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This chapter presents a review of community transport in Australia with the aim of providing material for comparative research in flexible transport.

Research on Australian community transport has been brought together to present an analysis of the key features of the industry: history; geography; funding; regulation and the use of volunteers.

Each key feature has led to the current strong state/territory basis for service organisation and delivery, despite the federal responsibility for supplying most of the funding and ensuring equity and standards. Varying approaches to regulation and supply have also been driven by remoteness and the prevalence of large pockets of entrenched social disadvantage in some regions.

The chapter summarises research findings including hitherto unpublished research on an application of flexible transport services outside mainstream public transport operations in Australia.

In response to recent public library funding deficiencies, many people both inside and outside the field of librarianship have suggested that public libraries need to rely less on traditional government funding and more on alternative funding sources. This chapter reports the results of a review of the research and professional literature relating to government and alternative funding for US public libraries and presents a case study of the West Chester (PA) Public Library, which relies heavily on non-tax funds for its operations. It concludes with an analysis of the major arguments for and against alternative funding for public libraries and a consideration of the implications for public librarianship in the United States.

In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers’ opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany and the Netherlands, which enables comparisons both between organisational settings and between properties of innovations. Comparing the development of three innovations in the two types of organisations enables the identification of links between patterns of authority sharing at these organisations and the opportunities to develop innovations. On this basis, the distribution of opportunities to change research practices among researchers in the two countries can be established.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The Mexican government has been criticized for its implementation of neo-liberal economic policies that threaten to further impoverish indigenous populations. Given this, it is surprising that in 1997 some members of the Mixe people – one of the poorest indigenous groups in Mexico – condemned the implementation of a new government funding project that was specifically intended to alleviate hardship caused by free trade. The paper argues that objections to both free trade and the new funding program stem from the overarching problem the Mixe face, namely their systematic exclusion from decision-making processes and citizenship at the national level.

This paper focuses on the Obama administration’s American Graduation Initiative (AGI) and the associated completion agenda.

In this paper, we provide an in-depth overview of the AGI with a focus on: (a) articulating the rationale that prompted the AGI; (b) describing the four primary components of the reform effort; (c) examining the political forces that led to its demise; (d) investigating the derivatives of the AGI in the form of private foundation and state-level efforts to bolster success rates; and (e) illuminating criticisms of the AGI that could have served to complicate the initiative’s success.

In the latter section of the paper, we also offer recommendations for future national and state policy.

This chapter insists that local cocreation projects need not only good intentions and the hard work of volunteers but also require funding and financing of the design and implementation of new solutions. It draws a conceptual distinction between funding and financing and explains who may help to provide funding and financing and why they may do so. As a part of this discussion, attention is drawn to the importance of writing good and persuasive funding applications and drawing up a strong and convincing business case to secure financing of new solutions. The new and emerging strategy for mobilizing private capital to help finance SDG projects is explained and illustrated, before closing the chapter with a discussion of the need to develop a proper system for fiscal accounting and auditing, which can prevent mismanagement and misconduct that eventually undermine popular support for local SDG projects.

Access to equity capital is critical for business success, especially for young companies which lack the cash flows necessary for debt repayment. The creation and growth of such companies is a means to economic opportunity and wealth for ethnic-minority entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the traditional venture capital industry is extremely limited in its investments.¹ It also is significantly less likely to invest in businesses owned by ethnic-minority entrepreneurs than those owned by white entrepreneurs (Bates & Bradford, 1992).²

Globally, the number of women entrepreneurs lags behind the number of men. Understanding how women entrepreneurs can be developed and fostered remains an open avenue of inquiry. One particular area of consideration is the role of other women in supporting and sustaining women’s entrepreneurship. Using social identity theory for our framing, we utilize in-person interviews with various women entrepreneurs across a range of global settings (urban Hong Kong, Singapore, United Kingdom, and rural India) to focus on understanding the roles of other women as they relate to entrepreneurship. Across settings, we found that women entrepreneurs identified four key roles that other women played in developing their ventures. Furthermore, certain roles, such as having a female role model, were critical in rural settings over urban settings. We thus consider the implications of having other women for women’s entrepreneurship broadly.