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Targets set out by state institutions, with respect to supplying water to deprived communities, seem to be idealistic and not realistic. Study envisioned to assess challenges of financing water infrastructure projects, and determines the role of the state towards infrastructure development by holistically planning and engaging with the private sector.

The study adopted a quantitative approach, whereby a questionnaire survey was conducted among different stakeholders involved in water infrastructure projects in South Africa. Data gathered were analysed using percentages, mean item score and standard deviation.

The study revealed that most challenges affecting the success of the financing of water infrastructure projects in South Africa are corruption, hostility towards private participation, cost recovery constraints, high fiscal deficits by state government, unreliable planning and procurement processes, and a rapid increasing number of municipalities that lack technical and administrative capacity to plan implement, operate and maintain water assets.

This research paper investigates projects’ financing challenges with a broad inspection on the role of the public sector. The apparent role of the international structures such as OECD, IMF and World Bank had no influence in the study. From the findings, it is clear that the central government and state institutions lack the necessary resources to accelerate infrastructure development, water infrastructure in particular. The study, thus, recommends a complete expansion and development of state capacity as well as improved collaborations with the private sector to drive the success delivery of services to the public.

Improved and flexible regulations and legislative guidelines are required to ensure that both sectors fulfil their side of the bargain, with an ultimate goal of meeting the predetermined targets of supplying adequate water to the deprived communities.

Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

Women are increasingly involved in a range of drug supply activities, but their role is overlooked in scholarship and policy processes. Women are key actors in plant cultivation (opium poppy, coca and cannabis), trafficking and distribution, but roles in the illegal drug economy are highly gendered stratified. Women most usually occupy low levels in supply and distribution chains, with their access to markets mediated by men. Nevertheless, participation by women in drug supply enables them to support precarious household incomes and/or cover the costs of dependent or casual drug use. More women are coming into drug supply and use at a time when a number of countries are adopting more repressive and punitive drug policies. The impact of enforcement is a sharp increase in numbers of incarcerated women, with implications for care of families and children.

Investments in gender training for agricultural researchers have not attained expected outcomes, bringing into question the efficacy of training approaches used. New approaches for transformative gender training need to draw on lessons learned from previous courses. This chapter analyses short gender training courses identified using a scoping methodology. Selected courses offered between 2005 and 2015 for scientists in Eastern Africa were critiqued against a theoretical framework for transformative gender training. Also shared is a training model (Gender Responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation course) that addresses gaps in previous courses. The chapter identifies critical lessons for facilitating transformative gender training for non-gender research practitioners which include the need for inter-disciplinary grounding in the disciplines of gender and agriculture, having a phased course delivery and the value of continuous technical support during and after training. Gender training models should also allow for the deepening of gender awareness and consciousness by providing safe spaces for personal reflections on the root causes of gender inequalities and for the questioning of the internalized norms and biases.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates). That is, without critically inquiring into the knowledge of life which is well-being and valuable, life is not worth living. Critical thinking questions existing theories and their unexamined and obsessive assumptions and generalizations, constraints, and “best” practices of the prevailing system of management and tries to replace them with more valid assumptions and generalizations that uphold the dignity, uniqueness, and inalienable rights of the individual person and the community. Better outcomes result from asking the right questions than from having the right answers. In the diverse, pluralist cultural environment of today, the promise of a truly generative dialog among Occidental (Western) and Oriental (Eastern) cultures and civilizations holds great hope for the future. Critical thinking (CT) is an “inclusive” thinking system that can facilitate this dialog such that all of us have a meaningful space and place in this universe. After defining CT and arguing its importance for executives, this chapter introduces CT in two parts: Part 1: Various Approaches to Critical Thinking; Part 2: Major Theories of Critical Thinking. Several contemporary business cases will be invoked to illustrate the need, nature, and scope of corporate CT.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of online policing has questionable impacts in Australian prosecutions involving drugs obtained and distributed through dark web cryptomarkets. The authors describe several Australian prosecutions of mid- and low-level dealers who have accessed drugs through the dark web and contrast these with the United States (US) case against the cryptomarket, AlphaBay. The discussion in this study emphasises how Australian police and courts view the relative weight of dark web activity associated with the domestic and transnational supply of illicit drugs that result in formal prosecutions. The authors suggest that large-scale forms of online and dark web police surveillance undertaken by US enforcement agencies reflect Ethan Nadelmann’s (Cops across borders: the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) thesis on the Americanisation of global policing through transnational communications networks. The authors then explain how key elements of transnational dark web drug supply appear to have a marginal bearing on criminal investigations into low- and mid-level traffickers in Australia, which rely on conventional surveillance tactics to identify clandestine mail pickups, physical distribution methods, and irregular money trails. However, the authors then illustrate how the Americanisation of online policing that targets high-level entrepreneurs and seeks to dismantle or eliminate dark web cryptomarkets has important implications on Australian reforms aimed at enhancing online surveillance powers to target a range of crimes that are often wrongly associated with illicit drug cryptomarkets. The authors conclude by demonstrating how intensive dark web surveillance has limited direct impact on routine drug policing in Australia, with dark web communications simply another medium for facilitating the physical detection of illicit transnational drug transactions.

