Who to blame: An inquiry into universal factors accounting for output variations in public–private partnership initiatives across geographical locations. Who to be blamed for not meeting performance,innovativeness, and quality outputs?

With the current controversy and blame game on output of public–private partnership (PPP) initiatives concerns, we investigate why there may be variations in achieving innovativeness, perceived quality, and performance of PPP initiatives across different geographical locations. For instance, we investigate a scenario where “a private company involved in waste management will perform in country ‘A’ but fails to perform in country ‘B’ given the same assignment and target.” We empirically sampled and make conclusions with 475 respondents from the public sector, private sector, and academia based on a survey inquiry. We adopted the structural equation modeling method using the partial least square for the data analysis. The results show that environmental dynamism causes major variations in desired output of PPP initiatives followed by collaboration capacity, environmental fit, and absorptive capacity, respectively. The findings further show that one partner cannot be blamed entirely for causing the failure of PPP initiative. However, we conclude that because on the basis of our data, environmental dynamism, which is as a result of some governmental activities, depicts the highest effect on output, public partners might be more liable. The findings from this study are an explicit view of PPP technocrats, which makes the conclusions more reliable.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on reimagining governance for future crises and resilience

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government-civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID-19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub-national borders where new “borders” are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.     

Tertiary institutions and capacity building in Ghana: challenges and the way forward

The last two decades have seen tremendous growth in tertiary education in Ghana. The prevailing consensus is that universities play a crucial role in development by making it possible to generate human capital in key areas such as health, agriculture, and engineering, also contributing to the attainment self-sufficiency. Whilst contributing to capacity building, this paper argues that universities in Ghana have had to contend with a number of challenges: low female access to universities, especially in science and technology-related courses; inadequate funds; poor research activity; and large class sizes. Making research a priority, designating strategic planning teams with appropriate institutional and financial support, developing cooperation with private universities, expanding access through the use of external degree centres and distance learning, and deepening universities’ relevance to societal needs, are identified as central to the enhancement of capacity building in Ghana.     

First Things First: R2P Starts with Direct Negotiations

Abstract

Public debates on R2P one-sidedly focus on its forcible aspects. They should, however, also focus on R2P’s non-coercive aspects, which include the legal obligations to cooperate and to pursue peaceful conflict resolution, notably the obligation to undertake meaningful attempts at negotiation before coercive means are taken into consideration. After the Arab Spring erupted in Libya and Syria, other countries did not exhaust reasonable efforts to deal and negotiate with the incumbent powers, and to assist and encourage them to meet their obligations under R2P, even though negotiations are part and parcel of the R2P framework and constitute the very first step to be taken whenever a state seems to ignore its obligations under that framework.     

Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the eastern front: ideas,political-social norms and emotions as mobilization mechanisms

Abstract

Following the outbreak of the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, thousands of volunteers joined pro-Kiev battalions. Although they have fiercely fought against pro-Kremlin forces, very little is known about them. The article will investigate why individuals have engaged in such a risky endeavour for no obvious material reward. It will claim that ideas, political-social norms and emotions have functioned as mobilization mechanisms that can explain individual decisions. Based on interviews, the article will argue that the mobilization of Ukrainian volunteer fighters has a strong cognitive-normative-emotional dimension that cannot be ignored and should be further explored.     

A New Tool for Coding and Interpreting Injuries in Fatal Airplane Crashes: The Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool Application to the Air France Flight AF447 Disaster (Rio de Janeiro–Paris), 1st of June 2009

For investigation of air disasters, crash reconstruction is obtained using data from flight recorders, physical evidence from the site, and injuries patterns of the victims. This article describes a new software, Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool (CIPAT), to code and analyze injuries. The coding system was derived from the Abbreviated Injury Score (AIS). Scores were created corresponding to the amount of energy required causing the trauma (ER), and the software was developed to compute summary variables related to the position (assigned seat) of victims. A dataset was built from the postmortem examination of 154/228 victims of the Air France disaster (June 2009), recovered from the Atlantic Ocean after a complex and difficult task at a depth of 12790 ft. The use of CIPAT allowed to precise cause and circumstances of deaths and confirmed major dynamics parameters of the crash event established by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority.     

The Rights-Asserting Contemporary Public Service Customer in Botswana

This article discusses an often-ignored subject in Botswana-specific literature: the emergence of rights-asserting contemporary public service customers. These customers unflinchingly demand their rights. Given this situation, this article argues that there is a need for a paradigm shift on the part of public servants. Among other things, this will entail the crafting of a new internally created customer service charter which puts a high premium on service delivery. Thus, the charter should beget a public service that respects customers' inviolate right to quality public service. Although the case study is about Botswana, there are general lessons — e.g., an internally created public service charter.     

Expanding Microfinance in Brazil: Credit Utilisation and Performance of Small Firms

We take advantage of the natural experiment generated by the exogenous change in government policy towards microcredit to evaluate the impact of the increased supply of microcredit on the utilisation of credit by micro-entrepreneurs. Based on micro-entrepreneurs' survey and administrative data from a microcredit programme in Brazil, we show that: the increased supply of microcredit raised formal credit utilisation and this does not crowd out the use of informal credit sources; formal credit taking improves business performance; and returns are larger for women- than for men-owned firms, but males employ significantly more workers after taking formal credit than females.