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This chapter discusses how an urban regeneration process, with culture as an economic asset, can contribute to creating a city brand and identity for the city of Mestre, a new habitat, and economic opportunities for the local community, as well as helping neighboring Venice tackle overtourism. This chapter highlights that places suffering from undertourism often are located closely to those suffering from overtourism. Urban regeneration policies driven by culture can be a key solution for both places, by creating a new future, identity, and economic opportunities for one community and for the other, in helping to regulate their touristic flows.

This study aims to examine the factors influencing the effectiveness of zakat distribution to university students. Specifically, it examines technology improvement, procedural application and governance on Sarawak university students’ zakat distribution effectiveness.

This study used the questionnaire as a research instrument and divided it into five parts. Part A gathers demographic information of respondents. Part B measures the respondent’s opinion on current technology improvement. Part C measures university students’ opinion on zakat application procedures. Part D measures the governance concept of the zakat institution. Part E measures the effectiveness of zakat distribution.

This study found technology improvement and governance significantly influence the effectiveness of zakat distribution to university students. This study provides no significant influence of the procedural application on zakat distribution’s efficacy to university students.

This study suggested that technology plays an essential role in zakat distribution effectiveness by providing faster data processing, easier retrieval of information and time reduction to complete a task. The enforcement of good governance by zakat institutions allows them to be competitive, meets the stakeholders’ demand and serves them better.

This study provides understanding to the zakat institutions in developing appropriate zakat distribution strategies and strengthening their management and governance system.

This paper integrates technology improvement, procedural application and governance in zakat distribution.

The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative and efficient process in urban policy-making that combines a divergent and creative method with a convergent and strategic one. At the same time, the purpose is also to propose a useful innovation to enforce the usability of both methods. On the one hand, mission-oriented policies run the risk of being overly focused on the present and of not being able to develop preparedness in organization. On the other hand, scenario development has the reverse problem it often does not point out how to use scenario narratives to inform and devise short-term strategic actions.

The paper proposes an innovative methodological approach, the mission-oriented scenarios, which hybridizes Mazzucato's mission-oriented public policy framework with Jim Dator's Manoa school four futures method. The proposed methodological innovation emerges from a urban foresight academic-led project carried out in the context of the Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy, where a first application of the mission-oriented scenarios was tested on six different focal issues (from reindustrialization to cultural policies) and the scenario narratives were used as sources for the grounding of 12 missions and 48 strategic actions towards 2030.

Mission-oriented scenarios can contribute to the generation of more sustainable and inclusive urban public policies. This methodological proposal is based on an original mix of knowledge exchange procedures borrowed from methodological approaches with different backgrounds: the mission-oriented and the archetypal scenarios. Their conjunction could support the formulation of ambitious yet pragmatic policies, giving a plurality of actors the opportunity to act and establish fruitful and lasting partnerships.

The paper reconstructs one of the first urban foresight projects carried out in a major Italian city by two prestigious universities and exposes a methodological innovation resulting from reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the project, which opens the door to the development of a new scenario technique.

Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

Decentralization has profound implications for many health systems. This study investigates the effect of health system decentralization in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries on public health security capacity and health service satisfaction.

Multiple linear regression analyses were employed for variables related to the level of health security capacity and satisfaction with the healthcare system while controlling for all socio-demographic variables from the European Social Survey, including over 44,000 respondents from 25 OECD countries. The Health Systems in Transition series of countries were used for assessing the decentralization level.

The result of multiple linear regression analyses showed that the level of decentralization in health systems was significantly associated with higher health security capacity (ß-coefficient 3.722, 95% confidence interval (CI) [3.536 3.908]; p=<0.001) and health service satisfaction (ß-coefficient 1.463, 95% CI [1.389 1.536]; p=<0.001) in the study. Countries with a higher level of decentralization in health policy tasks and areas were significantly likely to have higher health services satisfaction, whereas this satisfaction had a significant negative relation with the lower level of decentralization status of secondary/tertiary care services in OECD countries (ß-coefficient −5.250, 95% CI [−5.757–4.743]; p = 0.001).

