The submitting final thesis deals with the Regional and Structural Policy and focuses on the third objective "European Territorial Cooperation". This is the objective with the lowest financial allocation and very often it stays out of the main interest. According to this, the thesis try to clear up the programmes, it also introduces concrete projects. The largest attention in the thesis is payed to cross-border cooperation, esp. to cross-border programmes in the South-Bohemian Region (Austria and Germany). In this part, there are also evaluated previous achievements and outlined prospective ways of cooperation with german-speaking neighbours.

This diploma thesis examines the participation of Czech regional actors in the transnational and interregional branches of the INTERREG program in 2007-2013, using organizational learning theory. It focuses on learning processes on individual, group, and organizational levels. To a smaller extent, it also examines dissemination of knowledge towards other actors on the local and European level. The aim of the thesis is to find out whether these learning processes take place on all the mentioned levels and also to uncover the main obstacles of these processes. The method of the research is a questionnaire survey combined with semi-structured interviews. The research reveals that both individual and group learning take place during the projects. The most common barriers are complications stemming from differing environments of the actors (different political, institutional, legal, or administrative environments). Organizational learning takes place as well, but to a smaller extent than learning on the preceding levels. The main problem is the preservation of tacit knowledge. The research also suggests that effective dissemination of knowledge towards other local actors takes place as well. However, the relevance of the final project outcomes for other EU actors appears to be rather low.

Czech foreign development cooperation represents important part of the Czech foreign policy. It also demonstrates adoption of its own part of responsibility for resolution of current global problems. Together with becoming part of organisations such as European Union or Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development importance of Czech foreign development cooperation is growing. Next to the main goal which is reduction of poverty in third-world countries, development cooperation has also another goals: it is also contributing to construction of good relations with developing countries and it helps ensure economic, security and environmental interests of the Czech republic. Current system of the Czech foreign development cooperation has grown up from the foundations, which have been lawn before 1989. From that time Czech Republic has made a great effort to improve its system of development cooperation and become an effective and responsible donor. As a key step in the direction of desired changes can be considered process of transformation of the Czech foreign development cooperation, initiated in 2007. Transformation was officially crowned when the Fundamentals documents were adopted. These documents present the Conception of the Czech foreign development cooperation and the Law (Act) of the...

In the light of the urgence of cooperation in the world, for handling global issues, this study offers a discussion on bilateral cooperation, more specifically on municipal partnerships. While previous research has examined some specific cases on possibilities and challengeswith this kind of cooperation, the view of proven efficiency in relation to the symbolic value has fallen short. The organization Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy offers a Network for Human Rights and aims to promote the exchange of knowledge and experiences between local authorities. This study, which is based on ten in-depth qualitative interviews, ought to explore what challenges and learnings can be found in ongoing municipal partnerships, in this Network. The study further aims to explore how those findings relate to a North and South perspective and the municipalities’ values and goals, by collecting experiences from South Africa, Zambia, Botswana and Sweden. Through a thematic analysis process of the empirical data and the use of a theoretical framework in the field of organizational learning, developed by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, this study has been able to identify several findings. Challenges involve implementation, cultural obstacles and lack of resources, which prove to be divergent between North and South. Values and goals of the partnerships are hence hard to perform in practice. The outcomes circle practical activities, however, the most evident outcome is to learn from one another, which puts the learning experiences in focus of the study.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1966 J6 / Master of Science

Our aim with this essay is to examine the challenges that recreation teachers faces at their workplaces. We especially focus which cause difficulties for the implementation of recreation teacher’s assignments. We hope to highlight the difficulties and factors which act as a barrier to recreation teachers. The questions that we are trying to answer are: what perceptions in their daily work recreation teachers shave of their mission? What challenges do recreation teachers experience in the implementation of their mission? What solutions and aids do recreation teachers use to meet these challenges? We will use a qualitative method in our essay. Data collection includes interviews with four recreation teachers in three different schools. The empirical material will be analyzed and interpreted from a socio- cultural perspective and by means of other research in this area. The result shows that recreation teachers are experiencing challenges but are trying to carry out their mission through a variety of methods in order to provide children with basic care.

