Books on the topic 'Multi-level readiness for change'

This chapter analyses the adaptation of Poland’s defence policy and armed forces to the rapidly changing security environment along NATO’s north-eastern flank. First, it examines the impact of a resurgent Russia on Poland’s security calculus, especially since Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Next, it addresses the evolution of Warsaw’s views on the relative utility of NATO and the European Union and its efforts to return NATO to its traditional territorial defence role. It then focuses on the modernization of Poland’s armed forces, with a special emphasis on doctrinal change, the reform of the command and control system, and the creation of the Territorial Defence units. It also reviews the t state of key hardware purchases as of mid-2017. The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of the level of capabilities and the readiness of the armed forces in the changing threat environment along NATO’s north-eastern flank.

South East Queensland has been one of the fastest growing regions of Australia, both in terms of its rapidly growing population and an ever-expanding built environment. It is also one of the most vulnerable regions likely to suffer from the adverse impacts of climate change, especially increased flooding, storms, coastal erosion and drought. Responding to Climate Change: Lessons from an Australian Hotspot brings together the results of cutting-edge research from members of the Griffith Climate Change Response Program, showing how best to respond to anticipated changes and how to overcome barriers to adaptation. The authors treat climate change adaptation as a cross-cutting, multi-level governance policy challenge extending across human settlements, infrastructure, ecosystems, water management, primary industries, emergency management and human health. The research focuses on, but is not limited to, the experience of climate change adaptation in the recognised climate hotspot of South East Queensland. The results of this research will be of interest to planners, policy makers and other practitioners engaged in urban and environmental planning, coastal management, public health, emergency management, and physical infrastructure at the local, regional and metropolitan government scales.

This chapter examines agrarian changes triggered by the structural transformation of the overall economy, focusing on their drivers and distributional outcomes. By means of multi-level modelling of three processes—intensification of grain yields, diversification of cropping, and non-farm diversification (pluriactivity)—it concludes that intensification has moderately accelerated and is getting more important than its twin process. Similarly, crop diversification has accelerated, while non-farm diversification seems to be more pull- than push-driven. The most important drivers of the two first-mentioned processes are commercial ones: increasing local and domestic demand for grains and for other crops and institutional changes promoting market participation of smallholders. The chapter concludes that these processes are not pro-poor, but neither are they pro-rich; middling smallholder households tend to be more involved. The gender profile of agricultural diversification seems to involve and benefit male-managed farms, whereas non-farm diversification is gender neutral.

There have been major shifts in the framework of social policy and welfare across Europe. Adopting a multi-level, comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this book develops a critical analysis of policy change and welfare reform in Europe.

In the UK, belief, and faith are protected under the legal frame of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11), in which a person is given the right to hold a religion or belief and the right to change their religion or belief. It also gives them a right to show that belief as long as the display or expression does not interfere with public safety, public order, health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others (Equality Act 2010). The Equality Act 2010 protects employees from discrimination, harassment and victimisation because of religion or belief. Religion or belief are mainly divided into religion and religious belief, and philosophical belief (Equality Act 2010, chap. 1). The Dialogue Society supports the Equality Act 2010 (Perfect 2016, 11). Consequently, The Dialogue Society believes we have a duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations within our organisation and society. The Dialogue Society aims to promote equality and human rights by empowering people and bringing social issues to light. To this end, we have organised many projects, research, courses, scriptural reasoning readings/gatherings, and panel discussions specifically on interfaith dialogue, having open conversations around belief and religion. To encourage dialogue, interaction and cooperation between people working on interreligious dialogue and to demonstrate good interfaith relations and dialogue are integral and essential for peace and social cohesion in our society, the Dialogue Society has been a medium, facilitating a platform to all from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society thrives on being more inclusive to those who might be overlooked in society as a group. Although women seem to be in the core of society as an essential element, the women who contravene the monotype identity tend to remain in the shadows. The media is not just used to get information but also used as a way of having a sense of belonging by the audience. The media creates collective imaginary identities for public opinion. It gathers the audience under one consensus and creates an identity for the people who share this consensus. Hence, a form of media functions as a medium for identity creation and representation. Therefore, the production and reproduction of stereotypes and a monotype representation of women and women of faith in media content are the primary sources of the public's general attitudes towards women of faith. In the context of this report, the media limits not only women's gender but also their religious identity. The monotype identity of women opposes the plurality of the concept of women. Notably, media outlets are criticised for not recognising the differences in women's identities. Women of faith are susceptible to the lack of representation or misrepresentation and get stuck between the roles constructed for their gender and religion. Women who do not fit in these policies' stereotypes get misrepresented or disregarded by the media. Moreover, policymakers also limit their scope to a single monotype of women's identity when policies are made, creating a public consensus around women of faith. As both these mediums lack representation or have very symbolic and distorted representations of women of faith, we strive to provide a platform for all women from faith and non-faith backgrounds. The Dialogue Society has organised women-only community events for women of faith to have a bottom-up approach, including interfaith knitting, reading, and cooking clubs. Several women-only courses have informed women of the importance of interfaith dialogue, promoting current best practices, and identifying and promoting promising future possibilities. We have hosted panel discussions and held women-only interfaith circles where women from different faith backgrounds came together to discuss boundaries within religion and what they believed to transgress their boundaries. Consequently, we organised a panel series to focus on the roles of women of faith within different areas of society, aiming to highlight their unique individual and shared experiences and bring to light issues of inequality that impact women of faith. Although women of faith exist within all areas of society, we chose to explore women's experiences within three different settings to give a breadth of understanding about women of faith's interactions within society. Therefore, we held a panel series titled 'Women of Faith', including three panels, each focusing on a particular area: Women of Faith in Community, Women of Faith in Public Service, and Women of Faith in Media. In this report, following the content analysis method to systematically sort the information gathered by the panel series, we have written a series of recommendations to address these issues in media and policymaking. This paper has a section on specific policy recommendations for those in decision-making positions in the community, public service, and media, according to the content and findings gathered. This report aims to initiate and provide interactive and transferable advice and guidance to those in a position. The policy paper gives insight to social workers, teachers, council members, liaison officers, academics and relevant stakeholders, policymakers, and people who wish to understand more about empowering women of faith and hearing their experiences. It also aims to inspire ongoing efforts and further action to accelerate the achievement of complete freedom of faith, gender equality in promoting, recommending, and implementing direct top-level policies for faith and gender equality, and ensuring that existing policies are gender-sensitive and practices are safe from gender-based and faith-based discrimination for women of faith. Finally, this report is to engage and illustrate the importance of allyship, the outstanding achievement through dialogue based on real-life experience, and facilitate resilient relationships among people of different religious positions. We call upon every reader of this report to join the efforts of the Dialogue Society in promoting an equal society for women of faith.

