•Fairtrade certification improved coffee returns, whereas Utz contributed to higher yields.•Fairtrade farmers increased their coffee specialization, while Utz farmers reduced coffee areas but ...increased yield.•Multi-certification enables coffee farmers to diversify market outlets and generates positive price effects.•Due to overcertification, coffee sales under certified conditions only represent up to a third of total produced volume.•Expected income effect from certification is less than 10% of household income.
Certification is promoted to improve rural welfare through better market access and improved agricultural practices. We compare net effects of Fairtrade- and Utz-Certified coffee production in Central Kenya, using a matched panel from 218 farm-households that belong to three cooperatives and were visited twice in 2009 and 2013. We distinguish between effects at field, farm, household, cooperative, community, and market levels. Both certification regimes improved coffee returns, but Fairtrade was more effective in coffee processing, whereas Utz contributed to productivity. Under stagnating coffee prices, Fairtrade farmers increased their coffee specialization, while Utz farmers reduced coffee areas but increased yield.
While cross-sector partnerships are sometimes depicted as a pragmatic problem solving arrangements devoid of politics and power, they are often characterized by power dynamics. Asymmetries in power ...can have a range of undesirable consequences as low-power actors may be co-opted, ignored, over-ruled, or excluded by dominant parties. As of yet, there has been relatively little conceptual work on the power strategies that actors in cross-sector partnerships deploy to shape collective decisions to their own advantage. Insights from across the literatures on multiparty collaboration, cross-sector partnerships, interactive governance, collaborative governance, and network governance, are integrated into a theoretical framework for empirically analyzing power sources (resources, discursive legitimacy, authority) and power strategies (power over and power in cross-sector partnerships). Three inter-related claims are central to our argument: (1) the intersection between the issue field addressed in the partnership and an actor's institutional field shape the power sources available to an actor; (2) an actor can mobilize these power sources directly in strategies to achieve power in cross-sector partnerships; and, (3) an actor can also mobilize these power sources indirectly, through setting the rules of the game, to achieve power over partnerships. The framework analytically connects power dynamics to their broader institutional setting and allows for spelling out how sources of power are used in direct and indirect power strategies that steer the course of cross-sector partnerships. The resulting conceptual framework provides the groundwork for pursuing new lines of empirical inquiry into power dynamics in cross-sector partnerships.
With the increased attention to disability as a vulnerability criterion in the Sustainable Development Goals, international organizations and NGOs within the international development sector have ...started to pay explicit attention to persons with disabilities, including the collection of data on persons with disabilities. The Washington Group Short Set of Questions, which focuses on functional limitations, has been gaining popularity as an assessment tool for disability. This set of questions reflects a categorization of disability that does not necessarily correspond with subjective disability assessments, such as the yes/no question (“do you have a disability?”) which many development actors have used in their assessment tools when they collect disability data This study compares the subjective and the functional limitations assessment tools for disability to answer the question: do they identify the same individuals as persons with disabilities? Based on a survey carried out amongst persons with disabilities in Cambodia, we included both the Washington Group Short Set and a subjective question asking respondents to self-identify their disability type. We find that, although all respondents self-identified as disabled, not all respondents would be considered disabled according to the Washington Group Short Set of questions. In addition, there is little overlap between specific disability types according to a subjective classification method and the domains of functioning measured through the Washington Group methodology. Our findings affirm that categorization as abled or disabled depends on the tool used. This is important, as the assessment approach chosen by those collecting disability data can shape the design choices of policies and programs, and determine who benefits.
This paper compares three multi-national research infrastructures, one that provides data services, one that provides compute services, and one that supports linguistics research. The aim is to ...jointly provide services to the user communities, and, perhaps eventually, seamlessly interoperate. To this end, we look at and compare how the infrastructures build their service federations (trust, service status, information systems), and how they manage users (identities, authentication, and authorisation).
Towards FAIR Data Access Broeder, Daan; Elbers, Willem; Gawor, Michal ...
Research Ideas and Outcomes,
10/2022, Letnik:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Background
In the past decade many different national, EU and global projects have been successful in raising awareness about Open Science and the importance of making data findable and accessible ...such as stated in the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016).
In this respect, there have been many advances with respect to options for discovering data. A multitude of either thematic or general catalogues are providing faceted browsing interfaces for humans and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for use by machines and similarly, data-citations in publications offer references to resources hosted by repositories. However, using such catalogues and data-citations, researchers are not guaranteed to obtain access to the data itself. Mostly the resource link in the catalogue (and also in the metadata) or citation is a “landing-page”, a description of the resource meant for human consumption. The landing-page may contain instructions how to access or download the resource itself but usually it is difficult to parse by machines.
FAIR data access
Thus the approach sketched above does not meet the requirements in scenarios where applications need assured and quick access to data. Also the FAIR principles interpretation from GO FAIR states*1 that these “emphasise machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) because humans increasingly rely on computational support to deal with data as a result of the increase in volume, complexity, and creation speed of data.” The requirement for providing a Persistent Identifier (PID) for a resource*2, is mostly interpreted as meaning a PID for the resource’s metadata or landing-page only.
Note that we ignore the need for user authentication and authorization prior to accessing data, here we will only consider data that is ‘freely’ accessible.
To improve the situation with respect to machine data accessibility a number of technologies and approaches that have been discussed in the CLARIN and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) infrastructure domain can be useful. We present some and comment on their suitability.