From 1994, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) undertook a number of cooperative regional military projects with the support of numerous Western countries. In particular, the Baltic Peacekeeping Battalion (BALTBAT) was an example of efficient Western defence cooperation to generate outcomes in order to achieve military and political goals. BALTBAT became the template for other Baltic programmes: the Baltic Naval Squadron (BALTRON), the Baltic Air Surveillance Network (BALTNET) and the Baltic Defence College (BALTDEFCOL). This thesis analysed the Baltic programmes, particularly BALTBAT, as a case study for identifying the elements of a model for effective military assistance projects. The focus was on the broad political decisions agreed upon by the donor and recipient states, such as the selection of development of peacekeeping capabilities, as the basis for military assistance, which provided the foundation for these initiatives. The value of the Baltic programmes as a case study and basis for identifying the elements of a model was enhanced by the fact that they succeeded at a delicate time in a sensitive region. The Baltic states had virtually no military forces upon regaining independence. Russia objected to Baltic state membership in NATO and was sensitive about a build-up of military capabilities close to Russian borders. In spite of these obstacles, the Baltic projects achieved outcomes which supported the military and political goals of the donor and recipient states. Analysis of the Baltic projects highlighted the importance of broad political decisions between donor and recipient states for military assistance initiatives. It also indicated the major factors (subsequently called Mechanisms) resulting from those decisions which were important to the outcomes from these programmes. These Mechanisms comprise the elements of a model which could be of value to academics and practitioners working in the area of military assistance.

Certain tasks require multiple robots to cooperate in order to solve them. The main problem with multi-robot systems is that they are inherently complex and usually situated in a dynamic environment. Now, biological immune systems possess a natural distributed control and exhibit real-time adaptivity, properties that are required to solve problems in multi-robot systems. In this thesis, biological immune systems and their response to external elements to maintain an organism's health state are researched. The objective of this research is to propose immune-inspired approaches to cooperation, to establish an adaptive cooperation algorithm, and to determine the refinements that can be applied in relation to cooperation. Two immune-inspired models that are based on the immune network theory are proposed, namely the Immune Network T-cell-regulated---with Memory (INT-M) and the Immune Network T-cell-regulated---Cross-Reactive (INT-X) models. The INT-M model is further studied where the results have suggested that the model is feasible and suitable to be used, especially in the multi-robot cooperative shepherding domain. The Collecting task in the RoboShepherd scenario and the application of the INT-M algorithm for multi-robot cooperation are discussed. This scenario provides a highly dynamic and complex situation that has wide applicability in real-world problems. The underlying 'mechanism of cooperation' in the immune inspired model (INT-M) is verified to be adaptive in this chosen scenario. Several multi-robot cooperative shepherding factors are studied and refinements proposed, notably methods used for Shepherds' Approach, Shepherds' Formation and Steering Points' Distance. This study also recognises the importance of flock identification in relation to cooperative shepherding, and the Connected Components Labelling method to overcome the related problem is presented. Further work is suggested on the proposed INT-X model that was not implemented in this study, since it builds on top of the INT-M algorithm and its refinements. This study can also be extended to include other shepherding behaviours, further investigation of other useful features of biological immune systems, and the application of the proposed models to other cooperative tasks.

