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Planning for Jaipur City in Rajasthan, north-western India, which was added to the World Heritage List in 2019, considers the surrounding hills and water systems. Rapid urbanisation is currently placing strain on the area, and natural resources and city green spaces are deteriorating. A multidisciplinary team of academicians, researchers and practitioners was assembled under the Heritage Place Lab (HPL) initiative with the aim of developing a research agenda to complement the city's Special Area Heritage Plan (SAHP) that is currently in development.

Given the complicated urban structure of Jaipur, an interdisciplinary approach involving experts from various fields and engagement from all levels of the city's stakeholders was necessary. The partnership proceeded following the parameters provided under the HPL to jointly build a research agenda focussing on the management challenges of the World Heritage Site.

The co-produced research programme narrowed its initial emphasis on documenting of the natural heritage of the city to reflect the functions it served in a social setting. It was also revealed that the conflicting nature of activities within the World Heritage Site is caused by overlapping jurisdictions of several administrative and legislative components.

Jaipur, examined here by an interdisciplinary Research-Practice Team, provides a valuable and unique case study for heritage management, particularly given that most historic cities in India are facing comparable concerns surrounding urbanisation with rising pressures on natural resources.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

Regional civilizations have existed for more than 5,000 years. Each has evolved from primitive, social and political systems into much more complex ones to meet the challenges of historical ages and successive world civilizations (Yakovets, 2000). In the third millennium, regional civilizations face a new challenge – globalization and post-industrial world civilization.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

No scholar or researcher is able to provide robust evidence that counters the scant reflection on metatheory – mostly ontology and epistemology – underlying management studies in general, and industrial marketing and purchasing research in particular. This paper is a contribution to the indispensable discussion of metatheoretical alternatives in research, and most importantly, the strengths and shortcomings thereof, and respective implications on research questions, objectives, and findings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of natural resources on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa. Decomposing the measures of natural resource, in terms of contribution to GDP (oil rent (OR), mineral rent (MR) and forest rents (FRs)) and export drive (fuel exports (FE) and minerals export), with the objective of obtaining quantitative estimates of their relationship with FDI, we considered the effect of regional or trade blocks on the continent and control for trade openness, financial market development and infrastructure.

Using annual panel data of 49 African countries over the period 1980-2011 and employing the system GMM estimation technique.

The authors show that after allowing for effect of trade or regional block formation, natural resources in its composite form (ORs, MRs, forest rents (FRs), FEs and minerals export) influences FDI in Africa. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that though natural resources (compositely) influences FDI, the different measures of natural resource differ significantly in terms of their marginal contribution in attracting FDI to the continent especially to different trade blocks. The authors provide that in the presence of certain type of natural resources, trade openness or banking sector credit expansion or infrastructural development is less desirable whilst regional or trade blocks strongly moderate the effect of financial market development and infrastructural development on FDI flow on the continent.

The authors employed a broad data set to provide evidence of the association between natural resources in its composite form and well as its various component and FDI to African after accounting for regional/trade blocks.

The world is changing and key change agents include climate change and scarcity of resources. The purpose of this paper is to address how New Zealand and tourism could address the future and generate appropriate strategic responses.

Using the process of scenario analysis and drawing upon recent research from the www.tourism2050.com project, this paper describes the circumstances, drivers, economic consequences and key decisions that New Zealand would have to take in order to position itself as an eco paradise. The background to the scenario presumes overarching behaviours in a cooperative world in which resources are scarce.

The scenario portrays a future of collective individualism, where a high degree of personal freedom exists but within the constraints of a world in which there is a scarcity of resources. A communitarian ethos drives policy making with an emphasis on efficient resource use and waste minimisation. New Zealand is a nation favoured by climate change. Environmental intellectual property is one of the nation's key resources and in the spirit of achieving a global environmental equilibrium these technologies are shared with the rest of the world. Life is simple. Competitive individualism is equated with excess and resource waste, while cooperation, harmony, and the continuation of a global cooperative psyche are seen as the foundation stones of the continued, relatively comfortable survival of humanity. Tourism is a luxury and activities are environmentally ethical. Visitors are well‐off, purposeful, highly respectful and careful to prove their worth.

Eco paradise represents the classic tale of a prisoner's dilemma in which decision makers and consumers ponder the betterment of humankind against individualism. The scenario concludes with a strategic map of the core decisions New Zealand's tourism industry would have to take. The significance of the paper is its portrayal of a possible future to industry leaders, researchers and stakeholders thereby facilitating decision making in order to adapt to this future.