This study contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which decentralization of health services affects public health safety capacity and satisfaction with health services, whereas the level of decentralization in OECD countries varies considerably. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of public health security and satisfaction with health care delivery in assessing the effects of decentralization in health services.

The study aims to explain the process of management accounting practices and organizational change aspects in the public sector’s response to environmental pressures. Specifically, it discusses the interaction process between management accounting practices from one side and culture, leadership and decentralization from the other side.

This study adopts qualitative research approach and an interpretive case study. The study uses the triangulation method of data collection, including interviews, annual reports, documents and archival records. A theoretical lens informs it of the contextual/processual approach for interpreting interaction processes between management accounting and organizational change aspects, including culture, leadership and decentralization.

The findings confirm that a change in organizational culture has an important impact on accounting change, which has played a central role in the desire to initiate and accept such changes by the organizational members. Similarly, the new leadership style created a unique culture that was considered a solid platform to introduce new accounting systems by enhancing the trust between IT staff and management accountants and their trust in themselves to accept the change. The paper concludes that the relationships between the change aspects at the organizational level, and accounting practices at the inherent organizational and accounting levels are both recursive and two way, with the two concepts inextricably interwoven.

The study has some limitations as the data is limited to only a single country – more explanation for Jordanian Customs Organization quantitative understandings of governance improvement. The study has important implications for practitioners and customs officials by showing that different government regulations and customs reforms have varied influences on the public sector. These reforms have included most modifications to the accounting and organizational configurations. This study contributes to institutional theory development and refinement by exploring the interface between external influences and internal origins in the accounting change process.

This study uses a categorical association between organizational changes and accounting in the public sector as most prior studies have been conducted on the private sector due to competitive and technical pressures. It also contributes to organizational change and accounting literature by discussing the relationship between accounting from one side and culture and leadership from another side.

Micro-regeneration can effectively enhance a neighborhood’s commercial vitality and serve as a viable approach to boost economic benefits. However, the small scale of micro-regeneration efforts and the fragmented nature of information currently limit the availability of strong empirical evidence demonstrating its impact on neighborhood commercial vitality. The aim of the study was to examine the link between micro-regeneration and neighborhood commercial vitality, focusing on the average, time-lag, spatial spillover, and spatial heterogeneity effects.

Using the panel data set of 1,755 neighborhoods in Chongqing from 2016 to 2021 as the research sample, the difference-in-differences (DID) method was employed in this study to explore the impact micro-regeneration has on neighborhood commercial vitality.

The results illustrate that: (1) micro-regeneration can promote neighborhood commercial vitality in terms of the number and types of local consumption amenities by 27.76 and 5.89%, respectively, with no time-lag effect; (2) the positive spillovers can exist within the range of 5,000 meters–5,500 meters of regenerated neighborhoods; and (3) the effect of micro-regeneration on neighborhood commercial vitality can be greater in peripheral areas than in core areas of the city.

The findings fill the knowledge gap on the relationship between micro-regeneration and neighborhood commercial vitality. Additionally, the results on the time-lag effect, spatial spillover effects, and spatial heterogeneity provide practical implications that can support the government and private sector in developing temporal and spatial arrangements for micro-regeneration projects.

The build-up of large-scale COVID-19 testing required an unprecedented effort of coordination within decentralized healthcare systems around the world. The aim of the study was to elucidate the challenges of vertical policy coordination between non-political actors at the national and regional levels regarding this policy issue, using Sweden as our case.

Interviews with key actors at the national and regional levels were analyzed using an adapted version of a conceptualization by Adam et al. (2019), depicting barriers to vertical policy coordination.

Our results show that the main issues in the Swedish context were related to parallel sovereignty and a vagueness regarding responsibilities and mandates as well as complex governmental structures and that this was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity and uncertainty of the policy issue. We conclude that understanding the interaction between the comprehensiveness and complexity of the policy issue and the institutional context is crucial to achieving effective vertical policy coordination.

Many studies have focused on countries’ overall pandemic responses, but in order to improve the outcome of future pandemics, it is also important to learn from more specific response measures.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.