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Purpose – The purpose is to explore public participation as a means to overcome jurisdictional barriers in governance of trans-boundary wildlife management issues.

Methodology/approach – We present one model, defining six philosophical approaches to public participation, then examine relationships between these approaches and traits of stakeholder communities, revealing three distinct governance paradigms: top–down governance, public input, and public engagement. These paradigms illustrate that the different approaches represent fundamentally different types of participation, not simply varying amounts of participation. Using case studies from the United States, we demonstrate how some state, federal, and local government institutions have successfully applied public input and public engagement models of governance to suburban white-tailed deer management. While both models can be used effectively, certain approaches may be preferable to others depending on specific management context, public participation goals, and target publics.

Findings – Public input approaches appear better suited to addressing complex problems and communities of interest, while public engagement approaches may better resolve wicked problems that affect communities of place. Future research is needed to clarify the relationship between success of governance paradigms and contextual considerations.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter goes beyond many existing approaches to public participation and governance and presents interesting findings related to exurbanized and protected areas in the USA.

The teaching case is designed to be used by students in higher education institutions at the undergraduate level. This case may also be relevant for staff at the bursary departments of any public universities or public organizations that have biological assets.

This case provides a study on agricultural activity at Universiti Pengurusan Malaysia (UNIPM). The purpose of this case is to create greater awareness for case users on the accounting framework and on methods recommended for recording specific assets in agricultural activity, i.e., biological assets. This case provides users with experience in explaining the nature of an organization’s agricultural activities and accounting for biological assets as recommended in the Malaysian accounting framework. In addition, users are exposed to some current issues in accounting standards, such as ethical issues. In this case, Fakhrul, an accountant at UNIPM and a leader of the Asset Unit, was responsible for reporting the value of all UNIPM’s assets, including biological assets. He was instructed to accurately recognize, measure, and disclose the value of biological assets according to the appropriate accounting standard. Furthermore, UNIPM had been urged to replace the existing accounting standard of the Malaysian Private Entity Reporting Standard (MPERS) with the Malaysian Public Sector Accounting Standard (MPSAS). Fakhrul was considering how to account for and report biological assets according to the new MPSAS. This case is a decision making or ‘unfinished’ case which is suitable for financial accounting and reporting courses. The names of the people and the university are fictitious, but the details were based on actual events. A series of interviews were conducted with the key players to gather the data. Other useful documents such as the university’s annual report, university’s website and the deer reports were also referred.

The primary objective of this teaching case is to provide an opportunity for case users to understand both the accounting framework and the methods recommended for recording specific assets in agricultural activity. More specifically, the teaching objectives of this case are to achieve the following learning outcomes: to identify the relevant accounting standard for recognizing, measuring, reporting, and disclosing biological assets by public universities in Malaysia, to apply the appropriate accounting treatment in recognizing, measuring, reporting, and disclosing biological assets in accordance with the appropriate accounting standard for public universities in Malaysia and to understand the ethical issues involved in deer valuation methods.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and finance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a semantics representation framework for narrative images, conforming to the image-interpretation process.

This paper explores the essential features of semantics evolution in the process of narrative images interpretation. It proposes a novel semantics representation framework, ESImage (evolution semantics of image) for narrative images. ESImage adopts a hierarchical architecture to progressively organize the semantic information in images, enabling the evolutionary interpretation under the support of a graph-based semantics data model. Also, the study shows the feasibility of this framework by addressing the issues of typical semantics representation with the scenario of the Dunhuang fresco.

The process of image interpretation mainly concerns three issues: bottom-up description, the multi-faceted semantics representation and the top-down semantics complementation. ESImage can provide a comprehensive solution for narrative image semantics representation by addressing the major issues based on the semantics evolution mechanisms of the graph-based semantics data model.

ESImage needs to be combined with machine learning to meet the requirements of automatic annotation and semantics interpretation of large-scale image resources.

This paper sorts out the characteristics of the gradual interpretation of narrative images and has discussed the major issues in its semantics representation. Also, it proposes the semantic framework ESImage which deploys a flexible and sound mechanism to represent the semantic information of narrative images.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pressures to adhere to sustainability practices in an oil company in Sudan and its response to these pressures.

