Search results

Bangladesh’s urban poor face numerous obstacles, especially during times of disastrous natural events. The effects of global warming will pose new threats for them as frequencies and magnitudes of natural hazards are likely to increase. Thus, current and formerly successful coping and adaptation strategies will be challenged in the future. The urban poor need to be informed and empowered so that they can develop their own strategies in response to the expected local effects of climate change. Our research aims at grassroot workshops as a means of communication with slum dwellers in Dhaka which not only convey possible climate change impact on livelihoods but also create relevance for the individuals and options for action. More than 20 workshops including men, women, and children have been conducted and analysed. The final workshop design incorporates a mix of participatory and input-oriented elements in order to overcome the problem of psychological distance.

Institutional actors are critical allies for grassroots movements, but few studies have examined their effects and variations within the non-democratic context. This chapter argues that while institutional allies are heavily constrained and unlikely to give open endorsement to grassroot activists, some institutional activists indirectly facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes in the process of advancing their own political agendas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 and 2012, I illustrate this argument by examining the Anti-PX Movement – a landmark grassroots environmental movement against a chemical plant – in Xiamen, China. I find that the environmental institutional actors were constrained and divided, yet some still fostered opportunities for movement mobilization and in turn exploited the opportunity created by the protesters to pursue their policy interests, thus facilitating positive movement outcomes. As long as the claims are not politically subversive to the authoritarian rule, this type of tacit and tactical interaction between institutional activists within the state and grassroot activists on the street is conducive to promoting progressive policy changes.

Electronic government procurement is an important platform that promotes efficient, transparent, competitive and agile delivery of procurement activities in public sector organisations. Implementing units who play a major role exhibits different attitude towards new technology. The purpose of this paper is to assess if there is any significant difference between optimistic and discomfort implementing units in relation to the implementation and intention to use the Ghana Electronic Procurement System (GHANEPS).

Technology Readiness, Technology Acceptance and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and Diffusion Innovation Theory constituted the theoretical foundation. Guided by a cross sectional survey design, quantitative data from a sample of 181 procurement officers was collected using structured questionnaires. The hypothesised relationships were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

Although there were some observable differences, the bootstrap results show that the difference was not significant, implying that these two groups do not differ much about the GHANEPS introduction and implementation. This is justifiable in the case of Ghana because public policies are made by top officials, and those in the grassroot or implementation domain have no choice but to act accordingly.

This study focused on metropolitan, municipal, district assemblies, public hospitals, tertiary institutions and senior high schools.

The study contributes to the critical antecedents for electronic procurement implementation and public sector management literature. It provides public institutions and practitioners with empirical evidence on how beliefs and perceptions of implementing units about electronic public procurement has some influence on attitude towards usage and intention to use. Positive attitudes and perceptions of the public procurement officers can be reinforced through adequate training and awareness creation.

This study outcomes can serve as philosophical underpinnings for societal development.

This study used a multi-group analysis to examine if there is any significant difference between these two categories of implementing units (optimistic group and discomfort group) in relation to facilitating conditions, personal innovativeness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and ultimately to attitude and intention to use GHANEPS.

The health promoting benefits of sport participation are under-utilized and should be further developed, particularly at the grassroots level. The purpose of this paper is to examine how grassroots coaches in youth football perceive their coaching practices after participating in a community-based coach education program aimed at optimizing their experiences in youth sport, namely the Empowering Coaching™ training program, based on self-determination theory (SDT) and achievement goal theory (AGT). It compares French and Norwegian coaches to suggest whether the principles of the Empowering Coaching™ training program can be applied successfully in the two countries.

The Empowering Coaching™ training program is a six hour workshop and was delivered at the beginning of the 2011 football season. At the end of the season, the grassroots coaches’ reflections on their coaching practices were examined through a qualitative approach with in-depth interviews of 18 coaches in France and Norway, applying a hybrid analyses and comparing country-wise.

All coaches expressed the intention to embrace the philosophy of the program, and to apply several of the strategies they had learnt during the workshop. The coaches perceived that the program supported their efforts to develop and implement strategies to stimulate intrinsic motivation, enjoyment and long-term participation among the players. There were some differences between coaches from France and Norway (e.g. rules and involvement), but the similarities were more evident, supporting the universality of applying SDT in the youth sport setting.

