The Global Health Network on Alcohol Control: Successes and Limits of Evidence-based Advocacy

Global efforts to address alcohol harm have significantly increased since the mid-1990s. By 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) had adopted the non-binding Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol. This study investigates the role of a global health network, anchored by the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (GAPA), which has used scientific evidence on harm and effective interventions to advocate for greater global public health efforts to reduce alcohol harm. The study uses process-tracing methodology and expert interviews to evaluate the accomplishments and limitations of this network. The study documents how network members have not only contributed to greater global awareness about alcohol harm, but also advanced a public health approach to addressing this issue at the global level. Although the current network represents an expanding global coalition of like-minded individuals, it faces considerable challenges in advancing its cause towards successful implementation of effective alcohol control policies across many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The analysis reveals a need to transform the network into a formal coalition of regional and national organizations that represent a broader variety of constituents, including the medical community, consumer groups and development-focused non-governmental organizations. Considering the growing harm of alcohol abuse in LMICs and the availability of proven and cost-effective public health interventions, alcohol control represents an excellent ‘buy’ for donors interested in addressing non-communicable diseases. Alcohol control has broad beneficial effects for human development, including promoting road safety and reducing domestic violence and health care costs across a wide variety of illnesses caused by alcohol consumption

A Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) in Practice: Evaluating NGO Development Efforts

Human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) promise greater alignment of development efforts with universal norms, as well as a focus on the root causes of poverty. While HRBAs have been widely adopted across the development sector, there is little systematic evidence about the actual impact of this strategic shift. Evaluating the effectiveness of HRBAs is challenging because various non-governmental and other organizations have developed very different understandings of how to apply a rights-based framework in the development context. This essay takes a step toward the rigorous evaluation of HRBAs by offering a comprehensive review of rights-based programming implemented by Plan International, a child-centered organization. It shows that Plan’s adoption of HRBA-inspired strategies has transformed its interactions with local communities and added an explicit focus on the state as the primary duty bearer. There is evidence for a systematic increase in individual rights awareness, greater ownership exercised by community organizations, and the application of evidence-based advocacy aimed at scaling up proven program activities. But Plan’s peculiar brand of HRBA neglects collaboration with domestic social movements and civil society, largely avoids a more confrontational approach towards the state, and has yet to produce evidence for regular successful rights claims by disadvantaged communities against governmental representatives at local, regional, or national levels. The study also reveals a limited ability of Plan to address disparities and discrimination within local communities, as well as a need to define clearly the organization’s own accountability and duties deriving from its presence in local communities across more than fifty developing nations

Understanding the Limits of Transnational NGO Power: Forms, Norms, and the Architecture

A growing chorus of critics have called upon transnational nongovernmental organizations (TNGOs) from the Global North to “decolonize” their practices, to “shift the power” to the Global South, and to put an end to “white saviorism” by initiating a variety of significant organizational changes. Despite these repeated calls, the TNGO sector still struggles to reform. Explanations for TNGOs’ ongoing struggles from within the field of international relations have generally centered on TNGOs themselves and the ironies and paradoxes of organizational growth and financial success. This article introduces a different argument that TNGOs’ struggles to adapt in response to their critics are the result of TNGOs’ “nonprofitness.” By virtue of being nonprofit, TNGOs are embedded in an architecture consisting of forms and norms that inherently limit the extent to which they are able to change. Using the construct of the architecture, this article provides a novel account for the challenges that TNGOs confront as they attempt to close the gap between the rhetoric and reality of inclusive and transformational socioeconomic, political, or environmental change

Cloud services within a ROLE-enabled Personal Learning Environment

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is focused on the next generation of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In this paper, we first describe the engineering process used to create either a new widget bundle, a group of applications or service widgets. The widgets integrated in a ROLE PLE consist of two cloud-based services, a social networking and a mind-mapping tool, where learners can perform and collaborate on learning activities. We also modified other widgets to create a complete learning experience. The whole platform is running on a cloudcomputing infrastructure and one of the services is using a cloud-based database. Additionally, we describe the initial experiences from using this cloud education environment in Galileo University, Guatemala, in a web-based course with students from three different Latin-American countries. We measured emotional aspects, motivation, usability and attitudes towards the environment. The results demonstrated the readiness of cloud-based education solutions, and how ROLE can bring together such an environment from a PLE perspective

