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This viewpoint paper has two purposes: One is to argue that the Academy activities should increasingly be promoted and used for disseminating the practical and useful skills for the related law enforcement people who fight against financial crime, while the other is to contribute to the basis of discussions and further academy research.

This study summarizes and indicates potential usefulness of the new academy, specializing in the related social and political contexts in qualitative and descriptive ways.

This study indicates that the new academy activities in Japan would continue for a long time, thus providing immediately useful skillsets for the investigators and officers at the very frontline who face against various financial crimes.

While little research has been done about the series of related academy activities by OECD, this study describes the historical background and usefulness of the academy of the OECD in a specialized manner, thus showing its linkage with FATF.

This paper aims to critically review the strategies for prevention of illicit financial flows to and from developing countries with a view of ascertaining the most effective strategies to be selected and implemented by developing countries to stem the scourge.

The peer-reviewed journal articles were studied; those that discussed illicit financial flows were selected and reviewed critically using the systematic quantitative assessment techniques together with an output table.

The critical review deduced that enacting effective trade laws, trade regulations, creating a beneficial ownership registry, multinational companies disclosing information on business, automatic exchange of information on tax issues, the Financial Action Task Force 40 guidelines on anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism and domestic and international cooperation are the most reliable strategies that should be implemented by developing countries.

The wide geographic scope of developing countries, use of only high-quality databases that restricted the use of other articles and use of public sector perspective are the limitations for this paper.

This study is amongst the limited works to discuss the most reliable and effective strategies to prevent illicit financial flows in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Norwegian Government incorporated its responsibility for human rights into the investment practices of its Global Pension Fund and how human rights issues were negotiated when exclusion was considered.

Drawing on a series of interviews the authors analyse the way in which responsibility for human rights has been translated into the practices of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global.

The paper documents how a large investment fund used several mechanisms to address human rights risks. The authors demonstrate that different logics among actors sometimes impeded addressing human rights issues. The findings demonstrate that sovereign wealth funds (SWF) can be held accountable for human rights.

The paper illustrates the difficulty of co-operation between actors with different logics. This can result in institutional conflict, but also in positive outcomes for human rights.

Attempts to introduce human rights into state investments may result in increased institutional complexity. The findings indicate that state investors can address human rights issues, but that the ability to do so is diminished where divestment creates political tension.

Large investors can influence companies on specific human rights issues.

This is one of the first empirical investigations of the human rights practices of a SWF. The authors contribute to the literatures on accounting and human rights, SWF and institutional theory.

Literacy research in Norway has focused on many areas. Dyslexia has been one main area for many years. The last years’ many approaches have been taken to understand how reading disabilities can be prevented and to understand the connection between the spoken and written language. A school reform reducing the age of admission to school from seven to six from 1997 has had the effect of stimulating research in the field of reading development.

Norwegian orthography is described as semi-transparent. Studies of Norwegian children show that even children with dyslexia break the alphabetic code rather easily. Also, Norway is an advanced, rich country with a clear commitment to equity. These are some reasons why Norway should get good results on international reading achievement tests. The results from different international reading assessments, however, have worried the Norwegian Government. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has clearly stated that Norway has a job to do in terms of equity. In most reading achievement tests, Norway shows a wider spread of outcomes than many other OECD countries. The Norwegian school reform of 1997 has not been a great success in the area of children's literacy development. The international results and the evaluation of the reform have led to a range of initiatives from the Government and to yet another reform with a new curriculum. In this new curriculum, there is a somewhat clearer focus on benchmarks to be achieved. There is, however, little concentration on what to do when children fall behind their peers for no apparent reason. The school authorities hope, however, that the initiatives that are taken will make a difference.

This chapter analyses the Norwegian authorities’ presence on Twitter during the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks. Twitter activity by two official institutions is analysed in particular, namely, the blood bank at Oslo University Hospital and the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST). Our findings show that the Norwegian authorities were almost completely absent on Twitter during the critical hours of the terrorist attack, and that there was no coordination and synchronisation of communication from the authorities. This official silence allowed the diffusion of speculation and misinformation to take place; these were neither corrected nor addressed, as the analysed PST case shows. In contrast, the blood bank used Twitter to mobilise blood donors to address an acute problem: a shortage of blood to treat casualties. The chapter concludes by offering recommendations to the authorities for future major incidents.

