Books on the topic 'Local search approaches'

The global warming climate crisis threatens to throw the world as we know it into social and political turmoil. When environmentalists discuss global warming, they often maintain that democracy has to be an important part of climate change policy. But others see the need for a stronger, more authoritarian hand in the name of swift action, if not survival. The Introduction explores this question by first taking note of the potentially devastating consequences of the climate crisis for both the global ecological system and social and political institutions. It then outlines the limits and failures of the dominant environmental approaches to adequately confront these very large challenges. In search of an alternative theory and practice to preserve a democratic mode of governance in the face of threatening political-ecological disruptions, the Introduction presents the option of turning to the local level where democratic governance has its best chance of surviving climate crisis.

This chapter revisits trade-offs that qualitative researchers face when balancing the different expectations of area studies and disciplinary audiences. One putative solution to such trade-offs, mixed-method research, emphasizes the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods. CAS, as defined above, essentially encourages a different form of triangulation—the pooling of observations and interpretations across a wider array of cases spanning multiple areas. This kind of triangulation can be facilitated by cross-regional contextualized comparison, a middle-range approach that stands between area-bound qualitative research and (Millean) macro-comparative analysis that brackets out context in search of causal laws. Importantly, this approach relies upon an area specialist’s sensibilities and experience to generate awareness of local complexities and context conditions for less familiar cases. The examples of cross-regional contextualized comparison considered in this chapter collectively demonstrate that engagement with area studies scholarship and the pursuit of disciplinary knowledge can be a positive-sum game.

Despite the destabilizing potential of governing of a vast territory and a large multicultural population, the centralized government of the People’s Republic of China has held together for decades, resisting efforts at local autonomy. By analyzing Beijing’s strategies for maintaining control even in the reformist post-Mao era, Centrifugal Empire reveals the unique thinking behind China’s approach to local governance, its historical roots, and its deflection of divergent interests. Centrifugal Empire examines the logic, mode, and instrument of local governance established by the People’s Republic, and then compares the current system to the practices of its dynastic predecessors. The result is an expansive portrait of Chinese leaders’ attitudes toward regional autonomy and local challenges, one concerned with territory-specific preoccupations and manifesting in constant searches for an optimal design of control. Jae Ho Chung reveals how current communist instruments of local governance echo imperial institutions, while exposing the Leninist regime’s savvy adaptation to contemporary issues and its need for more sophisticated inter-local networks to keep its unitary rule intact. He casts the challenges to China’s central–local relations as perennial, since the dilution of the system’s “socialist” or “Communist” character will only accentuate its fundamentally Chinese—or centrifugal—nature.

Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences.

This is a complete and up-to-date revision of the classic text for public administration, implementing the rule of law as a fundamental issue in American democracy in pursuit of the common interest. It presents public administration as a tension between the necessary exercise of power and the search for responsiveness to achieve maximum accountability from public servants. The authors have initiated a new approach to the study of public administration by focusing on middle- and lower-level managers. These are positions that most public servants will occupy for the bulk of their professional careers. The book recognizes that most of the administration is in field offices, in state and local government, and in cooperation with the private and nonprofit sectors. It then focuses on power and its potential for influencing the behavior of the bureaucracy to perform its goal-oriented and balancing functions in a pluralistic open system. This leads to the relationship between theories about administration and the actual practice and how best results (imperative of accountability) are achieved in the increasingly globalized environment.

The Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies (KDWT) was founded in spring 2016 as a central research institute of the Otto Friedrich University Bamberg. The core tasks of the KDWT are the expansion of knowledge and technology transfer to non-university research in-stitutions, business and crafts, the expansion of technical excellence, the supplementation of the range of courses, the support in research, teaching, transfer and service in terms of content and technical equipment as well in the internationalisation of research. The centre is divided into four departments: Monument Preservation, Digital Heritage Technologies, Building Research and Res-toration Science and thus covers both the foundations in the humanities as well as engineering and scientific approaches. The first volume of the “Reports of the KDWT” series presents the technically diverse work of the first two and a half years since the KDWT was established in a format with colour illustrations. Four main chapters represent the four departments mentioned. First, the fundamental aims and focus of each subject are outlined. This is followed by individual presentations of the respective re-search projects, which also would like to bring the content closer to the non-expert reader, especially through the illustrations provided. For a better overview, basic information and thematically linked publications have been added to the projects. For example, the Monument Preservation department reports on various projects related to the theme, city and heritage conservation, addresses participatory heritage protection, emotions and heritage as well as a municipal monument plan for Bavaria, to name just a few. The digital heritage technologies outline projects in the area of 3D documentation. The building research area analy-ses large medieval buildings, develops concepts for building preservation and improves technical skills in building analysis. Finally, the area of restoration science explains the use of non-destructive methods of investigation and microanalysis based on international and local projects, be they Sin-ghalese temple sites, European cathedrals or medieval textiles from the Bamberg cathedral treasury. The aim of the project presentations is to clarify to what extent each sub-area represents the KDWT with extraordinary, professionally sound experience and expertise in teaching, research and above all in practice. In order to do justice to the extensive transfer, networking and research activities of the individual members, a fifth main chapter lists all individual services in alphabetical order until mid-2018.

Presenting key examples and case studies of how design has responded to the pandemic, Design and Covid-19 offers lessons and approaches to design for future resilience. Design has a key role to play in not only creating products to ensure safety from the pandemic, but also in the creation of complex systems, new technologies and physical environments that enable us to carry out our lives and protect populations in the future. Design and Covid-19 identifies four key phases of the pandemic to examine how designers developed systems, services, communications and products as part of our response to the crisis, whether at an international, national or community level. Contributors report from a range of international contexts, including countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia, detailing how countries responded to the pandemic, introduced social distancing and lockdowns, developed test, track and trace systems, implemented new laws and how design and designers responded to the urgent new challenges that the pandemic created. They explore the adaptation of designs as communities searched for new ways of connecting and working through restrictions and social distancing measures, establishing local mutual aid groups and using social media to support each other through the pandemic, and go on to focus on recovery and resilience, analysing the deeper, systemic design response as industries emerge from lockdown. They explore the need to reflect on and investigate key issues in order to understand what we can learn personally, socially, economically and globally from this unprecedented crisis. Drawing upon the expertise of scholars from across the globe, Design and Covid-19 explores a wide range of design disciplines to address the complex societal and global issues highlighted throughout the pandemic, and to inform new ways of building human and planetary wellbeing.