Search results

The purpose of this study is to analyze the horizontal expansion of Burayu Town between 1990 and 2020. The study typically acts as a baseline for integrated spatial planning in small- and medium-sized towns, which will help to plan sustainable utilization of land.

Landsat5-TM, Landsat7 ETM+, Landsat5 TM and Landsat8 OLI were used in the study, along with other auxiliary data. The LULC map classifications were generated using the Random Forest Package from the Comprehensive R Archive Network. Post-classification, spatial metrics, and per capita land consumption rate were used to understand the manner and rate of expansion of Burayu Town. Focus group discussions and key informant interviews were also used to validate land use classes through triangulation.

The study found that the built-up area was the most dynamic LULC category (85.1%) as it increased by over 4,000 ha between 1990 and 2020. Furthermore, population increase did not result in density increase as per capita land consumption increased from 0.024 to 0.040 during the same period.

As a result of financial limitations, there were no high-resolution satellite images available, making it challenging to pinpoint the truth as it is on the ground. Including senior citizens in the study region allowed this study to overcome these restrictions and detect every type of land use and cover.

Data on urban growth are useful for planning land uses, estimating growth rates and advising the government on how best to use land. This can be achieved by monitoring and reviewing development plans using satellite imaging data and GIS tools.

The use of Random Forest for image classification and the employment of local knowledge to validate the accuracy of land cover classification is a novel approach to properly customize remote sensing applications.

This paper presents participants' experiences of the collaborative process. The paper introduces the World Heritage Site and presents the central learning outcomes of a process through which researchers and practitioners sought to develop an empirically-grounded, site-specific and practice-led research agenda relevant to World Heritage management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to improving collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the World Heritage field.

From September 2021 to April 2022, a research-practice team comprised of social scientists and managers of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Norway participated in a capacity-building pilot initiative under the ICCROM-IUCN World Heritage Leadership programme. Bringing researchers and practitioners together in a joint collaborative process, the Heritage Place Lab (HPL) pilot programme aimed to function as an incubator for developing research agendas for World Heritage Sites.

The paper demonstrates that close collaboration between heritage researchers and practitioners can benefit World Heritage Sites, offering managers valuable inputs for informed and inclusive decision-making. In the case of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, an improved understanding of the diversities in local values would benefit management, as existing management issues underpin the site's complexity. Furthermore, fruitful collaborations between heritage researchers and World Heritage managers depend on an overlapping and reflexive understanding of central concepts. This can be achieved through collaborative research-practice processes but is likely to require careful time management.

Focussing on the collaborative process between World Heritage researchers and practitioners, and using additional information for comparable World Heritage examples obtained online, this paper shows how research interests and management challenges can be developed and aligned more successfully through cooperation and improved communication over time. Beyond the specific results for the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, the broader discussion presented on the challenges and importance of addressing the complexities of managing heritage sites will be valuable for other World Heritage Sites and managers.

The politically laden nature of postdisaster recovery calls for more research on its governance, especially at the micro-scale. Apart from engineering-oriented frameworks, researchers need new theoretical underpinnings. This paper aims to review the development of the evolutionary resilience theory and use it as an analytical framework to evaluate the governance of post-earthquake reconstruction planning in China.

This paper examines how reconstruction planning is governed in the epicenter town of the 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake, highlighting three key qualities of evolutionary resilience. The authors draw on site investigations, semistructured interviews and analysis of official and unpublished documents from various sources.

This paper finds that despite the absence of specific resilience statements in reconstruction plans of the time, qualities of evolutionary resilience, including social connectedness, flexibility and innovation, were evident in a hybrid and contradictory reconstruction planning system. In this respect, resilience thinking appears in Chinese planning earlier than generally assumed. This paper suggests that this manifestation of resilience was the result of an instrumental utility in addressing socioeconomic uncertainties in the postdisaster environment and, thus, may not be systematic.

This work enriches the understanding of recovery governance from an evolutionary resilience perspective where existing research is insufficient. It also offers ample practical guidance for similar cases in China and elsewhere.