In this groundbreaking book, Marshall presents a a regulatory plan for addressing poorly paid, precarious work in global supply chains. Aside from climate change, inequality and poverty remain the biggest crises of our age. While the top 1 per cent continues to make gains in their share of wealth, the number of low income people in precarious and insecure work is also increasing. In a unique approach that draws on legal sociology, political economy and regulatory studies, this book describes existing regulatory measures that have succeeded, but which have to date attracted little scholarly attention. It builds on these successful experiments to set out a vision for a new multi-level, international labour law that would increase minimum wages incrementally across all nations until they reach the level of a living wage.

Historical institutionalism (HI) has traditionally focused on formal institutions designed and enforced by official entities in advanced industrial democracies. Yet the modalities of endogenous institutional change delineated by HI reveal that the causal mechanisms of institutional transformation are typically informal. This chapter proposes a more inclusive ontology of institutions that views institutions as a single two-dimensional Möbius strip with both formal and informal components—regardless of regime type or level of economic development. Focusing on “adaptive informal institutions” that arise in a multi-tiered institutional context can show how informal institutions compromise, subvert, and even facilitate reforms of formal institutions.

Understanding the political economic drivers of energy planning in the Brazilian Amazon is critical since the forest is increasingly vulnerable to destruction and related, increased poverty. This chapter investigates how political economy affects biomass and hydroelectricity development in that region. It focuses on political economy as characterized by: (1) the needs and agenda of local communities, (2) economic interests and politics at the national level, and (3) international social actors and financial interests. Findings advance our understanding of the political economy of renewable energy by first, focusing on a critical global resource, and second, by implementing a multi-scalar framework that also considers impacts and drivers of climate change.

The book takes a political-culture perspective on the struggle between democracy and autocracy by examining how these regimes fare in the eyes of their citizens. Taking a globally comparative approach, it studies both the levels as well as the individual- and system-level sources of political support in democracies and autocracies worldwide. The book develops an explanatory model of regime support which includes both individual- and system-level determinants and specifies not only the general causal mechanisms and pathways through which these determinants affect regime support but also spells out how these effects might vary between the two types of regimes. It empirically tests its propositions using multi-level structural equation modeling and a comprehensive dataset that combines recent public-opinion data from six cross-national survey projects with aggregate data from various sources for more than one hundred democracies and autocracies. It finds that both the levels and individual-level sources of regime support are the same in democracies and autocracies, but that the way in which system-level context factors affect regime support differs between the two types of regimes. The results enhance our understanding of what determines citizen support for fundamentally different regimes, help assessing the present and future stability of democracies and autocracies, and provide clear policy implications to those interested in strengthening support for democracy and/or fostering democratic change in autocracies.

Since its formal entry to organization studies in 1985, the concept of organizational identity (OI) has had a long and fruitful development. We suggest OI is particularly appealing because it: 1) addresses fundamental questions of social existence about how we are both similar to and different from others; 2) is fundamentally a relational construct connecting apparent oppositions, such as “us” and “them”; 3) is a nexus concept forging relations with other theoretical constructs; and 4) is inherently useful to organizations. In the seven sections of this handbook, we trace conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges of theorizing and utilizing OI in organizations, including issues of the construct’s nomological net, its multi-level dynamics, the role time in OI (e.g., OI change), as well as its pluralistic manifestations (e.g., hybrid and multiple organizational identities).