A qualitative case study research was conducted through interviews with the case company’s managers and various external stakeholders. The interviews were complemented by several informal conversations, observations and documentary materials.

There were external and internal pressures exerted on the company to adopt sustainability practices. However, the coercive pressures did not necessarily bring about a real change in the organisation. The forces of change were mainly the foreign partner’s audit pressure and the non-governmental organisation (NGO) allegations, which were given serious attention, due to the importance of reputation as an asset to the company.

Clear regulatory frameworks, more direct engagement with NGOs and meeting the expectations of the local communities were considered as crucial factors to ensure there is a pathway for sustainability in the oil and gas industry of developing countries.

Most previous studies on the motivation for corporate sustainability practices focussed on external pressures. This study examined the specific types of stakeholders’ group, among the internal and external stakeholders, that has most influence on the organisation’s sustainability practices, in the context of a developing country with weak regulatory governance.

This study aims to test a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) paired with a thermal imaging camera for detecting big game species such as Eurasian elk, red deer, European roe deer and Eurasian wild boar.

The research work was carried out in the Czarna Bialostocka Forest District (Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland). A thermal imaging camera E20Tvx Yuneec with a view angle of 33° × 26.6° and a thermal sensor resolution of 640 × 512 pixels was selected for the research. The Yuneec H520E hexacopter was chosen as the lifting vehicle. The flights for the study were conducted between the autumn of 2021 and the winter of 2022. The UAV was flown at two different altitudes, 120 and 80 m above ground level, which provided a ground sampling distance of 11 and 7 cm, respectively.

The results so far have shown the potential of commercially available thermal imaging cameras for detecting and identifying big game species, such as Eurasian elk and red deer. Moreover, in the winter season of 2022 on the 7th and 13th of March, it was also possible to determine the sex of red deer distinguishing between males and females. The results of the survey made with the thermal camera were compared to the assessment from the standard method for the determination of the game population in the Czarna Bialostocka sub-district. In the case of red deer, the results of the research carried out during the winter exceed five times the numbers obtained as a result of the traditional inventory. That is most likely due to the gregarious occurrence of this species in the winter season.

The use of thermovision to estimate the population and sex of animals is a relatively new issue, especially in Poland, where the use of thermal imaging is not the official method of research of big game species yet.

The cross-docking strategy has a significant influence on supply chain and logistics efficiency. This paper aims to investigate the most suitable and efficient way to schedule the transfer of logistics activities and present a meta-heuristic method of the truck scheduling problem in cross-docking logistics. A truck scheduling problem with products time window is investigated with objectives of minimizing the total product transshipment time and earliness and tardiness cost of outbound trucks.

This research proposed a meta-heuristic method for the truck scheduling problem with products time window. To solve the problem, a lower bound of the problem is built through a novel two-stage Lagrangian relaxation problem and on account of the NP-hard nature of the truck scheduling problem, the novel red deer algorithm with the mechanism of the heuristic oscillating local search algorithm, as well as adaptive memory programming was proposed to overcome the inferior capability of the original red deer algorithm in the aspect of local search and run time.

Theory analysis and simulation experiments on an industrial case of a cross-docking center with a product’s time window are conducted in this paper. Satisfactory results show that the performance of the red deer algorithm is enhanced due to the mechanism of heuristic oscillating local search algorithm and adaptive memory programming and the proposed method efficiently solves the real-world size case of truck scheduling problems in cross-docking with product time window.

The consideration of products time window has very realistic significance in different logistics applications such as cold-chain logistics and pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, the novel adaptive memory red deer algorithm could be modified and applied to other complex optimization scheduling problems such as scheduling problems considering energy-efficiency or other logistics strategies.

For the first time in the truck scheduling problem with the cross-docking strategy, the product’s time window is considered. Furthermore, a mathematical model with objectives of minimizing the total product transshipment time and earliness and tardiness cost of outbound trucks is developed. To solve the proposed problem, a novel adaptive memory red deer algorithm with the mechanism of heuristic oscillating local search algorithm was proposed to overcome the inferior capability of genetic algorithm in the aspect of local search and run time.

