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This study aims to explore the management learning during a long-term crisis like a pandemic. The paper addresses both what health-care managers have learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the management learning is characterized.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic at two different public hospitals in Sweden. The study, conducted with semi-structured interviews, applies a combination of within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. The data were analyzed using thematic deductive analysis with the themes, i.e. sensemaking, decision-making and meaning-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by uncertainty and a need for continuous learning among the managers at the case hospitals. The learning process that arose was circular in nature, wherein trust played a crucial role in facilitating the flow of information and enabling the managers to get a good sense of the situation. This, in turn, allowed the managers to make decisions meaningful for the organization, which improved the trust for the managers. This circular process was iterated with higher frequency than usual and was a prerequisite for the managers’ learning. The practical implications are that a combined management with hierarchical and distributed management that uses the normal decision routes seems to be the most successful management method in a prolonged crisis as a pandemic.

The gained knowledge can benefit hospital organizations, be used in crisis education and to develop regional contingency plans for pandemics.

This study has explored learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and found a circular process, “the management learning wheel,” which supports management learning in prolonged crises.

This study aims to show a case study of ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) measures to increase coastal system’s resilience to extreme weather events and sea-level rise (SLR) implemented at Kiyú (Uruguayan coast of the Rio de la Plata river estuary).

A participatory process involving the community and institutional stakeholders was carried out to select and prioritise adaptation measures to reduce the erosion of sandy beaches, dunes and bluffs due to extreme wind storm surge and rainfall, SLR and mismanagement practices. The recovery of coastal ecosystems was implemented through soft measures (green infrastructure) such as revegetation with native species, dune regeneration, sustainable drainage systems and the reduction of use pressures.

Main achievements of this case study include capacity building of municipal staff and stakeholders, knowledge exchanges with national-level decision makers and scientists and the incorporation of EbA approaches by subnational-level coastal governments. To consolidate EbA, the local government introduced innovations in the coastal management institutional structure.

The outcomes of the article include, besides the increase in the resilience of social-ecological systems, the strengthening of socio-institutional behaviour, structure and sustainability. This experience provides insights for developing a strategy for both Integrated Coastal Management and climate adaptation at the national scale.

This study aims to better inform environmental management at universities by applying and validating the policy integration processes theory through a case study of Manchester Metropolitan University.

Social network analyses were used to identify, differentiate and categorise working networks of individuals and departments and the interconnections between them.

In an organisation, networks can be developed and active at departmental level but not at individual level. High numbers of departments can be doing work related to sustainable development whilst having low and medium levels of interconnections between departments. Influence of stakeholders throughout the network suggests levels of sustainable development policy integration at individual and departmental.

New insights provide evidence for universities’ environmental managers of the need of developing and implementing strategies that involve individuals’ work between departments by providing incentives, supporting capacity building and staff empowerment.

This paper applied and validated the theory of policy integration processes, showing that work at individual level and between departments needs more attention.

The purpose of this study was to explore 232 service providers’ and policymakers’ experiences of supporting children’s well-being during the pandemic, across sectors, in 22 countries – including Kenya, the Philippines, South Africa, India, Scotland, Sweden, Canada and the USA, in the last quarter of 2020.

A smartphone survey delivered via a custom-built app containing mostly open-ended questions was used. Respondents were recruited via professional networks, newsletters and social media. Qualitative content analysis was used.

The findings reveal numerous system-level challenges to supporting children’s well-being, particularly virus containment measures, resource deficiencies and inadequate governance and stakeholder coordination. Those challenges compounded preexisting inequalities and poorly affected the quality, effectiveness and reach of services. As a result, children’s rights to an adequate standard of living; protection from violence; education; play; and right to be heard were impinged upon. Concurrently, the findings illustrate a range of adaptive and innovative practices in humanitarian and subsistence support; child protection; capacity-building; advocacy; digitalisation; and psychosocial and educational support. Respondents identified several priority areas – increasing service capacity and equity; expanding technology use; mobilising cross-sectoral partnerships; involving children in decision-making; and ensuring more effective child protection mechanisms.

This study seeks to inform resilience-enabling policies and practices that foster equity, child and community empowerment and organisational resilience and innovation, particularly in anticipation of future crises.

Using a novel approach to gather in-the-moment insights remotely, this study offers a unique international and multi-sectoral perspective, particularly from low- and middle-income countries.

This study adopts an institutional entrepreneurship perspective in the context of public–private partnerships (P3s) to highlight the role of social actors in enacting institutional change in a complex organizational setting. By studying the actions of two prominent social actors, the authors argue that successful institutional change is the result of dynamic managerial activity supported by political clout, organizational authority and the social positioning of actors.

The authors conducted a field-based case study in a complex institutional and organizational setting in Alberta, Canada. The authors employed an institutional entrepreneurship perspective to identify and analyze the activities of two allied actors motivated to transform the institutional environment for public infrastructure delivery.

The empirical study suggests that the implementation of institutional change is both individualistic and collaborative. Moreover, it is grounded in everyday organizational practices and activities and involves a coalition of allies invested in enacting lasting change in organizational practice(s), even when maintaining the status quo seems advantageous.

The authors critique the structural explanations that dominate the literature on public–private partnership implementation, which downplays the role of agency and minimizes its interplay with institutional logics in effecting institutional change. Rather, the authors demonstrate that, given the observed impact of social actors, public–private partnership adoption and implementation can be theorized as a social phenomenon.

Brain-drain insurgency has become pervasive amongst professionals and the last option for everyone in the country to realise a sustainable quality of work-life (QWL). All youths now in the country have perceived migrating to the international workspace as a noble idea. This study investigates the incidence of brain-drain and QWL amongst academics in Nigerian universities.

