Trialling demand-led climate finance in Ethiopia:Towards effective disbursement modalities

Climate change poses a huge threat to developing countries, particularly to poor and vulnerable communities. Given the magnitude of the challenge, outside support is needed. Climate finance initiatives respond to this need by providing funding for 'climate smart' projects and programmes. Potentially, such support can create transformative opportunities for poor countries and communities, while building resilience to the grave threats posed by climate change impacts. Yet this landscape remains problematic, since climate finance is often inaccessible to the stakeholders who most need it and could perhaps make the best use of it, namely institutions from target countries. The Strategic Climate Institutions Programme (SCIP) Fund offers a pragmatic solution to this dilemma as well as a replicable model that is particularly relevant to vulnerable countries and communities. This follows from its emphasis on empowering diverse national stakeholders, fostering partnerships between institutions, and bolstering government

Trouble in the Caribbean: Responses to a Potential Chinese-Bahamian Bilateral Fishing Agreement

As of 2011, the Caribbean Sea was one of the only fisheries unoccupied by China’s Distant Water Fleet (DWF). However, in 2016, officials from the People’s Republic of China and the Bahamas discussed a proposal for a bilateral commercial fishing agreement in Bahamian waters. An official agreement was never proposed, but given the notoriety of China’s DFW and the Bahamas’ monitoring and enforcement problems, such an agreement could have devastating impacts on the Caribbean fishery. The proposal received international criticism from fishermen, scientists, and politicians, demonstrating the perennial conflict between the global commercial fishing industry and those engaged in recreational, sport, or subsistence fishing. In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) attempted to resolve this conflict by establishing fishery conservation measures. However, these measures are undermined by concepts such as maximum sustainable yield and optimum utilization, which prioritize the market value of a fishery’s resources over its recreational value. As the global commercial fishing industry begins to converge on one of the last fishing frontiers, the United States must shift how the world views fishery management. This article will discuss how stakeholders to the agreement can use both legal principles and non-legal incentives to induce the Bahamas to remain a sport fishing haven and support its artisanal fishing industry

Rhetorical relationships with students: A higher education case study of perceptions of online assessment in mathematics

Some students perceive that online assessment does not provide for a true reflection of their work effort. This article reports on a collaborative international project between two higher education institutions with the aim of researching issues relating to engineering student perceptions with respect to online assessment of mathematics. It provides a comparison between students of similar educational standing in Finland and Ireland. The students undertook to complete questionnaires and a sample of students was selected to participate in several group discussion interviews. Evidence from the data suggests that many of the students demonstrate low levels of confidence, do not display knowledge of continuous assessment processes and perceive many barriers when confronted with online assessment in their first semester. Alternative perspectives were sought from lecturers by means of individual interviews. The research indicates that perceptions of effort and reward as seen by students are at variance with those held by lecturers. The study offers a brief insight into the thinking of students in the first year of their engineering mathematics course. It may be suggested that alternative approaches to curriculum and pedagogical design are necessary to alleviate student concerns

An Independent Review of USGS Circular 1370: An Evaluation of the Science Needs to Inform Decisions on Outer Continental Shelf Energy Development in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, Alaska

Reviews the U.S. Geological Survey's findings and recommendations on Alaska's Arctic Ocean, including geology, ecology and subsistence, effect of climate change on, and impact of oil spills. Makes recommendations for data management and other issues

Interdisciplinary perspectives on aid and local ownership in projects

development projects;development aid;organization theory;local level;aid institutions;intercultural communication;project implementation

Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure

Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework

A process view on managing quality during the creation of technical innovations : lessons from field research.

Quality Management (QM) principles have left their marks on business practice for more than a decade. Amongst the many business functions that have faced the widespread introduction of QM standards and methodologies, the R&D function has been amongst the last to undergo their pervasive influence. The uncertain and ambiguous nature of the technical innovation not to introduce 'traditional' QM approaches in R&D settings. These arguments are often based on a rather rigid and mechanistic view on QM. As recent insights show, this need not to be the case. QM can offer an avenue to fundamentally scrutinise and re-think-functional interaction strategies in innovative contexts. Therefore, the process of introducing QM principles is an R&D environment deserves close attention. This paper offers a field-based insight into these fundamental organisational and managerial issues.Innovations; Knowledge;

An Assurance Framework for Independent Co-assurance of Safety and Security

Integrated safety and security assurance for complex systems is difficult for many technical and socio-technical reasons such as mismatched processes, inadequate information, differing use of language and philosophies, etc.. Many co-assurance techniques rely on disregarding some of these challenges in order to present a unified methodology. Even with this simplification, no methodology has been widely adopted primarily because this approach is unrealistic when met with the complexity of real-world system development. This paper presents an alternate approach by providing a Safety-Security Assurance Framework (SSAF) based on a core set of assurance principles. This is done so that safety and security can be co-assured independently, as opposed to unified co-assurance which has been shown to have significant drawbacks. This also allows for separate processes and expertise from practitioners in each domain. With this structure, the focus is shifted from simplified unification to integration through exchanging the correct information at the right time using synchronisation activities

Increasing resilience of ATM networks using traffic monitoring and automated anomaly analysis

Systematic network monitoring can be the cornerstone for the dependable operation of safety-critical distributed systems. In this paper, we present our vision for informed anomaly detection through network monitoring and resilience measurements to increase the operators' visibility of ATM communication networks. We raise the question of how to determine the optimal level of automation in this safety-critical context, and we present a novel passive network monitoring system that can reveal network utilisation trends and traffic patterns in diverse timescales. Using network measurements, we derive resilience metrics and visualisations to enhance the operators' knowledge of the network and traffic behaviour, and allow for network planning and provisioning based on informed what-if analysis

Aligning anti-money laundering, combating of financing of terror and financial inclusion : Questions to consider when FATF standards are clarified

Purpose &ndash; The purpose of this paper is to identify key questions that should be addressed to enable the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to provide guidance regarding the alignment of anti-money laundering, combating of financing of terror and financial inclusion objectives.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; The paper draws on relevant research and documents of the FATF to identify questions that are relevant to consider when it formulates guidance regarding the alignment between financial integrity and financial inclusion objectives.Findings &ndash; The FATF advises that its risk-based approach enables countries and institutions to further financial inclusion. It is, however, not clear what the FATF means when its uses the terms &ldquo;risk&rdquo; and &ldquo;low risk&rdquo;. It is also unclear whether current proposals for financial inclusion regulatory models will necessarily limit money laundering (ML) aswell as terror financing risks to levels that can be described as &ldquo;low&rdquo;. The FATF will need to clarify its own thinking regarding low money laundering and low terror financing risk before it will be able to provide clear guidance to national regulators and financial institutions.Originality/value &ndash; This paper was drafted to inform current FATF discussions regarding guidance on financial inclusion. The questions are relevant to all stakeholders in financial regulation.<br /