The emergence of the Chinese aid consensus has come to have profound implications for sustainability. The Beijing Consensus “sovereignty doctrine” of non‐interference, presents a stark contrast to the Washington Consensus architecture of imposed conditionalities and the serving of geopolitical interests. For this reason, from Africa's perspective, the Beijing Consensus appears to represent the preferred comprehensive meta‐narrative for Africa. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the attributes of “good” aid architecture in relation to the peculiarities of Africa's challenges.

In examining its principles, objectives, framework differences and impact, the Beijing model shows that it supports the human rights which “unleash”, empower and protect self‐directed development grounded in ownership and in the strategic interests of recipients.

The Washington Consensus has been problematic for African development because it is economistic and exclusively instrumentalist. While conceding to this shortcoming, the inability of the consensus to appreciate the unique and complex development problems of Africa is more troubling. Comparing the two, the Beijing Consensus, which is multidimensional and encompasses the intrinsic and non‐economic roles of development aid, with the consequence of over‐emphasizing expanding local policy, is adjudged practical for Africa. The conclusion is that the dominant Washington Consensus is too poorly articulated and structured to respond to declared determination for ownership, mitigating capabilities deprivation, and improving development control.

This paper has argued that the basic approach of the Beijing Consensus has been more generous and more attractive for sustainable development in Africa. Much more important, perhaps, is the ability of the consensus to appreciate the unique and complex development problems which occur as a consequence of donor deafness on limited rights and conditionalities. In sum, the Beijing Consensus results in exclusionary changes of “less magnitude and speed” and promotes poverty reduction and sustainable development. Taken together, these factors and practices mean that the Beijing Consensus best serves the staircase of a nation's pathway to indigenous development, when compared with the Washington Consensus. Such a comprehensive meta‐narrative that builds alliances and creates a foundation for enlightened and effective politics of development aid will “unleash”, empower and protect the full potential of Africa.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

Literacy demands have changed over the years and for success in society it is necessary to handle a wide range of texts and written information. The school has been criticized for not giving their pupils the necessary abilities to handle the kind of information they are faced with in society. One important dimension of literacy is reading comprehension, but even though much written information has the form of tables, drawings, graphs, etc. such presentations are most often accompanied by written text. This chapter focuses the comprehension of different kinds of written information, and data from different tasks are evaluated in light of the simple view of reading. A total of 132 grade 6 readers were given four reading comprehension tasks concurrently with a decoding task and a listening comprehension task. It was found that the sum of decoding and listening comprehension accounted for a larger part of the variance in all the reading comprehension tasks than the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The pupils' results on a naming task and morphological tasks from preschool accounted for significant parts of the variance in the comprehension of both plain text and text combined with tables and graphs over and above the concurrent decoding and listening comprehension results. Speed of orthographic identification in 2nd grade accounted for an additional, significant part of the variance in the plain text reading tasks. These results show that processing speed and linguistic knowledge, such as morphological knowledge, are important contributors to the comprehension of different kinds of written information. Even if speed of orthographic identification is especially important for comprehending plain texts, a broad linguistic and cognitive perspective seems to be important when preparing pupils to comprehend different kinds of written material.

The point of departure of this book is that smart mobility will only be developed in a desired direction and fulfil societal objectives if it is steered in that direction. The market, left to itself, will most certainly not deliver on these objectives. This message has been conveyed extensively in recent literature, but this book aims to take this discussion one step further by focussing on what governance of smart mobility looks like today and in the future. In this introductory chapter, the authors provide a framework of different understandings of policy instruments, how they are selected, developed and used. After the array of policy instruments within the transport sector has been extensively discussed, the authors turn to discussing a broader understanding of policy instruments found within political science and political sociology. In doing so, this book contributes to the critical scholarship on policy instruments, while exploring the why, the how and the what of policy instruments in relation to smart mobility. The chapter closes with a brief introduction to the structure of the book as well as a description of the content of each chapter.