133,815 research outputs found

    How Leaders Invest Staffing Resources for Learning Improvement

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    Analyzes staffing challenges that guide school leaders' resource decisions in the context of a learning improvement agenda, staff resource investment strategies that improve learning outcomes equitably, and ways to win support for differential investment

    Power, Responsibility, and Accountability: Re-Thinking the Legitimacy of Institutions for Climate Finance

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    Offers lessons from current mechanisms to finance climate mitigation and adaptation and considerations for legitimacy in new ones: the capacity to determine outcomes, the exercise of power as intended, and standards and systems to ensure accountability

    Managing Water under Uncertainty and Risk: The United Nations World Water Development Report 4

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    This report introduces new aspects of water issues: 1) it reintroduces the 12 challenge area reports that provided the foundation for the first two World Water Development Reports (WWDR); 2) 4 new reports on water quality, groundwater, gender, and desertification, land degradation and drought; 3) in recognition that the global challenges of water can vary considerably across countries and regions, a series of 5 regional reports have been included; 4) a deeper analysis of the main external forces of freshwater resources and possibilities for their future evolution; 5) managing water under uncertainty and risk

    Water management in New Zealand: a road map for understanding water value

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    With New Zealand facing poorer water quality, and shortages, this paper examines the water situation and the policy challenges it presents. Introduction Better water management will benefit all New Zealanders. The focus on water policy has been driven by poorer water quality, shortages, and unease at the costs with poor water allocation. This paper examines the characteristics of the water situation in New Zealand and the policy challenges it presents. We develop a multi-faceted framework for examining those challenges, with a view to helping stakeholders think about what needs to be done for freshwater policy to more accurately reflect society’s preferences. It has been prepared as part of the NZIER’s public good programme to provide an independent and succinct review of what we know and do not know about the topic. In preparing this report, we found that a lot has already been written. We did not want to repeat it – we refer to various publications that the reader may seek out. Instead, we wanted to produce a way of thinking about water, water policy, water management and water allocation that would allow us to reflect on current problems and work towards solutions. The goal is to use water wisely for the benefit of New Zealanders. How we do that depends on a wide range of factors, as this report describes. Most importantly, it depends on how we think about water resources. Thus, we focus on producing some mental models that we hope others will find helpful. This report does not consider any issues arising from the Treaty of Waitangi. We recognise that those issues are important, but we are not experts on them. In addition, the focus of the report is on better water management to improve the wellbeings of all New Zealanders, including tangata whenua. Water policy in New Zealand has been in a state of flux for quite some time. The uncertainty is driven by increased competition for water, a lack of understanding of society’s preferences, a lack of scientific information about water quality and inertia on the part of some users and institutions. It is clear that this situation is changing. We hope this report contributes something positive to that change

    Industry Implications of Value Creation and Appropriation Investment Decisions

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    As managers weigh their resource investment decisions, we argue that these investments have a direct impact on the growth and volatility of the firm’s industry. With data covering 377 industries across 16 years, we investigate relationships for aggregate firm investments on the growth and volatility of industry profit and sales. Results reveal important, complex relationships between investment in value creation and appropriation and different elements of the industry environment

    Advancing Strategy: How to Lead Change in Corporate Societal Engagement

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    Implementing a strategy may be even harder than developing it. This learning brief is intended for corporate foundation and CSR leaders who have completed an initial strategy refresh process and who seek effecitve practices and tools to advance this strategy. In our experience advising more than 100 multinational companie, effective leaders facilitate structured, data-informed decisions and enable important organizational improvements to achieve their strategic objectives. Specifically, advancing strategy in corporate societal engagement typically requires leading change in two major areas of the overall portfolio: designing a signative initiative and transforming local giving

    Adaptive Governance and Evolving Solutions to Natural Resource Conflicts

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    New Zealand is facing increasing challenges in managing natural resources (land, freshwater, marine space and air quality) under pressures from domestic (population growth, agricultural intensification, cultural expectations) and international (climate change) sources. These challenges can be described in terms of managing ‘wicked problems’; i.e. problems that may not be understood fully until they have been solved, where stakeholders have different world views and frames for understanding the problem, the constraints affecting the problem and the resources required to solve it change over time, and no complete solution is ever actually found. Adaptive governance addresses wicked problems through a framework to engage stakeholders in a participative process to create a long term vision. The vision must identify competing goals and a process for balancing them over time that acknowledges conflicts cannot always be resolved in a single lasting decision. Circumstances, goals and priorities can all vary over time and by region. The Resource Management Act can be seen as an adaptive governance structure where frameworks for resources such as water may take years to evolve and decades to fully implement. Adaptive management is about delivery through an incremental/experimental approach, limits on the certainty that governments can provide and stakeholders can demand, and flexibility in processes and results. In New Zealand it also requires balancing central government expertise and resources, with local authorities which can reflect local goals and knowledge, but have varying resources and can face quite distinct issues of widely differing severity. It is important to signal the incremental, overlapping, iterative and time-consuming nature of the work involved in developing and implementing adaptive governance and management frameworks. Managing the expectations of those involved as to the nature of the process and their role in it, and the scope and timing of likely outcomes, is key to sustaining participation.Adaptive capacity; governance; resilience

    Can Finance Really Become a Strategic Partner to the Business?

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    Much has been written about how finance organizations can become strategic partners with the businesses they support. While purported experts point to a variety of frameworks, scorecards and key performance indicators, etc. as the keys to bridging the gap between finance and business, these trite 'solutions' have done little to make finance the strategic business partner it seeks to be. Worse yet, pursuing these ideas has put finance organizations on a treadmill where they expend energy and resources (e.g., money and time) ultimately to get nowhere while the issue persists. So if you are still looking for a silver bullet or quick fix to this seemingly incurable problem, stop reading now. Paradoxically, the link between finance and the business has been under finance's proverbial nose for some time - resource allocation. A serious concerted effort to optimize an organization's resource allocation ultimately enables finance to develop the bridge between finance and strategy. This discipline known as corporate portfolio management works to actively manage the company's resource allocation as a portfolio of discretionary investments leveraging modern portfolio theory while considering organizational behavior.corporate portfolio management; modern portfolio theory; resource allocation

    Taking a “Deep Dive”: What Only a Top Leader Can Do

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    Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the concept of a deep dive, an intervention when top management seizes hold of the substantive content of a strategic initiative and its operational implementation at the project level, as a way to drive new behaviors that enable an organization to shift its performance trajectory into new dimensions unreachable with any of the previously described forms of intervention. We illustrate the power of this previously underexplored change mechanism with a case study, in which a well-established firm overcame barriers to change that were manifest in a wide range of organizational routines and behavioral norms that had been fostered by the pre-existing structural context of the firm.Strategic Change, Resource Allocation Process, Top-down Intervention

    Restructuring and rescaling water governance in mining contexts: the co-production of waterscapes in Peru

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    The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet, while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions, and the politicised nature, of water governance, analyses of its scalar politics are relatively nascent. In this paper, we consider how the increased demand for water resources by the growing mining industry in Peru reconfigures and rescales water governance. In Peru, the mining industry’s thirst for water draws in, and reshapes, social relations, technologies, institutions and discourses that operate over varying spatial and temporal scales. We develop the concept of waterscape to examine these multiple ways in water is co-produced through mining, and become embedded in changing modes and structures of water governance, often beyond the watershed scale. We argue that an examination of waterscapes avoids the limitations of thinking about water in purely material terms, structuring analysis of water issues according to traditional spatial scales and institutional hierarchies, and taking these scales and structures for granted
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