Unleashing the Potential of US Foundation Endowments: Using Responsible Investment to Strengthen Endowment Oversight and Enhance Impact

A small but growing number of US foundations are investigating or pursuing sustainable and responsible investing approaches -- often employing such terms as mission-related investing or impact investing. They are embracing the notion that in addition to making grants, they can employ investment and shareowner strategies across their assets to help achieve positive societal outcomes and targeted financial returns. This report is designed for foundation staff and trustees who are interested in encouraging their institutions to align a broader portion of their assets under management with their programmatic goals or to factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues into their investment decisions to help fulfill fiduciary duties. Practitioners in the sustainable and responsible investment industry who serve foundations, including consultants, research providers, financial advisors, and investment managers, can also benefit from the information and resources in this paper.Using extensive data from primary and secondary resources, this paper presents the current range and state of involvement by foundations in sustainable and responsible investing (SRI) and profiles a number of foundations whose approaches to SRI have resulted in meaningful environmental, social or corporate governance outcomes. It demonstrates that it is feasible for foundations to invest their endowments in alignment with their mission and ESG issues of concern, while at the same time achieving their overall financial goals. This report also details a range of resources, including many that have emerged just in the past few years, available to foundations in their efforts to explore SRI. Last, the report offers recommendations and ideas for foundation officers and trustees to enable them to guide their institutions into this space

Trends in Smart City Development

This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems

The Strategic Balance of Centralized Control and Localized Flexibility in Two-Tier ERP Systems

Two-tier ERP systems are an increasingly popular technology strategy for large, multinational enterprises. This paper examines how two-tier ERP enables organizations to balance centralized control and coordination at the corporate level with localized flexibility and responsiveness at the division/subsidiary level. The tier 1 ERP system handles core tasks like HR, finance, and IT using highly customized solutions tailored to the large corporate entity's needs, scale, and sophistication. This promotes enterprise-wide process standardization and centralized control. Meanwhile, the tier 2 ERP systems utilized by smaller subsidiaries and regional offices are less resource intensive and more configurable to address localized requirements. Tier 2 gives local divisions more control over their ERP to enable flexibility and responsiveness. This research analyzes the key drivers pushing large multinationals towards two-tier ERP, including managing complexity across global operations, enabling centralized coordination while allowing localization, integrating dispersed IT infrastructures, and controlling implementation costs. The paper explores the unique characteristics and benefits of tier 1 and tier 2 ERP systems in depth, providing concrete examples. Critical considerations for successfully deploying two-tier ERP are also examined, such as integration, change management, and striking the right balance between standardization and localization. The conclusion reached is that two-tier ERP delivers important synergistic benefits for large enterprises through its centralized/decentralized dual structure. The tier 1/tier 2 approach balances the key needs for coordination and control at the center with flexibility at the edges. However, careful planning is required for effective two-tier ERP implementation. The optimal balance between standardization and localization must be struck to fully realize the strategic potential. This research provides important insights for both academic study and real-world application of two-tier ERP systems

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design Institutional Story

The principal outputs of the PiP Project surround the Course and Class Approval (C-CAP) system. This web-based system built on Microsoft SharePoint addresses and resolves many of the issues identified by the project. Generally well received by both academic and support staff, the system provides personalised views, adaptive forms and contextualised support for all phases of the approval process. Although the system deliberately encapsulates and facilitates existing approval processes thus achieving buy-in, it is already achieving significant improvements over the previous processes, not only in reducing the administrative overheads but also in supporting curriculum design and academic quality. The system is now embedded across three faculties and is now considered by the University of Strathclyde to be a "core institutional service". Alongside the C-CAP system the PiP Project also cultivated a suite of approaches: an incremental systems development methodology; a structured and replicable evaluation approach, and; Strathclyde's Lean Approach to Efficiencies in Education Kit (SLEEK) business process improvement methodology Each is based on recognised formal techniques, providing the basis for a rigorous approach. This is contextualised within and adapted to the HE institutional context thus building the foundation not only for the project but ultimately for institution wide process improvement. This "institutional story" report summarises the principal outcomes of the Project