The findings are encouraging for sport as a health promoting setting and for the development of the personal skills in grassroot coaches, as they imply that coaches who feel competent in how to structure practices and matches that provide the players with positive sport experiences are likely to enable players to feel supported and motivated.

This study explores qualitatively the impact of an intervention based on SDT and AGT, focussing on football coaches’ reflections on their coaching practices.

The purpose of this study is to examine how young residents in two Indonesian kampungs (urban informal settlements) participate in two grassroots art festivals and to what extent their participation affects their capacity and network.

This study uses a qualitative method. The data collection were done in 2017 and took the form of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 respondents in two kampungs, Kampung Dago Pojok, Bandung, and Kampung Bustaman, Semarang.

The results show that the grassroots festival can empower youth throughout its process while also influencing their networks. The festival could act as the catalyst for youth to gain event management skills and exchange cultural knowledge. This study also found that there are two sides the art festivals can bring to the youth regarding their network: while the festival was able to develop their internal and external network, it also led to social division within the community.

The originality of this paper lies in the context of the research where it contributes to understanding the implications of community-based art festivals in the developing context, particularly in the low-income informal settlements. The paper’s content also provides insights that festivals can also be understood as more than place marketing or branding but as collections of steps and efforts of the community to provide meaningful actions for their place and people.

Provides a summary of a five‐day workshop held in Istanbul, organized by the International Center for Research on Women. Focuses on the potential for organizing women home‐workers, increasing the visibility of this group and strategies for implementing the International Labour Organisation’s convention on Homework in Turkey.

This study examines a phygital approach to rural cultural heritage tourism, adopted by a rural community in Sapphaya, Chai Nat Province, Thailand, in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Specifically, it investigates a community’s initiatives to amalgamate its physical and digital marketing communications in order to engage with consumers as a strategy for destination recovery and resilience.

This is a qualitative exploratory study involving three stages of action, applying two research approaches: (1) participatory action research (PAR) with Sapphaya’s tourism stakeholders, and (2) social media research utilising netnographic analysis of Sapphaya’s tourism social enterprise social media pages.

The findings indicate that a phygital rural cultural heritage strategy can facilitate the interconnectivity between a destination’s physical and digital dimensions of its cultural heritage tourism product, thereby enhancing its intrinsic value, meaning and experiential perceptions. Specifically, it recommends that a successful community-based phygitalisation strategy requires grassroot engagement across all stages of planning, development, implementation and management of the rural cultural heritage tourism product.

The paper focusses on the cultural heritage tourism strategy adopted by a rural community across the physical-digital-phygital spectrum to augment its sustainable tourism development during a time of crisis. A framework for phygital rural cultural heritage as a strategy for destination resilience and recovery is also proposed.

This study adopts a local engagement approach to develop a cooperative community heritage management strategy, based upon local rural capacity building towards digitalisation and empowering innovative partnerships amongst its stakeholders.

This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?

This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.

The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.

The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.

This paper revisits the early-20th-century British blueprint for Guild Socialism and discusses its similarities and differences with labor managed firm (LMF) theory and with the historic Yugoslav system. It finds that the Guild Socialist vision of a corporatist workers’ state based on universal, non-anonymous, multi-party negotiation of incomes, prices, and quantities comes much closer to anticipating the real-world Yugoslav experiment in worker-managed market socialism than the market-syndicalist utopia embodied in the Western economic model of the LMF and economy.

To highlight and explain some characteristics of sport which can contribute to HIV/AIDS awareness as a part of comprehensive HIV/AIDS countermeasures. HIV/AIDS is among the most crucial of global issues, and sport is widely viewed as a possible vehicle to counter it. By using data from a Zimbabwe study, the chapter draws on several unique characteristics of sport which can help in combating challenging social problems.

Several characteristics of “awareness activities” in Zimbabwean baseball were observed. Some points are characteristics of sport itself, some are related specifically to baseball, and the others are, we can say, peculiar to the activities of the Zimbabwe Baseball Association (ZBA) and the Maxwell and Friends Foundation (MFF). As an awareness catalyst, sport has some unique characteristics, although we cannot say that promoting HIV/AIDS awareness through sport can always be effective for all fields. However, the worldwide increase in such activities shows certain advantages of using sport as an awareness tool.

This chapter shows some unique characteristics of sport in the field of HIV/AIDS awareness. It will contribute to the re-examination of sport from the perspective of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP).