Based on an exploratory study conducted in the UK using thematic and cluster analysis, this paper investigates how the local communities' stakeholder is perceived, defined and categorized by project ...managers in major public infrastructure and construction projects (MPIC), and how their involvement could improve the performance of these projects. Due to the perceived benefits shortfall of MPIC, well organized actions from ‘secondary stakeholder’ groups have led to delays, cost overruns, and significant damage to the organization's reputation. Stakeholder management is an essential process which aims to maximize positive inputs and minimize detrimental attitudes by taking into account the needs and requirements of all project stakeholders. However, current project stakeholder management mechanisms are reactive rather than proactive, mainly offering an instrumental perspective, which aims to make the stakeholders comply with project needs. Therefore, a broader inclusiveness of secondary stakeholders who could be harmed by the organization's strategy, such as the local communities, is required to enhance the performance of MPIC.
•To explore secondary stakeholders in major public infrastructure and construction projects (MPIC).•To investigate project manager's perception, identification and categorization of the local communities' stakeholder.•To enhance current stakeholder management practices at the local level of MPIC to improve project performance.
Most community detection algorithms require the global information of the networks. However, for large scale complex networks, the global information is often expensive and even impossible to obtain. ...Therefore, local community detection is of tremendous significance. In this paper, a new local community detection algorithm based on NGC nodes, named LCDNN, is proposed. For any node, its NGC node refers to the nearest node with greater centrality. In the LCDNN, local community C initially consists of the given node, v. Then, the remaining nodes are added to the local community one by one, and the added node should satisfy: 1) its NGC node is in C, or it is the NGC node of the center node of C; and 2) the fuzzy relation between the node and its NGC node is the largest; 3) the fuzzy relation is no less than half of the average fuzzy relation of the current local network. The experimental results on ten real-world and synthetic networks demonstrate that LCDNN is effective and highly competitive. Concurrently, LCDNN can also be extended for multiscale local community detection, and experimental results are provided to demonstrate its effectiveness.
This paper organizes and synthesizes different extant research streams through a systematic literature review to identify connections and major assumptions on the influence of stakeholders in major ...Public Infrastructure and Construction projects (PIC), at the local community level. Findings suggest that research on stakeholder management has focused strongly on those stakeholders able to control project resources, whilst the effect on the legitimate ‘secondary stakeholders’, such as the local community, remains widely unexplored. Due to the unavoidable impact of major PIC on both people and places, it is suggested that seeking local community opinions in the initiation phase of the project and monitoring the megaproject impact at the local level can help to improve project performance. The output provides scholars and practitioners with future research directions and practical implications for an inclusive stakeholder management approach in construction megaprojects.
•Explores stakeholders in Public Infrastructure and Construction projects.•A systematic literature review examining local community perceptions of ‘megaprojects’.•To improve decision making to minimize environmental and social impact.
Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, researchers and civil society actors have questioned the preponderant role played by public and private decision-makers in forest management and the little ...power that this type of management leaves to local communities. Since then, initiatives have been created with the aim of promoting a greater role for local communities in forest governance. These initiatives are grouped around the concept of community forestry. This study questions whether this approach has led to the empowerment of local communities in the governance of local community forest concessions (CFCL) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To shed light on this concern, we start from the analysis of two CFCLs selected as case studies. These are the CFCL Kisimbosa Chamakasa and the CFCL Banisamasi in Walikale Territory. To do this, we conducted observations on the process of creating CFCLs as well as interviews with the various stakeholders (local community, state actors and NGOs). The results reveal that the CFCL creation initiative is exogenous to the local communities of Walikale. These have a minor responsibility in the creation of their CFCLs. It is the support NGOs which bear the costs necessary for the constitution of the CFCL application file but also for the realization of the prerequisites for obtaining the title. Moreover, the structures set up locally to ensure the management of CFCLs have limited autonomy in governance.
Background: There is an increasing number of refugees choosing to live in urban centers even when this makes them forego humanitarian assistance such as shelter and food from the United Nations High ...Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and host governments. Refugees in urban centers have to fend for themselves. This situation sometimes makes them ‘lock horns’ with the local communities. We examined the perception of the local community towards urban refugees in Mbarara city southwestern Uganda. Methods: We conducted 6 Focus Group Discussions composed of local leaders of the villages where refugees live. We also conducted 4 Key Informants Interviews with the Refugee Desk Officer (Office of The Prime Minister), the Officer in Charge of Mbarara Police Station, the Mayor Mbarara city, and the Resident City Commissioner. All participants were purposively selected due to their knowledge about the study topic. They were interviewed about their perceptions towards refugees in Mbarara city. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed. Results: Three themes emerged from the data: 1) Economic perceptions (employment competition, competition for land, basic needs scarcity, skilled labor, and economic favoritism) 2) Political perceptions (corruption, involvement in local politics, and security threat) 3) Sociocultural perceptions (religiosity, cultural acculturation, social inclusion, stigma, and sexual immorality) of society towards urban refugees. Conclusions: The community views refugees as people who are given preferential treatment by the government, civil society organizations, and the international community. Recommendation: Integration interventions are designed to ensure peaceful and cordial coexistence between the host community and refugees for sustainable development.