In the first chapter, I examine the effect of social learning on social norms of cooperation. To this end I develop an 'anti-social learning' game. This is a dynamic social dilemma in which all agents know how to cooperate but a proportion are informed and know of privately profitable but socially costly, or uncooperative, actions. In equilibrium agents are able to infer, or learn, the payoffs to the actions of prior agents. Agents can then learn through observation that some socially costly action is privately profitable. This implies that an informed agent behaving uncooperatively can induce others to behave uncooperatively when, in the absence of observational learning, they would have otherwise been cooperative. However, this influence also gives informed agents an incentive to cooperate - not cooperating may induce others to not cooperate. I use this model to give conditions under which social learning propagates cooperative behaviour and conditions under which social learning propagates uncooperative behaviour. In the second chapter, I present a co-authored model of a self-fulfilling price cycle in an asset market. In this model the dividend stream of the economy's asset stock is constant yet price oscillates deterministically even though the underlying environment is stationary. This creates a model in which there is rational excess volatility - 'excess' in the sense that it does not reflect changes in dividend streams and 'rational' in that all agents are acting on their best information. The mechanism that we uncover is driven by endogenous variation in the investment horizons of the different market participants, informed and uninformed. On even days, the price is high; on odd days it is low. On even days, informed traders are willing to jettison their good assets, knowing that they can buy them back the next day, when the price is low. The anticipated drop in price more than offsets any potential loss in dividend. Because of these asset sales, the informed build up their cash holdings. Understanding that the market is flooded with good assets, the uninformed traders are willing to pay a high price. But their investment horizon is longer than that of the informed traders: their intention is to hold the assets they purchase, not to resell. On odd days, the price is low because the uninformed recognise that the informed are using their cash holdings to cherry-pick good assets from the market. Now the uninformed, like the informed, are investing short-term. Rather than buy-and-hold as they do with assets purchased on even days, on odd days the uninformed are buying to sell. Notice that, at the root of the model, there lies a credit constraint. Although the informed are flush with cash on odd days, they are not deep pockets. On each cherry that they pick out of the market, they earn a high return: buying cheap, selling dear. However they don't have enough cash to strip the market of cherries and thereby bid the price up. The final chapter is on identifying the role of privilege in determining inter- generational mobility. The intergenerational elasticity of income is the standard measurement economists use for intergenerational mobility. It is not clear how we should interpret intergenerational elasticities. Particularly, high intergenerational elasticities could either reflect inequality of opportunity or the importance of genetically heritable characteristics in determining genes. Behavioural geneticists have long been using a twin based variance decomposition method, the ACE model, to estimate the genetic heritability of various characteristics. It is not clear, however, what this approach implies for intergenerational mobility of equality of opportunity. I develop a novel method that extends the methodology used in behavioural genetics to identifying how much of the intergenerational elasticity of income is determined by the presence (absence) of environmental privileges associated with being children of high (low) earners. Using this approach we can examine the counterfactuals of giving a poorer child the environment of a richer child; equalising the privileges associated with family income; and equalising the family environmental factors not associated with parental income. Furthermore, this method allows us to identify how good parental income is as a measure of family environment. The model I develop nests the behavioural genetics model allowing us to relax some of the identifying assumptions used in the standard ACE model. Finally, I apply this method to data on the income elasticities between American males of different types of relation: fraternal twins, identical twins and father-son relationships. The results of this application suggest that a 1 percent increase in the privilege associated with parental income increases child income by about 1 tenth of a percent. Equalising, to the mean, the environmental privileges across the population results in about a 30 percent drop in the intergenerational elasticity of income and a 5 percent drop in the variance of income across the population. These results must be treated tentatively as the twin data comes from a separate survey to the data on intergenerational elasticities.

Activities in and connected to cities are responsible for around 70 % of the global CO2 emissions and as the urbanization to cities are likely to increase in forthcoming future, actions to handle this situation are of vital importance. Through the integration of sustainable development in cities’ urban development, this have large potential to improve social, economic and ecological aspects in the cities. Besides being the places where most of the global consumption and emissions come from, it’s in these specific places where essential effects can be reached. There’re, however, difficulties with this, due to that it requires participation and responsibility from all stakeholders in the city. Different cities have different capabilities and conditions to work with sustainable development, which is why this study examine the two cities of Linköping and Norrköping. The study is based on interviews with actors that are closely connected to the urban development in the both cities. The results shows that the cities have different historical background and city structure, causing them to work a bit differently. Furthermore, the result also indicate that the largest challenges are how to handle the transportation issue, conflicts of interests as well as cooperation between different stakeholders.