Summary: Responsibility for the United Nations peacekeeping operations The purpose of this thesis is to analyze an issue whether the United Nations (UN) or troop contributing countries are responsible for the conduct of military contingents in the UN peacekeeping operations. The thesis focuses solely on UN-led operations and on peacekeeping forces - military troops contributed by member states in whole contingents, rather than as individuals. The reason for focusing on peacekeeping forces is their unique hybrid legal status. While they remain in the service of their states, they become for the period of their assignment international personnel under the authority of the UN. This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter one describes the meaning and the legal basis of peacekeeping operations and defines which types of operation are subject of the thesis. Second chapter deals with general rules governing international responsibility of states. Chapter three examines legal personality and responsibility of international organizations, in particular the UN. These two issues are closely related because for an entity to bear international obligations, it must first be established that the entity is a legal person. The fourth and crucial chapter addresses the specific issue of responsibility for a conduct of...

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Coordination, Collaboration, and Cooperation, (C04); Community (C01) Driven Development (D2) minus Historical Institutionalisation (HI) is equal to Policy Implementation Effectiveness (PIE), is recommended by the researcher to improve results. Trends in compiled data were analysed with regards to legislative oversight and accountability in the petroleum industry, using the OECD/ DAC evaluation criteria. In terms of relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency, the researcher discovered a partial link between the activities performed by parliamentarians representing the petroleum industry where HDSA transformation is concerned. It was concluded that electrical energy generation and distribution throughout the five-year period drew more focus in terms of oversight than on other sectors. It was further noted that oversight and accountability could have been applied more efficiently if input were linked to policy objectives and activities. This resulted in only partial or limited HDSA transformation in the petroleum industry. When it comes to sustainability the researcher argued that despite the apparent long-term stability of parliamentary activities, such stability may not translate to sufficient oversight and accountability to ensure sustainable transformation in the petroleum industry. It was concluded that while oversight and accountability was being applied to one specific arena, other areas in need of transformation did not receive sufficient, or indeed any, legislative oversight. The facilitation model: Communication, Coordination, Collaboration, and Cooperation, (C04); and Community (C01) Driven Oversight and Accountability (D1OA) is recommended by the researcher to improve effective oversight and accountability. Thus, Effective (A + O) = C04 + C01 /D1OA equals to (A + O)e = C205 / D1OA.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Gobierno y Gerencia Pública

This thesis set out to examine the role played by monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in promoting good governance in South Africa. It examined how M&E, in promoting democratic and good governance deliverables, such as transparency, accountability and learning, influences public administration practice. The reciprocity between democracy and M&E was demonstrated by assessing how the country managed democratic transition, the influence of globalisation on country practice, and specifically how the developmental State advances good governance. The thesis reviewed the evolution of M&E at the continental and country level, and also examined how the discipline has evolved over time, and its particular application in South Africa. A comprehensive overview of the oversight infrastructure was conducted, and tested against the performance of the Department of Social Development (DSD), the case study. Through an assessment of three distinct, but interrelated M&E perspectives, termed mandatory, persuasive and civic M&E, a differentiated picture of policy and actual performance was seen. It was found that mandatory M&E was strong, and the DSD generally performed well against this benchmark. Mandatory M&E also provided the legal basis and support for other forms of M&E. However, it was not always clear that compliance on its own leads to good governance. In examining persuasive M&E, the decision-making environment within the DSD was assessed, and the role of the DSD M&E function examined in terms of, amongst others, improving learning. Civic M&E revealed that the DSD has considered and acted upon the results of the non-government sector in revising its policies. However, there was no effective civic M&E at community level, largely due to uncoordinated or weak NGOs, many of whom were now contracted to the DSD. The research suggests that whilst information has been generated through different forms of M&E, without effective follow-through by decision-makers, it generated transparency, and not necessarily accountability. Furthermore, administrative compliance cannot on its own tantamount to good governance. The thesis argues for methodological pluralism, stronger civic M&E, and confirms the assertion that M&E promotes good governance.

