Local governments will play an important role in the transition towards fully renewable energy systems. In order to develop new roles for themselves in climate and energy planning, they have to be ...creative and find new ways of acting within existing regulatory frameworks. The objective of this paper is to explore the kinds of arguments and discussions local key actors use and encounter when developing innovative activities. We study two exemplary cases using a qualitative research approach based on interviews with key informants: a municipality-owned nearshore wind farm, and a local funding scheme for energy-efficiency refurbishment in single-family houses. Our findings indicate that i) innovative projects grow out of the momentum of previous visions and experiences; ii) key actors balance ‘green’ and economic arguments in order to gain project approval; and iii) innovative projects can sometimes only be realized by drawing on resources from outside the municipal sphere. Even though committed key actors may be successful, it is worth considering how the grip of narrow economic motives can be loosened in order to support the local experimentation and innovation that will become more and more important in green energy transitions.
•Local authorities need to experiment towards smart energy systems.•Unprecedented local energy action is risky and needs convincing arguments.•Key actors balance wide and narrow societal commitments to promote new initiatives.•Space is needed for wider societal commitments in local experiments in the future.
Foreign aid donors make themselves visible as the funders of development projects to improve citizen attitudes abroad. Do target populations receive these political communications in the intended ...fashion, and does the information succeed in changing attitudes? Despite the widespread use of various mechanisms to communicate information about foreign funding, little evidence exists about their effectiveness. We embed an informational experiment about a US-funded health project in a nationwide survey in Bangladesh. Although we find only limited recognition of the USAID brand, explicit information about US funding slightly improves general perceptions of the United States; it does not, however, change respondent’s opinions on substantive foreign policy issues. We also find that information increases confidence in local authorities. While our results suggest that information about foreign donors can effect attitudinal change, they also suggest that current mechanisms for information transmission might not be sufficient to do so.
Abstract
Although prisoners have significant care needs and are particularly vulnerable following release, there have been longstanding concerns about their social care. Among its provisions, the ...2014 Care Act defined the responsibilities of local authorities for identifying and meeting the social care needs of prisoners. Here, we report the findings of a national survey of local authorities undertaken in 2016, which explored the early arrangements put in place following the Care Act for prisoners on release. Eighty-eight of 158 local authorities responded, including 81 per cent of those with prisons in their catchment area. Key themes included difficulties with case finding, with a reliance on referrals from other agencies, although provision for those already known to local authorities generally worked well. Other themes were difficulties in sharing assessments and information between local authorities, and problems with care planning and co-ordination with other agencies. We discuss some of the tensions and challenges inherent in implementing the Act and highlight areas requiring attention, including the need for more robust case finding and systems for information transfer. We also suggest measures to strengthen arrangements.
Inter-municipal cooperation in public service delivery has attracted the interest of local authorities seeking to reform public service provision. Cost saving, together with better quality and ...coordination, has been among the most important drivers of such cooperation. However, the empirical results on inter-municipal cooperation and its associated costs offer divergent outcomes. By conducting a meta-regression analysis, we seek to explain this discrepancy. We formulate several hypotheses regarding scale economies, transaction costs, and governance of cooperation. While we find no clear indications of the role played by transaction costs in the relationship between cooperation and service delivery costs, we find strong evidence that population size and governance are significant in explaining the relationship. Specifically, small populations and delegation to a higher tier of government seem to offer cost advantages to cooperating municipalities. As an extension of our model, we seek to disentangle service-related transaction costs based on asset specificity and ease of measurability of the service.
Social media services such as TripAdvisor and Foursquare can provide opportunities for users to exchange their opinions about urban green space (UGS). Visitors can exchange their experiences with ...parks, woods, and wetlands in social communities via social networks. In this work, we implement a unified topic modeling approach to reveal UGS characteristics. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence techniques for opinion mining using the mentioned platforms (e.g., TripAdvisor and Foursquare) reviews is a novel application to UGS quality assessments. We show how specific characteristics of different green spaces can be explored by using a tailor-optimized sentiment analysis model. Such an application can support local authorities and stakeholders in understanding—and justification for—future urban green space investments.