The governance of public bodies in times of austerity

Private sector governance arrangements have been imported into UK public bodies under the influence of New Public Management reforms. This paper draws on a cohort study of 14 public bodies to assess the appropriateness of this practice and the impact of fiscal austerity during the study period of 2010–16. Based on multiple sources, including interviews with Chairs and Chief Executives, it shows that, though similar to private corporate Boards in appearance, public Boards are often excluded from the strategy role. They are also vulnerable to the elastic definition of policy over which Ministers assert dominance, thereby blurring accountability. It demonstrates the tension between vertical accountability to government principals and horizontal accountability to stakeholders. During the study window, public bodies were abolished, broken up, merged, reconfigured or taken back into core government, as the UK Government imposed austerity measures to reduce the size of the fiscal deficit and to diminish government roles in delivery, financing and regulation of public services. Surviving public bodies in the study suffered deep budget cuts and less autonomy from central control. These findings are interpreted as evidence of the re-territorialisation of the UK public sector, with accruals accounting and accounting consolidation practices playing a facilitating role

Strengthening Managing for Impact in Eastern and Southern Africa : Grant Completion Report

The Strengthening Managing for Impact Programme (SMIP) was a pilot initiative established to test the extent to which the use of the Managing for Impact (M4I) approach could enhance the impact of pro-poor interventions for greater development effectiveness. This programme was implemented in the Eastern and Southern Africa region (including French speaking countries) from 2006 till the end of 2009 and was largely funded by IFAD. A partnership was developed between Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation (formerly part of Wageningen International), Khanya6aicdd, IFPRI6IKCD (formerly IFPRI/ISNAR) and Haramaya University (in a joint partnership ‘Carmpolea’); and the Impact Alliance

Empowering protest through social media

Advances in personal communications devices including smartphones, are enabling individuals to establish and form virtual communities in cyberspace. Such platforms now allow users to be in continuous contact, enabling them to receive information in real time, which allows them to act in support of other members of their network. This paper will discuss some of the capabilities afforded by social media to protest groups focused on civil disobedience. Direct action protests are now a common sight at gatherings of world leaders, most notably the meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, the G20 meetings in Melbourne in 2006 and Toronto in 2010. Facebook and Twitter are becoming recognised as key mediums from which to drive change, exert influence and strategically and tactically outmaneuver conventional police deployments at protests. Police charged with managing protest activity now need to operate in both the physical and cyber worlds simultaneously

Lucian Bebchuk and the Study of Corporate Governance

It is with great pleasure that I write this Essay about Lucian Bebchuk, the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Bebchuk has made fundamental, influential, and lasting contributions to the field of corporate governance and has mentored an exceptional number of corporate scholars. He has also been my own mentor and main doctoral supervisor, and the ten years that I have worked with him as a student, fellow, and coauthor have been an incomparable learning experience. This Essay provides a brief account of Bebchuk’s pro-found contributions to the field of corporate governance and his major impact on scholarship, practice, and policy. The field of corporate governance strives to understand how corporate rules, arrangements, and structures governing the relationships among various participants (directors, executives, shareholders, and other stakeholders) affect value creation. As discussed below, Bebchuk’s research has shed considerable light on the field and created a basis for subsequent research on a wide range of issues. In the course of his career, Bebchuk has published more than one hundred articles in the corporate field, and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has ranked him as fourth among all law professors in all fields—and first among all corporate law scholars—in terms of citations to his work. These numbers, however, tell only part of the story. Below I try to provide a fuller picture. Part I discusses Bebchuk’s contributions. I first consider the broad range of areas in corporate governance to which Bebchuk’s work has made major and influential contributions. I then consider certain aspects of Bebchuk’s research that have made it so consequential and led others to engage with it, whether by agreeing with and building on it or by presenting alternative positions that address his insights. Here, I also discuss Bebchuk’s tools and modes of analysis and some of the overarching themes and approaches shared by his work in disparate areas. Part II then discusses Bebchuk’s impact. I first show how his studies have shaped and influenced subsequent academic work as well as discourse among practitioners and policy makers. I then consider the influence he has had through his mentorship of many important corporate scholars. I conclude in Part III by discussing the substantial imprint his work has made on the evolution of policy and practice in the corporate field. Due to space limitations, I will not discuss the significant contributions that Bebchuk has made outside the corporate field, especially in the earlier stages of his academic career. Here, it must suffice to mention that he has made significant contributions to the study of contracts, consumer law, property, settlement decisions suits made solely to extract a settlement offer, fee-shifting rules, enforcement, antitrust remedies, regulation of financial crises, and the normative foundations of law and economics. However, over time, he has been increasingly focused on the corporate field, and this Essay will be devoted exclusively to his contributions to this field

