This paper discusses to what degree did civil society organisations (CSOs) felt threatened during COVID-19 in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The authors explore how civil society organisations handled ...lockdowns. The authors invited three CSOs from Scotland, Wales and Ireland to describe the variations between cultural and political contexts and the influence of social and environmental dynamics on their work during COVID-19. These three countries have been challenged to a great extent by a high level of uncertainty owing to the full lockdowns during COVID-19. Hitherto, the people of Scotland, Wales and Ireland have been living relaxed and operating smoothly. Lockdowns have created challenges for successful CSOs. This paper focuses on the political reactions and social dynamics of CSOs focused on active grassroots participatory democracy and the philosophy that comes with it as a democratic decision-making mechanism where people have the power to vote on progress in the area of public participation and social change. The central finding in our investigation is that CSOs power to influence their politicians or society and become engaged in changes within their society is minimised during the pandemic.
Managerialist logic has become dominant in development policy and practice. However, in recent years, the Dutch government is seeking to adopt social transformation approaches to development ...interventions. The implementation of social transformation ideas takes place in an environment dominated by managerialism. However, our understanding of how the logic of social transformation and managerialism collide or come into conflict and the pathways through which the managerialist principles dominate the social transformation principles is limited. Drawing on qualitative data from the Strategic Partnerships (SP) and Accountability Fund (AF) policy instruments for civil society organisations in Kenya, we find that in practice, the social transformation principles underpinning the SP and AF ‘vaporise’ or get lost during implementation due to the wider aid system within which they are embedded. We highlight the implications of the broader aid system on attempts by donor agencies to shift from managerialism towards a social transformation perspective on development.
This article investigates citizen's views on women's empowerment as a process of change in Niger, the lowest country on the Human Development Index where women suffer widespread gender inequality. It ...draws on semi-structured interviews with radio and civil society organisation (CSO) representatives and on focus group discussions with radio listeners. By discussing how empowerment is perceived by the three groups, it examines which aspects of life disempower women and what could contribute to an empowering environment. It goes on to analyse how these responses can be used to shape radio broadcasts, to promote further female empowerment. Contributing to journalism, development, and women's studies, the article provides valuable and transferable insights into the understanding of female dis/empowerment, which can be used in other similar developing countries.
AbstractWhile Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play a crucial role in the development endeavors of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) prefers to adopt a ...securitization approach, depicting their activities as a potential danger, counterproductive, amplify the voices of foreign actors, and ‘rent-seeking’. According to reports, CSOs have been characterized and delineated as political humanitarian, driven by self-interest, and as entities that amplify the voices of foreign actors. This study aims to elucidate the processes by which CSOs in Ethiopia were securitized and desecuritized, respectively, by the EPRDF government led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Prosperity Party. The paper explores the securitization and desecuritization dynamics of CSOs in Ethiopia, with a specific focus on the underlying reasons that contribute to these processes. This study also investigates the consequences of the EPRDF securitization measures on CSOs, as well as the potential obstacles faced by CSOs in Ethiopia. The analytical framework utilized in this study is the application of the notion of securitization as proposed by the Copenhagen School (CS). By constructing the data from unrevised documents, the paper characterizes the dynamics of securitization and desecuritization of CSOs in Ethiopia through an interpretive analytical approach.
This paper considers measurement extraction for two closely-spaced objects with unknown equal intensities in an imaging sensor's focal plane array (FPA). Given a screen of FPA data, the first part of ...the measurement extractor, target location estimator, can extract the location estimates for two targets or one, with the corresponding accuracy given by the Cramér Rao lower bound (CRLB). The second part of the measurement extractor, target detector, selects among the hypotheses of two resolved targets and a single one using information-theoretic criteria and hypothesis tests. Simulation results have been conducted to evaluate the measurement extraction performance including the probability of resolving the two hypotheses, and the efficiency and unbiasedness of the target location estimates for the selected hypothesis using different hypothesis detection schemes. The generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) based on linearized observation model using second order Taylor series expansion is most appealing as it provides an explicit expression of the probability of detecting two targets as a function of the target separations, the signal-to-noise ratio at a given false resolution probability. It is shown that the simulation-based resolution performance for the GLRT using the estimated center location of the two targets matches well with the analytic performance assuming known center.