Rarely acknowledged, particularly in business and communications, is that animals have interests in decisions that affect them. This chapter raises questions about how stakeholding is defined and explains why the circle of ethical consideration has been limited to human beings but should be expanded when so much of what we do impacts animals – animals who often labor for our benefit, not theirs, whose bodies are used as food, whose skins are used for fashion and furniture, and who are experimented upon, all without their consent, nor representation of their interests beyond essential physical needs. Animals as laborers/workers for our interests is an important expansion to business and public relations (PR) ethics. While labor is deeply raced and gendered, it also is species dependent. Many practices allowed with animal workers would never be permitted or certainly regarded with concern, if among human beings. Freeman's (1984) two-tiered sense of stakeholders is applied and the argument made that animals should be included in the array of stakeholders, the argument being they are not only silent but also silenced as have been marginalized human groups. This chapter offers a textual analysis of the cover of the December 09, 2013 issue of Time magazine and a response article which serve as a case study for considering animals as stakeholders integral to PR–corporate social responsibility–diversity, equity, and inclusion intersection. I examine deer in the urban landscape and ask whether their perspectives are included in decisions about population, habitat, and health. If communications are to be ethical, inclusive, and socially responsible, animals must be affirmed as part of DEI commitments. Action steps/recommendations for doing so are included.

This paper explores budgetary practices in a Tanzanian university after decentralization.

Data were collected through interviews, document analysis, and observation. Moreover, Bourdieu's theory was used in open and axial coding procedures for data analysis.

The findings show that decentralized budgeting was a disillusionment. Administrators failed to transfer financial authority to resource recipients. Budgetary practices were shaped by the social structure/budget cycle (field), resources possessed by budgetary actors (capital) and the sincerity patterns of actors in budgetary practices (habitus). Most resource recipients had insincerity in budgeting habitus deploying subversive strategy, while the minority had sincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying submissive strategy. On the other hand, administrators had sincerity and insincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying conservative strategy.

In order to enhance effective decentralization, resource recipients should be provided with adequate financial resources and budgeting skills. Furthermore, they should be trusted and recognized. Moreover, in order to shape budgeting strategies and practices towards achieving organizational objectives, managements should identify and work on internal, external and technical budgetary constraints. In addition, they should promote sincerity in budgeting habitus as habitus can be created, altered, and reproduced through knowledge.

This is the first paper to investigate budgetary practices in a university setting, employing all Bourdieu's six theoretical concepts. It contributes to Bourdieu's theory by introducing a submissive strategy. In addition, it introduces “episteme” concept as the opposite of “doxa.” Moreover, the paper responds to the call by Deering and Sá (2018) to investigate what guides budgetary practices in a university setting. The paper has also demonstrated the role of approval organs and subordinates which were neglected in prior studies. It proposes a theory of budgetary practice in a University setting when budgeting is decentralized. It thus responds to the call to investigate and theorize the role of actors in calculative practices (such as budgeting) in a University setting (Argento et al., 2020; Aleksandrov, 2020; Grossi et al., 2020; Ozdil and Hoque, 2017).

This paper aims to determine the effects of agricultural, recreational and urban variables on Oklahoma land prices.

An econometric model is estimated using price of agricultural land parcels as the dependent variable and independent variables representing agricultural, recreational and urban uses. Recreational variables include county‐level recreational income from Agricultural Census data as well as deer harvest for each county. Urban variables are functions of population and income for each county. The agricultural variables include rainfall as well as crop returns for cropland and cattle prices for pasture.

Agricultural variables are the most important, followed by urban and then recreational variables. Transaction prices are higher than commonly used land‐value survey data. The major recreational variable is deer harvest, which is more important in small tracts. The value of pasture is now greater than cropland. Small tract sizes receive substantial premiums.

Agriculture is still an important part of the Oklahoma economy, so the findings might differ in more densely populated states. As with most econometric models, there are possible biases due to errors in measurement or missing explanatory variables.

The paper provides information that could be used by those wanting to estimate land value or wanting to manage land to increase its value.

The paper differs from previous work in both variables considered and the data used. Also, most previous work has not as directly addressed the issue of the relative importance of agricultural, recreational and urban variables.