Corporations and NGOs: When Accountability Leads to Co-optation

Interactions between corporations and nonprofits are on the rise, frequently driven by a corporate interest in establishing credentials for corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this article, we show how increasing demands for accountability directed at both businesses and NGOs can have the unintended effect of compromising the autonomy of nonprofits and fostering their co-optation. Greater scrutiny of NGO spending driven by self-appointed watchdogs of the nonprofit sector and a prevalence of strategic notions of CSR advanced by corporate actors weaken the ability of civil society actors to change the business practices of their partners in the commercial sector. To counter this trend, we argue that corporations should embrace a political notion of CSR and should actively encourage NGOs to strengthen "downward accountability” mechanisms, even if this creates more tensions in corporate-NGO partnerships. Rather than seeing NGOs as tools in a competition for a comparative advantage in the market place, corporations should actively support NGO independence and critical capacit

Cloud services, interoperability and analytics within a ROLE-enabled personal learning environment

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments, EU 7th Framework Programme, grant agreement no.: 231396, 2009-2013) was focused on the next generation of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). A ROLE PLE is a bundle of interoperating widgets - often realised as cloud services - used for teaching and learning. In this paper, we first describe the creation of new ROLE widgets and widget bundles at Galileo University, Guatemala, within a cloud-based infrastructure. We introduce an initial architecture for cloud interoperability services including the means for collecting interaction data as needed for learning analytics. Furthermore, we describe the newly implemented widgets, namely a social networking tool, a mind-mapping tool and an online document editor, as well as the modification of existing widgets. The newly created and modified widgets have been combined in two different bundles that have been evaluated in two web-based courses at Galileo University, with participants from three different Latin-American countries. We measured emotional aspects, motivation, usability and attitudes towards the environment. The results demonstrated the readiness of cloud-based education solutions, and how ROLE can bring together such an environment from a PLE perspective

Impact of hot-carrier degradation on the low-frequency noise in MOSFETs under steady-state and periodic large-signal excitation

This letter reports the diagnostic power of the low-frequency noise analysis (steady-state and periodic large-signal excitation) in MOSFETs subjected to hot-carrier degradation. The LF noise under periodic large-signal excitation is shown to increase more rapidly than the LF noise in steady-state. Moreover the improvement in the LF noise performance due to periodic large-signal excitation, observed for fresh devices, gradually diminishes as the devices are subjected to hot-carrier stress

Die Elektronische Edition der Schriften Immanuel Kants

Die Universität Bonn verfügt über ein elektronisches Korpus von Immanuel Kants gesammelten Schriften gemäß den Abteilungen 1–3 der Akademie-Ausgabe. Dieses Korpus bildet die Grundlage einer elektronischen Edition der Schriften Kants, auf die über die Webseite des ehemaligen Instituts für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik zugegriffen werden kann: http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/kant/. Im vorliegenden Artikel wird über den Umfang und den Zustand des Bonner Korpus und der elektronischen Edition berichtet

Comparing Global Alcohol and Tobacco Control Efforts: Network Formation and Evolution in International Health Governance

Smoking and drinking constitute two risk factors contributing to the rising burden of non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries. Both issues have gained increased international attention, but tobacco control has made more sustained progress in terms of international and domestic policy commitments, resources dedicated to reducing harm, and reduction of tobacco use in many high-income countries. The research presented here offers insights into why risk factors with comparable levels of harm experience different trajectories of global attention. The analysis focuses particular attention on the role of dedicated global health networks composed of individuals and organizations producing research and engaging in advocacy on a given health problem. Variation in issue characteristics and the policy environment shape the opportunities and challenges of global health networks focused on reducing the burden of disease. What sets the tobacco case apart was the ability of tobacco control advocates to create and maintain a consensus on policy solutions, expand their reach in low- and middle-income countries and combine evidencebased research with advocacy reaching beyond the public health-centered focus of the core network. In contrast, a similar network in the alcohol case struggled with expanding its reach and has yet to overcome divisions based on competing problem definitions and solutions to alcohol harm. The tobacco control network evolved from a group of dedicated individuals to a global coalition of membership-based organizations, whereas the alcohol control network remains at the stage of a collection of dedicated and like-minded individuals