Signposting
Signposting*3 is a technology proposed by van de Sompel (Sompel and Nelson 2015) to release relevant technical and bibliographical attributes from a resource URI. It's well described, and uses the HTTP protocol to provide additional information via HTTP Link Headers*4. Alternatively, for HTML type resources, the information may also be provided in HTML Link elements.
In the CLARIN community the signposting concept was accepted, but its proposed implementation deviated from van de Sompel and made it less dependent on the HTTP protocol (Arnold et al. 2021). However on the downside, the signposting information is embedded in the CLARIN specific Component Metadata (CMDI) (Broeder et al. 2012), and so makes it CLARIN specific, or at least requires clients to have specific knowledge about CMDI.
CLARIN Digital Object Gateway (DOG)
One approach that is currently worked on for the CLARIN research infrastructure is the creation of a DOG library*5 and (later) a service that provides a proxy gateway from the resource PID to the actual data. DOG uses implicit knowledge about the different repository solutions that are used by the CLARIN B-type centres*6 and some repositories outside the CLARIN infrastructure.
DOG works in two steps: first obtaining metadata from the resource PID and secondly extracting resource links from the metadata. Each of the repositories registered within DOG has a minimal configuration specifying how to parse fields of interest from the resource's metadata. For B-type CLARIN centres DOG uses content negotiation as the primary way of obtaining the metadata in CMDI format. For repositories outside the CLARIN infrastructure, DOG primarily relies on the API provided by the repository in order to access metadata and data resources.
The DOG solution does have scalability problems, but within the limited domain of CLARIN centres, it can offer a solution until a better one becomes available.
Limited PID kernel information
The (limited) PID kernel information approach assumes that for every Digital Object (DO) (Berg-Cross et al. 2015) and its metadata a Handle type PID (CNRI 2020) is issued and that the Handle information record can be used to store and associate additional important information with the (meta) data PID using handle value types such as for example a checksum and references to the data or metadata. This is a simplification of the architecture proposed in the work done in RDA context: PID Kernel Info recommendations (Weigel et al. 2018). Consistent use of Handle information records could solve the data access problem, but just as for the signposting strategy, it requires strong discipline to maintain the additional information source. Examples from smaller projects and repositories exist that do manage this information in the Handle record eg. the DARIAH-DE repository*7.
FAIR Digital Objects (FDO)
FDOs*8 attempt to overcome the data management challenges posed by the heterogeneity and complexity of data using a combination of abstraction, virtualization and encapsulation (Schwardmann 2020). In practice, in the context of our access to data problem, the FDO solution can be seen as both a generalization and upgrade of the PID kernel information approach. The key characteristics here are the (conceptual) encapsulation of data objects with data structure and services that allow aware applications to recognize the data objects metadata and bitstream format, and process as intended by the programmer. Eligible data processing services, either general ones from communities, can be found through the FDO typing mechanism, or can be directly linked from the FDO.
A rich set of FDO attributes permit signaling machines processing FDOs where and how to access bitstream data including for instance additional information about supported protocols and APIs.
What to do?
For our community and in our collaboration with others, we need solutions now but would prefer not to invest and get closed in unscalable technologies.
We would propose to combine the DOG approach with signposting. First testing URIs (obtained by resolving the Handle PID) for the presence of HTTP Link Headers. If these are missing, (extended) DOG could use its idiosyncratic workflow. Long term we see advantages of the general, scalable and protocol independent approach that FDOs offer. Hybrid solutions are conceivable where FDO proxies can sit between the FDO machinery and data hosted by signposting compliant repositories.
This article contributes to the literature on global value chains by examining how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) promote gender equality. NGOs have been instrumental in setting social ...standards that seek to institutionalise gender-sensitive governance structures. However, relatively little is known about their roles in doing so. Using in-depth empirical research on the Women@Work Campaign in the cut-flower sector in Kenya, the article examines how a coalition of Kenyan NGOs and an international NGO push for gender equality in global value chains. While the Kenyan NGOs do most of the actual work on the ground, the international NGO uses its position to facilitate and empower the local NGOs to do their work. Yet, we see that funding conditions hamper the local NGOs' efforts to promote gender equality. Overall, our analysis highlights that NGOs fulfil important roles in promoting gender equality in horticulture value chains but the requirements of the international aid system act as a constraint.
Abstract
We study the topology of the network of ionized and neutral regions that characterized the intergalactic medium during the Epoch of Reionization. Our analysis uses the formalism of ...persistent homology, which offers a highly intuitive and comprehensive description of the ionization topology in terms of the births and deaths of topological features. Features are identified as k-dimensional holes in the ionization bubble network, whose abundance is given by the kth Betti number: β0 for ionized bubbles, β1 for tunnels, and β2 for neutral islands. Using semi-numerical models of reionization, we investigate the dependence on the properties of sources and sinks of ionizing radiation. Of all topological features, we find that the tunnels dominate during reionization and that their number is easiest to observe and most sensitive to the astrophysical parameters of interest, such as the gas fraction and halo mass necessary for star formation. Seen as a phase transition, the importance of the tunnels can be explained by the entanglement of two percolating clusters and the fact that higher-dimensional features arise when lower-dimensional features link together. We also study the relation between the morphological components of the bubble network (bubbles, tunnels, and islands) and those of the cosmic web (clusters, filaments, and voids), describing a correspondence between the k-dimensional features of both. Finally, we apply the formalism to mock observations of the 21-cm signal. Assuming 1000 observation hours with HERA Phase II, we show that astrophysical models can be differentiated and confirm that persistent homology provides additional information beyond the power spectrum.
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