase Investment and Improve Service For The Poor?

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    This report presents the results of a Global Economic and Sector Work (ESW) Study on the Political Economy of Sanitation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Senegal that was conducted by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) and the World Bank. Its purpose is to help WSP and the World Bank -- through a better understanding of the political economy of sanitation -- in their efforts to support partner countries and development practitioners in the design, implementation, and effectiveness of operations that aim to provide pro-poor sanitation investments and services to improve health and hygiene outcomes

    Review of CCAFS Scaling Activities

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    This review was commissioned by CCAFS Learning Platform for Partnerships and Capacity Building for Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture, with the aim to reflect on CCAFS project portfolio to highlight good practices and gaps in implementation of CCAFS Scaling Activities. The review was undertaken with a systemic approach, using the concepts of design thinking and system thinking throughout its methodology and analysis. 21 practitioners throughout CCAFS regional, flagship and learning platform portfolios were interviewed between March and May 2019. The results are presented in a way that allows CCAFS to identify areas to deepen systematically upon; areas for CCAFS’s further strategic or conceptual support, and areas that require more research by CCAFS. The systemic analysis shows that CCAFS has the potential to consciously transform into a learning organization and an innovation environment, thereby fostering and increasing its performance, relevance and overall impact in changing and challenging circumstances. The results were discussed and validated with the CCAFS Core Team (CT) in the frame of a CCAFS CT Workshop on Scaling on 15th May in Madrid. In open learning formats, the CT prioritized its next step. The review report further contains a set of recommendations, derived from both the review and the CT Workshop on Scaling, which shall help CCAFS to transform into both a learning organization and an innovation environment

    Influence Strategies in Shareholder Engagement: A Case Study of Five Swedish National Pension Funds

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    Investors spend money and resources trying to reduce the environmental, social, and governance risks in companies they own. If unattended, these risks may cause reputational damage not only to the portfolio firm, but also to its owner. In this paper, we study five Swedish national pension funds and the influence strategies used in shareholder engagement. Knowledge about influence strategies is important because successful shareholder engagements can lead to more sustainable corporate behaviour and a lower risk to the investor. Our findings show that, besides traditional power and legitimacy dependencies which have been reported as influential in deciding stakeholder salience, we present five additional factors in determining influence strategies in shareholder engagement. We provide a conceptual model showing how these factors interlink with choices of influence strategies, offering a practical use of this study. Stakeholder theory has been used as our theoretical frame of reference, based on existing influence strategy literature taken from the stakeholder–firm perspective.case study; ESG directive; influence strategy; pension funds; reputation risk; responsible investment; shareholder engagement; shareholder salience; stakeholder theory

    ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

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    Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

    Strategic principles and capacity building for a whole-of-systems approaches to physical activity

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    Mobilizing Communities to Support the Literacy Development of Urban Youth: A Conceptual Framework and Strategic Planning Model

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    Offers a strategic planning model for community mobilization around adolescent literacy development. Explores spheres of influence; strategies for schools, community groups, and families; outcomes; and lessons learned from other community change efforts

    Creating Social Value within the Delivery of Construction Projects

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    The purpose of this paper is to present the current knowledge surrounding social value and show how lean approach supports social value realisation in the delivery of construction projects. A critical literature review was adopted, to gather the current knowledge surrounding social value from mainstream management sciences, construction management and lean literature. A total of 70 studies were critically reviewed. The study reveals that the separation theory propagated by Friedman, (1962), tends to separate social value from economic value, thus making organisations care less about delivering social value. The study found that there is still no clear or single criterion for measuring social value delivered and there is a dearth of scholarly publications on social value especially in construction management literature. The investigation shows that lean production approach has the potentials to enable construction organisations to conceptualise the community and the physical environment where they operate as customers, which contributes to the delivery of social value objectives in construction projects. This study conceptualises the community and the physical environment around where the construction project is executed as customers using lean production approach and shows that the Transformation, Flow & Value view support smooth workflow which enhances the achievement of social value objectives. This creates a new insight into how social value can be realised in construction project delivery. This study extends the on-going debate around the need for social value in construction project delivery and contributes to construction management and lean construction literature on social value. Future studies could build on this to obtain empirical data and develop an approach/method that would support the evidencing of social value delivery in construction projects

    Business Models for Sustainable Finance: The Case Study of Social Impact Bonds

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    Business models for sustainability (BMfS) are relevant topics on research agendas, given their orientation toward sustainability issues. However, traditional versions of these models are often ill-equipped at solving complex social problems. Cross-sector partnerships for sustainability (CSPfS) have been recognized as a new paradigm that mitigates the failure of traditional models. Impact investing, and social impact bonds (SIBs) in particular, represent an interesting field of research in innovative business models for sustainable finance, even though the literature does not consider SIBs within this broader field. We propose an exploratory study based on qualitative methods aimed at conceptualizing SIBs within the framework of BMfS and understanding how SIB collaboration varies across social sectors and geographical areas. Our study identifies three different models of SIBs characterized by the different degrees of collaboration between actors: (i) SIB as a fully collaborative partnership; (ii) SIB as a low-collaborative partnership; and (iii) SIB as a partially collaborative partnership. Our findings are useful to policy makers and practitioners involved in the SIB design, suggesting that a fully collaborative SIB model may stand a better chance of achieving the expected social impacts

    Complex City Systems

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    Information and communications technology (ICT) is being exploited within cities to enable them to better compete in a global knowledge-based service-led economy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cities exploited large technical systems (LTSs) such as the telegraph, telephony, electrical networks, and other technologies to enhance their social and economic position. This paper examines how the LTS model applies to ICT deployments, including broadband network, municipal wireless, and related services, and how cities and city planners in the twenty-first century are using or planning to use these technologies. This paper also examines their motivations and expectations, the contribution to date, and the factors affecting outcomes. The findings extend the LTS model by proposing an increased role for organizations with respect to an individual agency. The findings show how organizations form themselves into networks that interact and influence the outcome of the system at the level of the city. The extension to LTS, in the context of city infrastructure, is referred to as the complex city system framework. This proposed framework integrates the role of these stakeholder networks, as well as that of the socioeconomic, technical, and spatial factors within a city, and shows how together they shape the technical system and its socioeconomic contribution. The CCS framework has been presented at Digital Cities Conferences in Eindhoven, Barcelona, Taiwan, London and at IBM’s Global Smart Cities Conference in Shanghai between 2010 and 2012. Its finding are timely in the context of major policy decisions on investments at regional, national and international level on ICT infrastructure and related service transformation, as well as the governance of such projects, their planning and their deployment
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