The book is devoted to the research and development of methods for combining computational structures for reconfigurable signature-based information protection tools for computer systems and networks in order to increase their efficiency. Network security tools based, among others, on such AI-based approaches as deep neural networking, despite the great progress shown in recent years, still suffer from nonzero recognition error probability. Even a low probability of such an error in a critical infrastructure can be disastrous. Therefore, signature-based recognition methods with their theoretically exact matching feature are still relevant when creating information security systems such as network intrusion detection systems, antivirus, anti-spam, and wormcontainment systems. The real time multi-pattern string matching task has been a major performance bottleneck in such systems. To speed up the recognition process, developers use a reconfigurable hardware platform based on FPGA devices. Such platform provides almost software flexibility and near-ASIC performance. The most important component of a signature-based information security system in terms of efficiency is the recognition module, in which the multipattern matching task is directly solved. It must not only check each byte of input data at speeds of tens and hundreds of gigabits/sec against hundreds of thousand or even millions patterns of signature database, but also change its structure every time a new signature appears or the operating conditions of the protected system change. As a result of the analysis of numerous examples of the development of reconfigurable information security systems, three most promising approaches to the construction of hardware circuits of recognition modules were identified, namely, content-addressable memory based on digital comparators, Bloom filter and Aho–Corasick finite automata. A method for fast quantification of components of recognition module and the entire system was proposed. The method makes it possible to exclude resource-intensive procedures for synthesizing digital circuits on FPGAs when building complex reconfigurable information security systems and their components. To improve the efficiency of the systems under study, structural-level combinational methods are proposed, which allow combining into single recognition device several matching schemes built on different approaches and their modifications, in such a way that their advantages are enhanced and disadvantages are eliminated. In order to achieve the maximum efficiency of combining methods, optimization methods are used. The methods of: parallel combining, sequential cascading and vertical junction have been formulated and investigated. The principle of multi-level combining of combining methods is also considered and researched. Algorithms for the implementation of the proposed combining methods have been developed. Software has been created that allows to conduct experiments with the developed methods and tools. Quantitative estimates are obtained for increasing the efficiency of constructing recognition modules as a result of using combination methods. The issue of optimization of reconfigurable devices presented in hardware description languages is considered. A modification of the method of affine transformations, which allows parallelizing such cycles that cannot be optimized by other methods, was presented. In order to facilitate the practical application of the developed methods and tools, a web service using high-performance computer technologies of grid and cloud computing was considered. The proposed methods to increase efficiency of matching procedure can also be used to solve important problems in other fields of science as data mining, analysis of DNA molecules, etc. Keywords: information security, signature, multi-pattern matching, FPGA, structural combining, efficiency, optimization, hardware description language.

One out of three women in the world has suffered gender-based violence. Yet from #metoo to Malala to Maria da Penha, women are rising up and pushing back. The purpose of this book is to show how to transform fear to freedom through a combination of international action, legal reform, public policy, mobilization, and value transformation. The Struggle analyzes drivers of violence and strategies for resistance in the semi-liberal countries at the frontiers of globalization. These hot-spots of violence represent the highly unequal middle-income countries, with declining citizenship and surging social conflict that now host two-thirds of the world’s population. The book profiles struggles against femicide, rape, trafficking, and related abuses in Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, the Philippines, Egypt, and Turkey in detail, with contrast cases beyond. Using the dual lenses of human rights and feminist theory of “gender regimes,” the book argues that different repertoires of abuse require distinct dynamics of change. Thus, The Struggle profiles strategies for transforming gendered power relations through multi-level campaigns on access to law and impunity, rights-based public policy, promotion of women’s agency, transforming violent masculinity, and reproductive rights. This study of campaigns to end gender violence at the frontiers of globalization expands our understanding of human rights reform pathways worldwide, and the interdependence of women’s rights with all struggles for justice.

The CAF is the European Common Assessment Framework for better quality in public administration, and it celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2020. The CAF improves public administration through self-assessment by the employees and executives of "their" organisation. The beginning of the CAF dates back to 1998 when the ministers of the European Public Administration Network (EUPAN) commissioned designing "general principles concerning the improvement of the quality of services provided to citizens". The CAF 2020 is the fifth version of the CAF, and it is designed to be the European guideline for good governance and excellence in public sector organisations. In four chapters, this book provides an overview of how the CAF is contributing to transform public administration. About 30 designated CAF experts from academia and practice offer insights into the impact of the CAF in different fields of public sector organisations, reflecting the powerful role of the CAF in navigating through challenging times. Furthermore, this book provides an overview of the institutional status of the CAF in Europe and internationally, and it shows the necessary steps for further strengthening the CAF as the number one tool for transformation and quality in the public sector. As a resumé of the book, it can be stated that the CAF initiates and accompanies the transformation of public administration, especially through: transforming the organisation towards change and organisational development; transforming public administration towards the Sustainable Development Goals; transforming the public sector towards effective governance, multi-level collaboration and comprehensive policy-field-thinking; making public administration and structural reforms successful; and driving states and societies towards European integration and European values.