To sparkle a clearer understanding concerning factors preventing the QWL amongst Nigeria's lecturers, this study utilised a cross-sectional research design to survey the participants across all departments in federal institutions through an explanatory research approach. This study applied an array of adapted scales to evaluate members of academic staff track of what provoked the incidence of brain-drain amongst Nigerian lecturers and possible influence on their QWL. The study surveyed 431 members of academic staff in Nigerian universities to collect useful data and employed a structural equation model (SEM) to analyse the obtained data.

The outcome of this study highlights that there is a horrible condition of service amongst Nigerian lecturers, a poor compensation system, poor academic research funding and lack of autonomy are bane to the QWL experienced in Nigerian tertiary institutions today. This study indicates that poor staff development and inadequate university funding are part of the justification that provoked brain-drain insurgence, and allowed the government to lose their skilled and competent egg-heads in the university to other foreign nations of the world.

This study demonstrated that brain-drain has become part of Nigeria's national life given that all professionals are seeking better life where their skills, competence and energy would be valued. Brain-drain was not common until these days amongst academics and fewer studies were noted but this study showed a novel paradigm regarding the QWL and brain-drain trajectory.

This paper aims to examine the complexity of the relationship between human capital management (HCM) and the performance of community-based health planning and services (CHPS) from an emerging market perspective. It further explores the mediating role of community orientation; institutional intervention and capability of resources in the hypothesized relationship between HCM and the performance of CHPS.

Quantitative data was collected (through a survey) from 210 health volunteers using a systematic random sampling technique. A 95% response rate was realized and the data was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical multiple regression.

HCM has a direct relationship with the performance of the CHPS model. It also emerged that institutional intervention and capability of resources partially mediate the relationship between HCM and CHPS performance; while community orientation fully mediates the same relationship.

Capacity building for staff must be wired into the workings of the CHPS model to yield the maximum impact. This points to the need for training packages that focus on building both social and cultural competence for staff working among locals under the CHPS model. Effective planning is, thus, needed to ensure a seamless allocation of adequate resources to boost performance. Also, community engagement is critical to the success of the CHPS model as it could serve as a platform for awareness creation among locals.

This paper introduces community orientation, institutional intervention and capability of resources as mediating variables to investigate the hypothesized relationships. It offers a developing country insight into how HCM-related factors might be impacting the performance of community-based health programs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors contributing to the competencies and capabilities of Family Development Center (FDC) staff in order to promote pre-school language developmental support amongst parents.

A cross-sectional study was conducted amongst 260 FDC staff under the supervision of Thai local authorities in the rural province of Suphanburi in Thailand from July to September 2016. Self-administered questionnaires were used. Eligible participants with at least a year’s experience on the FDC committee were purposively selected. Analyses were performed by descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, Spearman’s correlation, χ² test and stepwise multiple regression.

Only 23.5 percent of staff had a high level of capability. The respondents’ perceptions of their self-capability were influenced by motivation, attitudes toward promoting language learning amongst parents, self-efficacy, sufficient budget and receiving constructive appraisal support (r=0.387, 0.328, 0.366, 0.106 and 0.104, respectively). Marital status was negatively associated with FDC staff capability (r=−0.172). The multivariate analysis showed that 23.9 percent of the variability of FDC staff’s self-capability could be explained by their motivation for working, attitude, self-efficacy and marital status (p<0.001).

Research findings could be used to improve motivation for working, positive attitudes and self-efficacy regarding parenting promotion for pre-school language development to achieve standardized quality performance. Results of this study could also form the basis for designing effective training programs for FDC staff in the context of the specific organization and community.

The purpose of this paper is to report on performance measurement and impact assessment progress made in 14 countries as part of the Global Libraries initiative, starting with the early country grants in Mexico and Chile. For the mature grants in Bulgaria, Botswana, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Viet Nam which were recently completed or are approaching completion, the nature of the country program is outlined, before the impact assessment work is described and some recent results and conclusions are reported. A similar approach is adopted with pilot and new grants in Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Lithuania.

The country reports are presented as a series of case studies, in some cases supplementing those in an earlier special issue of this journal.

Where appropriate, recent country-specific survey findings are reported.

This paper shares Global Libraries IPA learning at country level with people in other countries who may be contemplating public library evaluation at regional, national or local level or who are interested in performance measurement and impact evaluation.

These cases studies reflect concentrated impact assessment and performance measurement work at country level across a range of countries over more than 12 years.

Access to clean drinking water is a major encumbrance in developing countries. In Ghana, urban water supply is below internationally recognised standards, especially among the urban poor, sub-urban and rural communities. Stakeholders and institutional inefficiencies may be hindrances facing the Ghanaian water supply process. Therefore, this study aims to appraise the motivational factors and outcome of stakeholders’ engagement and identify the factors that influence effective institutional management of urban water supply in Ghana.

Sequential exploratory mixed methods were adopted and analysed to proffer answers to the research questions. Nineteen participants and 521 respondents were sampled for the qualitative and quantitative phases.

Findings reveal that the institutional processes and stakeholder engagement significantly influence the effectiveness of the management of urban water supply in Ghana. Findings identified 35 motivational factors and categorised them into the health of the population, socio-economic, technological and innovation trends, policy reform and adaptive governance. Also, the 22 institutional factors identified were categorised into three groups: regulatory framework, ethics for managing water supply and the culture of managing water supply.

Besides the study addressing the theoretical gap regarding which variables are germane in influencing the effective management of urban water supply, the study may be among the top studies that have appraised the role of stakeholders in the institutional management of urban water supply in Ghana.