This study examines how accountability affects school performance in Legae Academy and Al-Nur School. It scrutinizes the main approaches to accountability held by managers, teachers and students and the assumptions underpinning these. It explores all the formal and informal practices and policies of accountability institutionalized in the schools, by looking at who is accountable to whom, how they are accountable and for what are they accountable. Another issue that is addressed is the lines of accountability within the organizational hierarchy of the schools (schools board, school managers, teachers, students, and where applicable other relevant stakeholders), and the possible relationships that can be established between the accountability system and practice and overall school performance. A sample of 6 administrators, 15 teachers and 16 students was selected in total at both Legae Academy and Al-Nur, to be interviewed using purposeful sampling. While the study has an open-ended approach, the following key propositions are considered as a guiding framework: (i) variables of accountability such as responsibilities and expectations influence an accountability system; (ii) accountability of managers, teachers and students improves their practice and performance; and (iii) effective accountability systems play a central role in overall school performance. The main argument of this study is that, where minimum resources both material and human are available, internal accountability with clearly defined lines of accountability – upward to the relevant governance and management structures within the school hierarchy and downward to the main stakeholders, namely parents and students – plays a critical role in enhancing school performance.

The work to keep a nation safe from threats or potential threats has become very difficult in the 21st century. The advent of globalisation and the advances in technology resulted in borderless societies and a complex world of changing global threats. It is inconceivable that there would be a government worth its salt that would not create and sustain security institutions to safeguard its people, installations and critical infrastructure that form the bedrock of the economy and government operations in terms of services. Post 1994, South Africa developed an oversight model for the country’s intelligence services, in an effort to ensure that abuses associated with the apartheid era of intelligence remain a thing of the past. Noting that a number of design, functional and implementation changes have occurred in the past 18 years within the accountability and oversight model, this study sought to establish the extent to which the current accountability and oversight model is effective and still relevant in dealing with the 21st century challenges of intelligence. This was the main research question. The study was grounded in the institutional theory in its different variants. This study argued that the South African accountability and oversight model needs to be reviewed and aligned with the latest international developments which bring an institutionalised civilian oversight as part of the central pillars of the model. Through a combination of documentation analysis and interviews of a targeted sample of experts, the study found that while a sound legislative framework is in place within an appropriately designed model, there are inadequate skills at the parliamentary level for oversight. Policy gaps in respect of the control of intelligence at the ministerial level have also been found to be a serious limitation of the current accountability model. The study also found that civilian oversight suffers from a lack of an institutionalised framework. The study concluded with a number of recommendations pertaining to amendments of legislation to provide for an institutionalised framework for civilian oversight, introduction of mandatory training programmes for members of the parliamentary committee on oversight, as well the need to close prevailing policy gaps.

Thesis advisor: Henry Braun / The measurement of student academic growth is one of the most important statistical tasks in an educational accountability system. The current methods of measuring student growth adopted in most states have various drawbacks in terms of sensitivity, accuracy, and interpretability. In this thesis, we apply the conditional growth chart method, a well-developed diagnostic tool in pediatrics, to student longitudinal test data to produce descriptive and diagnostic statistics about students' academic growth trajectory. We also introduce an innovative simulation-extrapolation (SIMEX) method which corrects for measurement error-induced bias in the estimation of the conditional growth model. Our simulation study shows that the proposed method has an advantage in terms of mean squared error of the estimators, when compared with the growth model that ignores measurement error. Our data analysis demonstrates that the conditional growth chart method, when combined with the SIMEX method, can be a powerful tool in the educational accountability system. It produces more sensitive and accurate measures of student growth than the other currently available methods; it provides diagnostic information that is easily understandable to teachers, parents and students themselves; the individual level growth measures can also be aggregated to school level as an indicator of school growth. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.