Context
Most protected areas are managed based on objectives related to scientific ecological knowledge of species and ecosystems. However, a core principle of sustainability science is that ...understanding and including local ecological knowledge, perceptions of ecosystem service provision and landscape vulnerability will improve sustainability and resilience of social-ecological systems. Here, we take up these assumptions in the context of protected areas to provide insight on the effectiveness of nature protection goals, particularly in highly human-influenced landscapes.
Objectives
We examined how residents’ ecological knowledge systems, comprised of both local and scientific, mediated the relationship between their characteristics and a set of variables that represented perceptions of ecosystem services, landscape change, human-nature relationships, and impacts.
Methods
We administered a face-to-face survey to local residents in the Sierra de Guadarrama protected areas, Spain. We used bi- and multi-variate analysis, including partial least squares path modeling to test our hypotheses.
Results
Ecological knowledge systems were highly correlated and were instrumental in predicting perceptions of water-related ecosystem services, landscape change, increasing outdoors activities, and human-nature relationships. Engagement with nature, socio-demographics, trip characteristics, and a rural–urban gradient explained a high degree of variation in ecological knowledge. Bundles of perceived ecosystem services and impacts, in relation to ecological knowledge, emerged as social representation on how residents relate to, understand, and perceive landscapes.
Conclusions
Our findings provide insight into the interactions between ecological knowledge systems and their role in shaping perceptions of local communities about protected areas. These results are expected to inform protected area management and landscape sustainability.
Satisfaction represents a major factor for success, and when it comes to relationships between tourists, local communities and state authorities, each one of them is involved in the tourism ...processes. The local community discuss continuously with the customer and with other customers to discover ways to deliver better value. The suggestions about improvements that can be made by the local community to raise tourists’ satisfaction are very important. On the other hand, local community satisfaction will determine the tourists’ satisfaction. In this new perspective, the local community in a village plays a crucial role in raising the tourism and economic potential. Why? Because: local community is involved in any process related with tourism and with the state authorities also. Researching local community satisfaction in Mihai Viteazu village represented our paper goal and the results have shown that local community in Mihai Viteazu village is satisfied in a proportion of 75%.
Owing to the lack of a universal definition of communities, some semi-supervised community detection approaches learn the concept of community structures from known communities, and then dig out ...communities using learned concepts of communities. In some cases, users are only interested in the community containing a given node. However, communities detected by these semi-supervised approaches may not contain a given node. Besides, these methods traverse the entire network to detect many communities and cost more resources than a local algorithm. Therefore, it is necessary and meaningful to find the local community that contains a given node with prior information on the local network around the given node. We call this a Semi-supervised Local Community Detection (SLCD) problem. In this paper, prior information refers to certain known communities. To address the SLCD problem, we propose the Semi-supervised Local community detection with the Structural Similarity algorithm, called SLSS, which uses some known communities instead of all known communities. The idea of SLSS is to use the structural similarity between the known communities and the detected community, calculated by the graph kernel, to guide the expansion of the community. Experimental results show that SLSS outperforms other algorithms on six real-world datasets.
Disparities between experts' and local communities’ notions of heritage constitute a key area of concern in narratives on democratic and inclusive approaches to heritage conservation. However, the ...differentiating underlying reasons for heritage delineation remain underexplored. By examining official and local understandings of heritage in Greek traditional settlements, the current paper interrogates the factors behind heritage ascription and classification. Focusing on rural living heritage places and breaking through the ancient glorified Classical past, the paper sheds light on a less known, contemporary and lived heritage which is however equally important for the modern Greek identity. In the context of a profound authorised heritage discourse, the paper questions the tension between official heritage policy and community notions of heritage, revealing multi-layered and not necessarily contrasting knitting of heritage meanings, problematizing its role in fostering heritage co-production.
•Complementarity rather than dichotomy between official and experienced notions of heritage.•Heritage delineation depends on multiple and not mutually exclusive factors.•The differentiating reasons behind heritage delineation can enrich its content.•Official approaches to heritage are often based on a specific prioritised heritage.
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