In this article I highlight the political work of Nicaraguan migrants living in the informal settlement of La Carpio in San José, Costa Rica, as they negotiate rights in the form of urban services. ...Nicaraguans in La Carpio have organized politically since 1993 to self-instal, demand, and negotiate services such as potable water and electricity. In the process, they successfully compel local authorities to allocate these services and grant them an implicit recognition of their right to remain and live a decent life, regardless of their status. These migrant struggles to improve urban life, the political subjectification they engender, and the mechanisms for rights-claiming that they open, show a different articulation of citizenship and political agency largely absent in the literature on migrants, refugees, and noncitizens, shaped in global North contexts: the predominance of urban informality as a means for migrants to negotiate with institutions of power the allocation of substantive rights. Moreover, in the absence of direct engagement with and challenge to the national migration regime, Nicaraguan migrants are able to weave the fabric upon which their own continuous practice of citizenship rests through their quotidian, informal interactions with state servicing authorities in La Carpio.
The building sector is responsible for more than one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Netherlands has set an ambitious target to reduce GHG emissions by 95% by 2050 compared to the ...1990 baseline. Several factors, such as low retrofitting rates, lead to uncertainties in achieving these targets. In the residential sector, the energy retrofit rate of the owner-occupied homes is low. Homeowners encounter different types of barriers when deciding to make energy retrofits. The purpose of this study is to explore the policy implications of the main identified influencing factors and consequently the potential mismatch between current policy and the homeowners’ actual needs. We used semi-structured interviews and focus group meetings with experts from the largest cities in the Netherlands as the data collection methods. We identified the discrepancy between current policy and the actual needs of homeowners as follows: (a) less attention to the right message and the right messenger: policymakers cannot motivate the households using the word sustainability. Policymakers can convince homeowners to make energy retrofits through the improvement in quality of life, the expected cost savings, and the integration of energy retrofits into the maintenance of the home (message effect). Moreover, the trustworthiness and familiarity of the energy ambassador with the households are the main characteristics of these ambassadors (messenger effect). (b) the lack of integrated financial, informational and technical support: the main identified transaction cost barriers (non-monetary costs) are difficulties to inspire homeowners to carry out energy retrofits, lack of knowledge on how to start the energy retrofits, many steps in carrying out energy retrofits of old houses. More importantly, there is a lack of an active and accessible party in the market to reduce the financial, technical and informational barriers.
•COVID-19 presents great challenges for virus control and social security in rural areas of developing countries.•We examine the role of elected village governments in coordinating state response in ...Rajasthan, Odisha, and Kerala, India.•Urgent needs have galvanized new cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interactions that link state action with local realities.•Evidence from Kerala illustrates how long-term support for local governments improves public trust and effectiveness of response.•Governance is as important to understanding COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.
Countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of COVID-19 and control the economic fallout left in its wake. Rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. This paper makes the case for the critical role of local governance in coordinating pandemic response by examining how state authorities are attempting to bridge the gap between the need for rapid, vigorous response to the pandemic and local realities in three Indian states – Rajasthan, Odisha, and Kerala. Through a combination of interviews with mid and low-level bureaucrats and a review of policy documents, we show how the urgency of COVID-19 response has galvanized new kinds of cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interaction between administrative units involved in coordinating responses, as local governments have assumed central responsibility in the implementation of disease control and social security mechanisms. Evidence from Kerala in particular suggests that the state’s long term investment in democratic local government and arrangements for incorporating women within grassroots state functions (through its Kudumbashree program) has built a high degree of public trust and cooperation with state actors, while local authorities embrace an ethic of care in the implementation of state responses. These observations, from the early months of the pandemic in South Asia, can serve as a foundation for future studies of how existing institutional arrangements and their histories pattern the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. Governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.
This article provides an insight into the voluntary sector's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in one UK region, using qualitative evidence from a rapid evaluation study with leaders of volunteer ...agencies. We picked out the information relevant to services that disabled people access, as a way to provide a snapshot of the issues experienced during the various lockdowns, as well as participants' concerns for the future of volunteering in the UK.
Religious areas were predicted to be negatively associated with COVID-19 vaccinations. Using public data on religion and vaccination rates within local authorities in England, support for the ...hypothesis was found. All major religious groups within England (i.e., Christianity, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and “other” religious groups) were negatively associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates. Effects were stronger for Muslim and Christian areas than areas with other religious groups. Effects were not due to wealth, household size, mobility, or age. These results suggest that religious regions in general and regions with Muslims and Christians in particular are negatively associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates. These findings can be used as a guide for future research and to help inform vaccination efforts.
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