Innovation in a decentralized blockchain infrastructure can be used by medicine as a prerequisite for the exchange of patient data. Developments in the medical device industry that support the technology of the internet of things and wireless sensor networks also facilitate the examination of patient medical records that no longer require visits to the practice of doctors or hospitals which in some cases takes in a considerable time. Not to mention the consideration of traffic congestion and busy routine in the work. Patients can check their healthcare concerns using only sensors such as e-Health Sensor Shield Platform which then sends recording results through the transmission line to the data lakes. However, this patient’s medical record data is very confidential and may only be accessed by certain parties only. This required the design of the concept of security in the transmission of data so that the data does not leak to parties who are not eligible. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the concept of using encryption with an asymmetric key for securing data from sensors to data lakes before forwarding to a decentralized, interconnected blockchain infrastructure.

Divestitures and other forms of organizational separation are not commonly associated with continuity and ongoing collaboration in inter-organizational relationships. Instead, separation is often equated with terminating relationships and gaining independence. Here, the authors argue that achieving separation does not require terminating relationships and that ongoing collaboration between separating entities may actually contribute to successful separation. The authors base this argument on the assertion that the objective of organizational separation is to achieve organizational autonomy for all entities involved and that separating entities can enable each other’s development of autonomy while remaining interdependent. The authors also discuss how collaborative separation may contribute to a range of benefits, as well as why it may nevertheless fail to emerge in practice. In this respect, the authors consider the relevance of ethical perspectives and emotional dynamics related to feelings of (dis)respect, (dis)trust, pride and shame. The authors conclude by discussing activities that may contribute to, and undermine, effective collaborative separation.

As hybrid organizations become increasingly common, the authors observe that some hybrid forms are becoming institutionalized and legitimated. The authors explore the implications of the institutionalization of hybridity, addressing both the internal tensions that plague many hybrids and the external tensions stemming from evaluator assessments and stakeholder uncertainty. The authors propose that institutionalization can dampen internal tensions associated with hybridity and also facilitate legitimation and acceptance by external audiences. The authors present identity as a useful theoretical lens through which to examine these questions, as identities are born from, but also have the potential to modify, existing institutional arrangements. The authors present directions for future research at the juncture of identity, hybridity, and institutionalization, suggesting potential avenues of inquiry in this productive stream of research.

The predominant neoliberal structure of capitalism and tourism as the fuel of capitalism exposes growing problems of injustice, unfairness and inequality. Places and communities around the world are currently expressing the need for radical changes in placemaking to be able to think, plan and act differently. This theoretical contribution adopts a humanistic management (HM) perspective of placemaking to promote places where people enjoy living, working, interacting and having meaningful experiences. Tourist destinations are relevant places to discuss the application of HM principles in practice and promote humanistic destinations and the humanisation of placemaking. This chapter concludes by arguing for an interface with eco-centric and posthumanist transformative approaches to promote holistic value-based placemaking and regeneration of places.