Thesis advisor: Diana C. Pullin / The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) increased the role of the federal government in the education of America's children, raising the standards of performance for all children in all schools and holding schools accountable for the achievement of all children. Schools, districts, and states are required under the law to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) not only in the aggregate, but for certain subgroups of students, including racial and linguistic minorities, children with disabilities, and students who are economically disadvantaged. Schools that fail to make the requisite AYP risk exposure to a host of sanctions including: being labeled "in need of improvement," replacing principals, and state take-over. This dissertation argues that, in this demanding context, it is possible that NCLB may actually be increasing the achievement gap between racial groups in America rather than reducing it. The use of standardized assessments to measure student progress may be causing detrimental effects on students in racial minority groups. These effects may be further compounded in states like Massachusetts where regulations designed to implement NCLB impose additional mandates, such as requiring students to pass a test for graduation. Through an analysis of school profile data reported by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, a review of district documents, and interviews with teachers and administrators at one high school that has been identified as in need of improvement, this dissertation examines the intersection between high stakes testing and retention in light of the system of rewards and sanctions imposed by NCLB, paying particular attention to the disparate impact this phenomenon may be having on students of color in urban schools. This study illuminates the challenges faced by policymakers in their attempts to reduce the achievement gap faced by students in this country as well as the impact such policies have on the practice of teaching and learning. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

The doctoral thesis Who Am I? Subjectivities in the Society of Accountability aims to demonstrate that accountability is one of the most powerful processes of subjectivation in our contemporary era. The background is constituted by ordinary daily practices, born from the propagation of digital media in the last twenty years. Accountability is defined as the peculiar anthropotechnic that derives from the extension of the subject in the form of the account. Account is defined as every extension of the subject in the digital world, so that these extensions are univocally attributable to a singular physical body of a singular human being. The concept of subjectivity is considered as outlined by Michel Foucault in the period 1977-1984. The dissertation also aims to demonstrate that the society of control, investigated by Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, finds its present fulfillment in the form of the society of accountability. Accountability is considered in three moments, connected by a circular movement instead of a causal sequence. The first moment describes how dispositives act on subjects. The scene of address is constituted by the request of performativity made by dispositives to the subject. This request takes place in the account, to be understood as the interface between dispositives and subjects. Secondly, the same process is taken in consideration from the point of view of the subject, who is invited to answer the question: Who am I? Thus the subject understands him/herself as a subjectivity without ground, because the hermeneutics of the self, derived from dispositives, finds the foreclosure of the referent as its foundation. In a third moment accountability is considered from the point of view of the statements (énoncés). The conversion of statements into information, and the statistical inferences operated on it (basically, the processes related to big data), are the focus of this moment. The outcome of this analysis is a second hermeneutics of the subject, characterised by the discourse of the master. Convergences and divergences between this (digital) hermeneutics, the Christian hermeneutics derived from the confession and the Cartesian moment are explored in order to outline the actual accountability as pastoral power and discourse of the master at the same time. In conclusion, accountability is considered as a possible ethics. If anomie and anonymity are excluded as far as they exclude the scene of address, and consequently the very possibility of existence of a bios, the valorisation of opacity is identified as the grounding of a possible ethical action based on freedom, an exercise of freedom to be understood as resilience to the complete panoptical visibility and the consequential proceduralisation of the scene of address.

In October 2005, the Maltese Government embarked on a new phase of its national educational reform; primarily re-organising all State maintained schools into semi-autonomous regional colleges, sustaining partnerships between the schools, the parents and the wider community and re-structuring the education authorities into two Directorates. This thesis reports research into inter-school working that Malta, as in other countries, was actively promoting. The research aims were to: •analyse the nature of collaboration in a policy context that required joint working within and by individual schools; •explore the implications for educational leadership, governance and accountability within and between the institutions involved. Case studies of four colleges were carried out. Key participants were interviewed and documents analysed. The cases were analysed individually and a cross-case analysis was also undertaken. The classification and interpretation of the data focuses on the four key themes: - collaboration, (presented by the 2006 Education Act as a meta-concept and the basis for the success of the Colleges reform), educational leadership, governance and accountability. The data helped me to appreciate the importance of tradition, history and time which are necessary to understand how reforms impact differently on schools in general and school life in particular. The results show that in spite of a highly centralised system, we were used to examples of collaboration that had existed, albeit in informal and ad hoc ways. Many respondents felt that their school leaders lacked leadership qualities and failed to foster a culture of shared leadership. At the same time there was growing concern about the growing administrative responsibilities facing school management. There was consensus that the move to devolve greater responsibilities to the schools through inter-school working and the college system was a move in the right direction. This, in turn, was fostering an ethos of collective accountability within and across schools.