Privacy self-regulation and the changing role of the state: from public law to social and technical mechanisms of governance

This paper provides a structured overview of different self-governance mechanisms for privacy and data protection in the corporate world, with a special focus on Internet privacy. It also looks at the role of the state, and how it has related to privacy self-governance over time. While early data protection started out as law-based regulation by nation-states, transnational self-governance mechanisms have become more important due to the rise of global telecommunications and the Internet. Reach, scope, precision and enforcement of these industry codes of conduct vary a lot. The more binding they are, the more limited is their reach, though they - like the state-based instruments for privacy protection - are becoming more harmonised and global in reach nowadays. These social codes of conduct are developed by the private sector with limited participation of official data protection commissioners, public interest groups, or international organisations. Software tools - technical codes - for online privacy protection can give back some control over their data to individual users and customers, but only have limited reach and applications. The privacy-enhancing design of network infrastructures and database architectures is still mainly developed autonomously by the computer and software industry. Here, we can recently find a stronger, but new role of the state. Instead of regulating data processors directly, governments and oversight agencies now focus more on the intermediaries - standards developers, large software companies, or industry associations. And instead of prescribing and penalising, they now rely more on incentive-structures like certifications or public funding for social and technical self-governance instruments of privacy protection. The use of technology as an instrument and object of regulation is thereby becoming more popular, but the success of this approach still depends on the social codes and the underlying norms which technology is supposed to embed. --

Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power

This report highlights and contextualises four cross-cutting interventions with a strong potential to reshape the digital ecosystem: 1. Transforming infrastructure into open and interoperable ecosystems. 2. Reclaiming control of data from dominant companies. 3. Rebalancing the centres of power with new (non-commercial) institutions. 4. Ensuring public participation as an essential component of technology policymaking. The interventions are multidisciplinary and they integrate legal, technological, market and governance solutions. They offer a path towards addressing present digital challenges and the possibility for a new, healthy digital ecosystem to emerge. What do we mean by a healthy digital ecosystem? One that privileges people over profit, communities over corporations, society over shareholders. And, most importantly, one where power is not held by a few large corporations, but is distributed among different and diverse models, alongside people who are represented in, and affected by the data used by those new models. The digital ecosystem we propose is balanced, accountable and sustainable, and imagines new types of infrastructure, new institutions and new governance models that can make data work for people and society. Some of these interventions can be located within (or built from) emerging and recently adopted policy initiatives, while others require the wholesale overhaul of regulatory regimes and markets. They are designed to spark ideas that political thinkers, forward-looking policymakers, researchers, civil society organisations, funders and ethical innovators in the private sector consider and respond to when designing future regulations, policies or initiatives around data use and governance. This report also acknowledges the need to prepare the ground for the more ambitious transformation of power relations in the digital ecosystem. Even a well-targeted intervention won't change the system unless it is supported by relevant institutions and behavioural change