The study investigates the linkage between personality traits and firm performance. It examines the role of the pursuit of excellence, perseverance, a proactive mindset and formal education in determining the entrepreneurial success of MSMEs.

Data were collected from 432 MSME entrepreneurs using a structured questionnaire from India's two major industrial towns to analyze the impact of personality traits on firm performance. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to assess the direct and indirect relationships with the help of mediation analysis.

The findings assert that personality traits improve firm performance and determine the success of MSMEs. The results reveal that the need for achievement, a proactive mindset and the pursuit of excellence are crucial to firm performance. In addition, formal education mediates between perseverance and the pursuit of excellence personality attributes on the one side and firm performance on the other.

The research has various theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurs, financial institutions and policymakers. The results could be productively used to nurture the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Although research on personality traits as a driver of firm performance is growing, the pursuit of excellence, perseverance and proactive mindset attributes as enablers of firm performance have not garnered much attention. The study presents a precise conceptual model by integrating the aforementioned dimensions in the backdrop of an emerging market.

This study aims to investigate key aspects of public ownership of land, expropriation and compensation laws and practices in Ethiopia with special reference to Burayu Town.

A mixed research technique of descriptive and analytic approach is applied in the research. This study used a purposive sampling technique to select case study counties and a systematic method for sampling households. Questionnaire surveys, focus group discussions, interviews and observations were used to collect empirical data. Average, percentage and paired-sample t-test analyses are used for quantitative data analysis.

Significant discrepancies exist between the expropriation laws and how property valuation and compensation are practiced in Ethiopia. The findings include the arbitrariness in designating public interest status to projects; unfair property valuation practice that neglects location factor to determine market value due to a skewed understanding of public ownership of land; and the assignment of property valuators who have no valuation expertise and proper knowledge of expropriation related laws. Findings revealed the socio-economic status of expropriated households has deteriorated due to the expropriation of their landholding.

It was difficult to locate the relocated persons as they were resettled in different localities. Furthermore, the town officers were not forthcoming to provide complete information on the expropriation and compensation procedures they followed. However, this study overcame the limitations through persistent requests and availing time for the data gathering.

The findings indicated the need to redefine relationships between public ownership of land, public interest and expropriation of landholding. A proper understanding of the triad will pave the way for better expropriation practice in Ethiopia and in countries where land is under public ownership.

The social implication of the study revealed that the socio-economic situation of relocated persons was adversely affected due to the poor implementation of laws.

The disparity between public ownership of land and the rights of citizens on landholding is misunderstood by policymakers. Research has shown for the first time the root cause for the discontent of expropriated persons in Ethiopia.

Leveraging the boom of a craft beer renaissance, this paper explores social capital theory through the impact of the craft brewing industry. The exploration addresses entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems that share one commonality – the need for community development and revitalization. North Carolina's deregulation of craft brewing (Pop-the-Cap Initiative, 2005) led to a boom of brewery startups, from 54 in 2010 to more than 380 in 2022.

This qualitative study focuses on 15 brewery founders who have launched ventures within a few years of the Pop-the-Cap Initiative. This included 15% of those breweries launched between 2012 and 2017. Naturalistic Inquiry methodology was utilized, and semi-structured interviews, observations, and artifact analyses were applied to each participant via content analysis and NVivo.

Framed by two contributing entrepreneurial mindset factors (anti-establishment mindset and business-person's burden mindset) and three external entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems conditions (community conditions, doom and boom conditions, and economic conditions), these emergent themes represent the ecosystem contributors (mindsets/conditions) associated with startup success and social value creation in rural and downtrodden urban areas.

This study facilitated a deep dive into two evolving entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems (rural/urban) through the perspective of brewery startups. It illuminated the actors, conditions, and domains in play. Conceptualizations of “nestedness” (Spigel, 2022) with “microfoundations” (Wurth et al., 2022) integrated to see a specific sector (craft brewing) developing within a sub-ecosystem's capacity to help frame and “understand the co-evolution of agents with entrepreneurial ecosystems” (Cho et al., 2022). Additionally, antecedents to the birth of local economies suggest the value of agents involved in evolution of nascent local economies (Cho et al., 2022). These findings reinforce developing literature while presenting opportunities for future studies.