Since violent conflict escalated in Thailand's Deep South in 2004, women's groups have contributed to addressing societal issues in the form of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). However, women have ...also carried the burden of the prolonged impact of the conflict. By applying the theoretical approach of historical institutionalism at the macro level and the feminist analysis at the micro level, this study seeks to investigate the institutional evolution of women's CSOs that gradually developed from 2004 to 2020. This study drew on empirical evidence from ten local CSOs working on women's issues. It found significant factors that have contributed to the institutionalization of women's CSOs as change agents for peacebuilding. These factors include historical legacy, critical juncture, path dependence, and the involvement of specific actors and events. This study argues that violent conflict in 2004 became a critical juncture that catalyzed the rise of women's CSOs in terms of more proactive engagement in society. At the same time, women's CSOs' main agendas were gradually shifted from victims' restoration projects to larger gender-based agendas of empowerment and peace initiatives. Over the past sixteen years, women's CSOs have a path toward institutional change moving from informal to formal contributions to peacebuilding.
Volunteering in civil society organizations (CSOs) is sometimes idealized as welcoming arena for everybody. Prior research, however, has shown that participation in volunteer work depends on gender, ...wealth, education, and social networks, suggesting that CSOs are not in fact open to everyone. Inequality within different fields of volunteering combined with the factors that put actors into more powerful positions has rarely been scrutinized. Besides identifying the characteristics and resources relevant for promotion, we primarily investigate how these patterns differ between four subfields: politics, social services, religion, and sports. We analyzed a large database created from the Austrian micro-census. The findings reveal significant relations between the actors’ gender, their occupational and educational status, and their hierarchical positions in CSOs within each of the subfields. Our results indicate that the extent to which social inequality spills over to volunteering depends on field characteristics: In the fields of sports and politics, occupational status plays a major role, while in the fields of religion and social services, educational status is more important. We explain these differences through organizational and individual factors that characterize these social fields.
The aging of sewer networks is a serious issue in urban areas because of the reduced functionality of the system that can have negative impact on the urban environment. Aging pipes are not ...water-tight anymore and they can leak untreated sewage or allow infiltration of groundwater. In the latter case, more frequent combined sewer overflows (CSOs) may occur. Generally, prompt intervention to repair damaged conduits is envisaged. However, in low-lying coastal regions, sewer systems may provide an unplanned drainage that controls the groundwater table from flooding the urban ground. Here, a study is presented to investigate the influence of the repair of damaged sewer on the water table of an urban shallow aquifer. Sewer and groundwater models were built to describe the effect of sewer replacement. Based on a real dataset, simulations were run for a city located along an estuary. Results show that the presence of infiltration into the sewer system increases the frequency of CSOs, which trigger the discharge of untreated sewage after a minor precipitation or even in dry weather conditions. As the sewer is repaired, CSO spills diminish occurring only upon significant precipitation. However, the water table rises and eventually, during the high tide, the groundwater floods the low-lying part of the city. Overall, this work highlights the susceptibility of shallow aquifers in coastal urban areas and suggests that they should be regarded in flooding predictions.
The article examines the ways in which civil society and citizens can get connected through the communication practices of CSOs. The purpose is to explore how CSOs perceive, organize and coordinate ...their strategic communication and PR, to identify problems they encountered and to recommend ways of improving their communication practice. The article found out that two-way communication with the public is achieved by organizing different types of events, media relations and online campaigning. Still, there is an insufficient understanding of the importance of strategic communication and ‘ad hoc’ approach is usually used. The reasons are lack of human resources and finances. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail in the article.
Sites throughout Boston Harbor were analyzed for caffeine to assess its utility as a tracer in identifying sources of sanitary wastewater. Caffeine ranged from 15ng/L in the outer harbor to a high of ...185ng/L in the inner harbor. Inner harbor concentrations were a result of combined sewage overflow (CSO) events as well as illicit discharge of sanitary sewage into municipal storm drains. Comparing current results to data from 1998 to 1999 shows reductions in caffeine levels. Reductions are attributed to termination of effluent discharge to the harbor, declines in the number of CSOs and discharge volume along with efforts to eliminate illicit discharges. Spatial distributions of caffeine identified CSOs as major contemporary sources to the inner harbor. The findings further establish the utility of caffeine as a tracer for sanitary wastewater contamination in urban estuaries and demonstrate the efficacy of pollution reduction strategies undertaken in recent decades in Boston Harbor.
•CSOs identified as the primary source of wastewater to Boston Harbor.•Decreases in caffeine over time demonstrates efficacy of capital WWTP improvements.•Effectiveness of caffeine as a tracer for sanitary wastewater in coastal waters demonstrated.
PDF
