The constitution of risk communication in advanced liberal societies

This article aims to bring to the fore some of the underlying rationales that inform common conceptions of the constitution of risk communication in academic and policy communities. ‘Normative’, ‘instrumental’ and ‘substantive’ imperatives typically employed in the utilisation of risk communication are first outlined. In light of these considerations a theoretical scheme is subsequently devised leading to the articulation of four fundamental ‘idealised’ models of risk communication termed the ‘risk message’ model, the ‘risk dialogue’ model, the ‘risk field’ model and the ‘risk government’ model respectively. It is contended that the diverse conceptual foundations underlying the orientation of each model suggest a further need for a more contextualised view of risk communication that takes account not only of the strengths and limitations of different formulations and functions of risk communication, but also the underlying knowledge/power dynamics that underlie its constitution. In particular it is hoped that the reflexive theoretical understanding presented here will help to bring some much needed conceptual clarity to academic and policy discourses about the use and utility of risk communication in advanced liberal societies

No. 26: The Supermarket Revolution and Food Security in Namibia

The surprisingly high rate of supermarket patronage in low-income areas of Windhoek, Namibia’s capital and largest city, is at odds with conventional wisdom that supermarkets in African cities are primarily patronized by middle and high-income residents and therefore target their neighbourhoods. What is happening in Namibia and other Southern African countries that make supermarkets so much more accessible to the urban poor? What are they buying at supermarkets and how frequently do they shop there? Further, what is the impact of supermarket expansion on informal food vendors? This report, which presents the findings from the South African Supermarkets in Growing African Cities project research in 2016-2017 in Windhoek, looks at the evidence and tries to answer these questions and others. The research and policy debate on the relationship between the supermarket revolution and food security is also discussed. Here, the issues include whether supermarket supply chains and procurement practices mitigate rural food insecurity through providing new market opportunities for smallholder farmers; the impact of supermarkets on the food security and consumption patterns of residents of African cities; and the relationship between supermarket expansion and governance of the food system, particularly at the local level

Imperfect Match: PDDL 2.1 and Real Applications

PDDL was originally conceived and constructed as a lingua franca for the International Planning Competition. PDDL2.1 embodies a set of extensions intended to support the expression of something closer to real planning problems. This objective has only been partially achieved, due in large part to a deliberate focus on not moving too far from classical planning models and solution methods

Dialogue and revolution: fostering legitimate stakeholder agency in natural resource governance

This thesis explores how people exert their agency in policy processes that pertain to natural resource governance, and how they construct the required sense of legitimacy for such actions. It also examines the manner in which facilitated multi-stakeholder processes foster legitimate stakeholder agency, and reflects on how they may ensure the rigour of research interventions in situations characterised by intractable uncertainty and controvers

The Politics of Livestock Sector Policy and the Rural Poor in Peru

This working paper explores public policies that would advance pro-poor development in the livestock sector, with special attention to organized actors, their interests, and the political feasibility of state initiatives. It focuses on two sub-sectors that involve large numbers of small producers: the dairy sector and the alpaca sector. Emphasis is placed on the latter, since there is a greater potential role for Peru's weak, neo-liberal state in promoting pro-poor development in the alpaca sector. The paper's main findings are that: i) key public agencies of importance for the livestock sector suffer from politically motivated turnover of functionaries, the absence of a professionalized, meritocratic bureaucracy, insufficient funding, lack of coordination, and a limited capacity to act as regulatory and coordinating agents, ii) there are few organized actors at the national level capable of advancing the interests of small producers, and iii) decentralization initiated in 2002 has created new institutional spaces for participation by the poor in politics and resource allocation, while, in practice however, numerous obstacles hinder participation and limit the overall effectiveness of these institutions. The author recommends several specific public policies that could promote pro-poor development: i) protection of the dairy sector from subsidized US dairy products in trade agreements, ii) direct marketing of alpaca fiber from producers to the industries, and iii)national standards for quality grading of alpaca fiber. The paper also identifies a number of more general strategic entry points for improving opportunities for small producers to benefit from expansion in the livestock sector: i) support to small producers associations, ii) assistance for small fiber-processing industries, iii) institutionalization and professionalization of state agencies, iv) increased funding of livestock sector agencies, v) coordination among and between donor projects and state agencies and, vi) support for decentralization.Livestock Production/Industries, Political Economy,

An integration framework for managing rich organisational process knowledge

The problem we have addressed in this dissertation is that of designing a pragmatic framework for integrating the synthesis and management of organisational process knowledge which is based on domain-independent AI planning and plan representations. Our solution has focused on a set of framework components which provide methods, tools and representations to accomplish this task.In the framework we address a lifecycle of this knowledge which begins with a methodological approach to acquiring information about the process domain. We show that this initial domain specification can be translated into a common constraint-based model of activity (based on the work of Tate, 1996c and 1996d) which can then be operationalised for use in an AI planner. This model of activity is ontologically underpinned and may be expressed with a flexible and extensible language based on a sorted first-order logic. The model combines perspectives covering both the space of behaviour as well as the space of decisions. Synthesised or modified processes/plans can be translated to and from the common representation in order to support knowledge sharing, visualisation and mixed-initiative interaction.This work united past and present Edinburgh research on planning and infused it with perspectives from design rationale, requirements engineering, and process knowledge sharing. The implementation has been applied to a portfolio of scenarios which include process examples from business, manufacturing, construction and military operations. An archive of this work is available at: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~oplan/cpf

Spartan Daily, February 26, 1954

Volume 42, Issue 95https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/11990/thumbnail.jp

Coalition Task Support using I-X and <I-N-C-A>

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the authorâ s and shouldnâ t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.I-X is a research programme with a number of different aspects in-tended to create a well-founded approach to allow humans and computer systems to cooperate in the creation or modification of some product such as a design, physical entity or plan - i.e. it supports cooperative synthesis tasks. The I-X approach involves the use of shared models for task-directed cooperation between human and computer agents who are jointly exploring (via some, perhaps dynamically determined, process) a range of alternative options for the synthesis of an artifact such as a design or a plan (termed a product). The (Issues - Nodes - Constraints - Annotations) ontology is used to represent a specific artifact as a set of constraints on the space of all possible artifacts in an application domain. It can be used to describe the requirements or specification to be achieved and the emerging description of the artifact itself. It can also describe the (perhaps dynamically generated) processes involved. I-X and | have been applied to Coalition Task Support

Spartan Daily September 16, 2010

Volume 135, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1173/thumbnail.jp

Ethically Driven Stakeholder Management: A Structured Literature Review and Future Research Agenda

The discipline of business ethics is moving fast to the forefront of stakeholder management research. On the one hand, scholars are studying management's behaviour and the promotion of ethical behaviour in stakeholders. On the other hand, a complex interplay exists among ethics, the maximization of shareholder value, and meeting stakeholder claims. The aim is to build on and update in a systematic fashion a previous literature review on stakeholder management theory (SMT) which did not bring ethics to the forefront. Following a strict protocol, this structured literature review examines 108 articles, covering 61 journals from 1989 to 2021. It highlights citation classics and their research impact through total citation and citation-per-year analysis. Content analysis focuses on the findings of quantitative, qualitative, and conceptual articles. Coder triangulation ensures the reliability of the findings, which analyse location and sector, stakeholder type, research methods, research question, conceptual lenses, and foci of articles under review. A specific section outlines directions for future research and provides suggestions for the development of a future research agenda on a topical issue