Craft breweries in rural and urban environments represent third places within communities. Third places can be recognized as conduits for developing social capital among individuals, groups, and firms. High levels of social capital positively impact communities. These conditions helped anchor tenants thrive and did not occur accidently. They are intentional value propositions of entrepreneurs and ecosystem conditions.

Brewery entrepreneurs were aware of their contribution to social capital value, economic impact (e.g., tax revenue, jobs, space, attraction/destination, etc.), and how these facets interplay as revitalizing anchor tenants (i.e., craft breweries). Insight into how entrepreneurs come to understand and recognize their impact on community through social capital development and the economy can aid in further support ecosystems at the community level.

This study aims to examine Musina municipality’s tourism development status and plans with existing documents and respondents’ responses on their envisaged implications on tourism development and sustainability initiatives in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa.

Surveys, interviews and focus group discussions, supplemented by field observation and document reviews, gray literature alongside published literature, were applied. Subsequently, Microsoft Excel and cross-tabulation analysis orchestrated the analysis of the data.

The policy and strategy aspects contributing to the previous and actual tourism statuses in Musina municipality are defined. The study concludes that Musina Municipality has rich tourism possibilities but lacks a better tourism strategy to empower local communities. Nonetheless, it dwells in the most tourism-based landscape within the Vhembe District of Limpopo.

Musina Municipality is one of the driest areas in the north of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It is also marked by impoverished rural communities. Studies on sustainable tourism and development have increased in recent years. However, rare studies specialize in synergies within various forms of tourism. Also, significant resources to advance local communities in rural areas are not sufficiently appreciated.

The burgeoning population has an adverse impact on the employability prospects in the emerging economies and has triggered entrepreneurial activities to steer this predicament. The purpose of this study is to explicate the major entrepreneurial competencies that drive firm competitiveness.

Three industrial estates were selected from the two major industrial districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. The study used a cross-sectional design and responses from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) entrepreneurs were collected by employing a structured questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was applied to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the study.

The study discerns the enablers of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence. The results reveal that the need for achievement and locus of control competencies strikingly augment firm competitiveness while risk-taking capability and innovativeness competencies aggrandize pursuit of excellence competency. The study further adduces that pursuit of excellence partially mediates between the liaison of risk-taking capability and innovativeness on the one end and firm competitiveness on the other.

The study demonstrates the compelling determinants of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence that might embolden training institutes and banks to emphasize the identified competencies for enhancing firm competitiveness and advancing loans.

There is a paucity of literature on “pursuit of excellence” and “firm competitiveness” regarding the MSME sector in India. Therefore, the study contributes to the literature by synthesizing these constructs in an epigrammatic conceptual model. The study is distinctive because it is one of the rare studies to explore the mediating effects of the pursuit of excellence entrepreneurial competency.

Even if there is a wealth of research highlighting the key role of values and cultural significance for heritage management and, defining specific interventions on built heritage, seldom the relation to their leading values and values hierarchy have been researched. How do values and interventions relate? What values trigger most and least interventions on heritage? How do these values relate and characterize interventions? And what are the values hierarchy that make the interventions on built heritage differ?

This paper conducts a systematic content analysis of 69 international doctrinal documents – mainly adopted by Council of Europe, UNESCO, and ICOMOS, during 1877 and 2021. The main aim is to reveal and compare the intervention concepts and their definitions, in relation to values. The intensity of the relationship between intervention concepts and values is determined based on the frequency of mentioned values per intervention.

There were three key findings. First, historic, social, and aesthetical values were the most referenced values in international doctrinal documents. Second, while intervention concepts revealed similar definitions and shared common leading values, their secondary values and values hierarchy, e.g. aesthetical or social values, are the ones influencing the variation on their definitions. Third, certain values show contradictory roles in the same intervention concepts from different documents, e.g. political and age values.

This paper explores a novel comparison between different interventions concepts and definitions, and the role of values. The results can contribute to support further research and practice on clarifying the identified differences.