Building Resident Power and Capacity for Change

An "on the ground" reflection about what it takes for funders to work effective with low-income communities. This report is a set of reflections that began with conversations among fifty people who gathered in Chicago in September of 2008 for Grassroots Grantmakers first "on the ground" learning gathering, and extended over the following several months.The idea for this report came from an interest in doing more than generating proceedings or a report on a meeting.  Our interest was in promoting and supporting reflection about what it takes to work effective in the grassroots grantmaking domain, and in sharing those reflections as a spark for further conversations

The dilemmas of providing welfare in an ethnically diverse state : seeking reconciliation in the role of a 'reflexive practitioner'

Despite an increasing commitment to tackle disadvantage and discrimination, welfare states in the West struggle to provide accessible and appropriate health and social care to people of minority ethnic populations. This article analyses the dilemmas of welfare provision in an ethnically diverse state by drawing on empirical findings from a qualitative study exploring the perceptions and experiences of family life and social support for people of Pakistani origin living in the UK, and its interface with the state as a site of potentially competing and conflicting sets of social values. We conclude by suggesting that a notion of 'reflexive practitioner' is fundamental to generating a critical insight that can deal with the tensions posed by diversity for a welfare state

The understanding of early childhood development that Alberta kindergarten teachers bring to their work when administering the early development instrument (EDI)

Recent research into the abilities of children beginning school is powerfully influencing government policy and the provision of early childhood education in Canada. The Early Child Development (ECD) Mapping project, undertaken by the Offord Centre for Child Studies, McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is one such body of research. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is designed to gather information about developmental outcomes of children’s prior-to-school experiences at the time of starting kindergarten (the first year of school). The EDI is administered by kindergarten teachers at the level of individual children, with outcomes reported at the population level. However, many kindergarten teachers in Alberta do not have formal training or qualifications in early childhood development. This project therefore sought to identify the discourses of early childhood development that kindergarten teachers in Alberta, Canada, employ in administering the EDI. The project employed Discourse Analysis, operationalised within broader socio-cultural theoretical understandings of teacher knowledge, to analyse interview and focus group material collected from teachers from several school settings in Alberta. The main finding was that the understandings teachers applied in administering the EDI conformed to a traditional developmentalist discourse, employing concepts such as ‘appropriate’, ‘typical’, and ‘normal ranges’ of development. It is argued that the teachers encountered these discourses when administering other tests designed to identify atypical outcomes and therefore attract program funding. However, these discourses were also held in tension with discourses of school readiness as well as other concepts drawn from curriculum models encountered during professional development activities. The study concludes that there is a need for careful consideration of the discourses teachers access to inform their practice when administering the EDI in order to ensure the validity of the EDI as a baseline against which subsequent population level outcomes can be assessed

Kinstate intervention in ethnic conflicts : Albania and Turkey compared

Albania and Turkey did not act in overtly irredentist ways towards their ethnic brethren in neighboring states after the end of communism. Why, nonetheless, did Albania facilitate the increase of ethnic conflict in Kosovo and Macedonia, while Turkey did not, with respect to the Turks of Bulgaria? I argue that kin-states undergoing transition are more prone to intervene in external conflicts than states that are not, regardless of the salience of minority demands in the host-state. The transition weakens the institutions of the kin-state. Experiencing limited institutional constraints, self-seeking state officials create alliances with secessionist and autonomist movements across borders alongside their own ideological, clan-based and particularistic interests. Such alliances are often utilized to advance radical domestic agendas. Unlike in Albania's transition environment, in Turkey there were no emerging elites that could potentially form alliances and use external movements to legitimize their own domestic existence or claims

Improving Intent Correctness with Automated Testing

Intent-based networking (IBN) systems have become the de-facto control abstraction to drive self-service, self-healing, and self-optimized capabilities in service delivery processes. Nonetheless, the operation complexity of modern network infrastructures make network practitioners apprehensive towards adoption in production, requiring further evidence for correctness. In this paper, we argue that testing, verification and monitoring should become first-class citizens in reference IBN architecture, in order to improve the detection errors during operations. Towards this goal, we present an extension for an intent architecture that allows IBN system to validate the correctness of network configuration using realistic network emulation. Furthermore, we present an intent use-case that ensure correct operation in hybrid networks

Between Global Committees, National Policymaking and a Single Kitchen: Governing Food Systems Towards Sustainability in an Era of Multi-Stakeholderism

This thesis deals with the expanding presence of non-traditional actors in food system governance, and it investigates how the engagement of these actors can improve democratic governance by decentralising decision-making, promoting sustainability, and increasing deliberation. The first research output (Rosendahl, et al., 2015) brings a reflection on the positionality of researchers in transdisciplinary projects. The second (Zanella & Milhorance, 2015) addresses decentralisation in development cooperation policies from government-centred programmes to stronger involvement of private sector and civil society. Using the case of the Committee on World Food Security, the third research output (Zanella, et al., 2018) questions to what extent and ways multi-stakeholder participation is improving the deliberative quality of processes and institutions of global governance. The fourth output (Zanella, 2020) aims at developing an empirical method that restaurants can use to assess their practices for achieving sustainability, highlighting the role of this actor in influencing local food governance. At the global level, we found that the Committee on World Food Security improved the deliberative quality of global food governance by including and facilitating transmission of discourses. This was achieved by the Committee’s high diversity of actor-representation, a regular mode of communication, and the capacity of participants to influence debates and decisiveness. Stronger focus on accountability and better understanding of how instrumental, structural, and discursive power would make deliberative analysis even more useful for further research. At national levels, we found growing conflicts due to the larger involvement of non-traditional actors, particularly civil society actors and large farm associations and agribusiness corporations, with vested interests, conflictive worldviews, disparate political influence, power, and resources. In the case of this thesis – Brazil-Mozambique cooperation in agriculture – we found profound asymmetric distribution of resources among family and commercial farms, with the later clearly dominating the allocation of resources (e.g., public funding, preferential credit, political access). At the local level looking specifically at the engagement of restaurants in local food governance, we found that sources of information on food sustainability used by restaurant managers, chefs, and owners, are quite apart from those found in the scientific literature on food sustainability. This suggests that strengthening the analytical links between the macro-level of food system literature and micro-level of restaurant operations would be a valuable reference for emerging local food governance institutions driving change towards sustainability. Unified principles-based methods of sustainable performance might address the complexity of food system sustainability, drawing from my own experience in heading restaurants in Berlin, Germany, and in Brasília, Brazil. Sustainable food principles – applicable for all levels, from global to local – are strongly linked with larger citizen participation in food governance: what has been increasingly labelled as democratic food governance. I conclude that this emerging concept of food democracy is in line with the theoretical foundations of eliberation, which see democracy less as voting mechanisms, and more focussed in exchanging opinions, judgements, values, discussions, argumentation, of being free to agree and disagree, and to change our own perceptions

A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference