The purpose of this study was to discover what families perceive as the benefits of participating in family volunteering; specifically service missions and the substantive impact the experience had on the families. A grounded theory approached was used. Five families were identified through a criteria-based snowball sampling technique. The data were analyzed using constant comparison. Based on the data analysis a core category emerged that encapsulated the result of the family service experience. The core category was coined, "family deepening." Family deepening encompassed the essence of the process the families in this study experienced. In order to achieve family deepening the participants in this study participated in a purposive, unique, shared, interactive, and challenging experience. Additionally, they experienced sacrifice. All these attributes appeared to contribute to the process of achieving a family deepening experience.

Slow agrarian development has often been blamed on the absence of civil society mobilization. This paper quantitatively analyzes the effect of political and fiscal decentralization on agricultural development in 30 democratizing African States. Hence two hypotheses are tested: H1) New democracies that combine elected sub-national governments with fiscal decentralization will be more likely to spend more in agriculture. H2) In such system we should observe better agricultural outputs, other things equal. Results reveal that counter-intuitively simultaneous democratic and fiscal decentralization have a negative impact on public investment in agriculture. On the other hand, as expected fiscal decentralization does not have any significant impact in the absence of democratic decentralization. Most importantly democratic decentralization is found to have a highly positive impact on the provision of agricultural related public goods when fiscal decentralization is low. The test also reveals that fiscal and political decentralization positively influence agricultural production.

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / This study investigates how a civil society organisation, Reclaim the City (RTC), based in the old Woodstock Hospital is attempting to address the plight of the homeless through deepening participatory governance. Homelessness is a growing concern in South Africa. Post-1994 the African National Congress (ANC) embarked on the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) to address the imbalances of the past through providing housing, water, electricity and sanitation amongst others. However by 1996 this program was decommissioned and replaced by the Growth, Employment, and Reconstruction (GEAR) policy which ushered in the privatisation of basic services. The challenge was that many of the previously marginalised could not pay for these services. The move away from the RDP meant residents had to pay for housing and when many could not pay their rents they were evicted. The evicted moved into the streets and later, in this case study, to the old Woodstock Hospital. In their new location, they started engaging with Development Action Group (DAG) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) and the City of Cape Town to address their plight.

This dissertation consists of three essays on banking. The first two chapters analyze, theoretically and empirically, the relationship between bank capital and macroeconomic activity. The third chapter addresses a policy question about financial deepening in some emerging market economies. The first chapter develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to examine the impact of macroprudential regulation on the bank's financial decisions and the implications for the real sector. It explicitly incorporates costs and benefits of capital requirements. We model an occasionally binding capital constraint and approximate it using an asymmetric nonlinear penalty function. It is seen that higher capital requirements can dampen business cycle fluctuations and stronger regulation can induce banks to hold buffers and hence mitigate an economic downturn. We also see that higher capital requirements can enhance the welfare of the economy as a whole. Lastly, we find that switching to a counter-cyclical capital requirement regime can help moderate business cycle fluctuations and raise welfare. The second chapter empirically evaluates the impact of bank capital on lending patterns using an innovative instrumenting strategy. We construct an unbalanced quarterly panel of around nine thousand commercial banks over sixty quarters, from 1996 to 2010. Using different measures of capital, we find a moderate relationship between bank equity and lending. The relationship is also found to differ by size. The bigger banks have a greater responsiveness of lending to capital than smaller ones. The third chapter evaluates financial deepening in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and compares their performance with other top performers in Africa. First, we use an unbalanced panel of 16 countries and 158 banks and document some key areas that need immediate policy attention. Next, we use the financial possibility frontier methodology to benchmark the performance of some important economies in our sample, with respect to each other and their estimated potential. We find that the WAEMU countries perform poorly compared to the control group and their own estimated potential. We make policy recommendations to solve this problem and increase financial depth.

L’objet de notre thèse est l’unité de l’œuvre de Péguy selon Hans Urs von Balthasar. Balthasar est le premier commentateur qui a tenté de relire tout l’itinéraire du poète à la lumière du petit autoportrait que le poète a laissé dans Un nouveau théologien. M. Fernand Laudet : « c’est par un approfondissement constant de notre cœur… que nous avons retrouvé la voie de chrétienté. » En prenant ce mot de « cœur » dans les différentes acceptions que l’écrivain lui a données, Balthasar a été capable de rassembler l’œuvre de Péguy de façon organique en une voûte qui a les Mystères pour clé. À la lumière des plus profondes intentions du cœur du jeune Péguy, Balthasar peut éclairer non seulement le rejet d’un certain christianisme augustinien et la décision de se placer résolument au cœur du socialisme, mais encore le retour progressif au catholicisme. En retrouvant la foi, Péguy entame cependant un approfondissement ultérieur : il médite le mystère même du cœur chrétien et pénètre enfin le cœur du Père. Notre travail a voulu présenter une lecture très originale de l’itinéraire de Péguy. La pertinence de cette lecture est prouvée, entre autres choses, par sa capacité à intégrer les plus grandes interprétations de Péguy qui l’ont précédée et même suivie. / The theme of the present dissertation is the unity of the work of Charles Péguy in the interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Balthasar is the first commentator who has attempted to re-read the whole trajectory of Péguy’s life and work in light of the brief self-portrait that the poet offers us in Un nouveau théologien. M. Fernand Laudet. “It was,” Péguy writes there, “a constant deepening of our heart . . . that lead us to discover the path of Christendom.” Meditating on the various meanings of the word “heart” in the poet’s thought, Balthasar is able to show his work rising into an organic edifice with the Mysteries as its keystone. He shows how not only Péguy’s repudiation of an Augustinian Christianity and his resolute embrace of the heart of socialism, but his eventual return to Catholicism make sense only in light of what were from the very beginning his heart’s deepest intentions. But Péguy’s rediscovery of faith meant also the entry into a new deepening of the heart: the contemplation of the mystery of the Christian heart and at last of the Father’s heart. This dissertation seeks to present Balthasar’s original reading of Péguy’s trajectory and, at the same time, to show its fecundity, which is demonstrated by, among other things, its capacity to integrate the major readings of Péguy produced both before and after Balthasar’s own work on the poet.

This essay aims to examine and analyze how the political situation in Thailand looks like and what conditions Thailand has to become a consolidated democracy. This is achieved via a theoretical case study where Linz and Stepans five arenas of consolidated democracy is the center. This theory has been applied to the current political situation in Thailand to get to a conclusion on what the democratic situation actually looks like. In the end this essay comes to the conclusion that the democratic future of Thailand looks really dark and that the conditions for a possible consolidated democracy in the near future are really bad. The main reason for this dark democratic future is the current government and there unwillingnes to adept to a democratic system.

Baigiamajame magistro darbe pateikta mokslo darbų, skirtų vėžių atsiradimo, gilėjimo asfalto dangoje ir įtakos transporto priemonių važiavimui analizė. Pateikti vėžių asfalto dangoje dinamikos ir įtakos transporto priemonių važiavimui modeliai. Atlikti Provėžų gylio pasiskirstymo Lietuvos valstybinės reikšmės magistraliniuose bei krašto keliuose eksperimentiniai tyrimai. Suformuluotos ir pateiktos išvados ir siūlymai. / The Master thesis provides the analysis of scientific works on the origin of ruts, their deepening on the asphalt pavement and impact on the vechile drive. It presents models of the dynamics of ruts on the asphalt pavement and their impact on the vehicle drive. Morover, experimental researches of the distribution of the depth of ruts on Lithuanian main and national roads were carried out, conclusions and suggestions formed and provided.

In 2011, Levine & Molina contributed to the research within the field of the quality of democracy by creating a framework focusing on the quality of the political process. The purpose of this study is to further contribute to the theoretical discussion of the quality of democracy by empirically applying Levine & Molina’s model of quality of democracy on a case: Bogota, the capital of Colombia. The data was collected through a field study in Bogota through semi-structured interviews with elites. The first research question aims at deciding what quality the democracy in Bogota has, if analyzing it through Levine & Molina’s five main dimensions. The second question asks if their model captures the central dimensions needed for concluding the quality of democracy if contrasting their dimensions to other societal factors lifted as important in Bogota by the informants.   The conclusions show that Bogota appears to have a rather low quality of democracy. Its strongest dimension is electoral decision, while the weakest one is participation. When comparing Levine & Molina’s dimensions to the surrounding society in Bogota, their framework can mainly be concluded to be including the main aspects for being able to evaluate the quality of democracy in a given place. However, it appears obvious that a strong and active emphasis on surrounding circumstances is central for drawing any conclusions of the quality of the political process.

The Structural Funds, (namely the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the Guidance Section of the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund and lastly the Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance) being the most important instruments of European Community Regional Policy have gone through a process of reform since their establishment as a consequence of European Union integration. This thesis aims to analyze the process of reform of the Structural Funds taking processes of widening and deepening of European Union as the main triggering factors. The thesis also traces the historical evolution of the Structural Funds and results of each main refom movement in a descriptive manner.

A fundamental focus in ecology is understanding interactions between environmental heterogeneity and ecological community structure, both of which are currently undergoing unprecedented alterations due to global change. In particular, many freshwater phytoplankton communities are experiencing multiple global change stressors, altering phytoplankton community composition, biomass, and spatial distribution. I used multiple approaches to characterize the interactions between spatial distribution and community structure of phytoplankton and quantify uncertainty in predictions of phytoplankton temporal dynamics. First, I analyzed data from 51 lakes to determine the environmental drivers of phytoplankton vertical distributions across the water column for different phytoplankton groups. I show that the relative importance of environmental drivers varies according to the functional traits of each phytoplankton group. Second, I conducted whole-ecosystem experiments in a reservoir to assess phytoplankton responses to surface water mixing events, which may become more prevalent as storms increase under global change. My results demonstrate that aggregated phytoplankton biomass has inconsistent responses to mixing over the short term, but responses of morphology-based functional groups of phytoplankton to mixing are more predictable. Third, I conducted a long-term whole-ecosystem experiment to assess phytoplankton responses to changes in water column thermal gradients which are predicted to increasingly occur under global change. I found that phytoplankton depth distributions responded similarly to thermal gradient disturbance over multiple years, and changes in depth distributions were related to changes in community composition. Fourth, I produced weekly hindcasts of phytoplankton density in a lake for two years to determine the dominant sources of uncertainty in phytoplankton density predictions. I found that better estimation of current phytoplankton density improved representation of error in phytoplankton models, and incorporation of additional life history stages to model structure may improve phytoplankton predictions. Overall, my dissertation chapters demonstrate that the vertical distribution and community structure of phytoplankton are linked, and that the interaction of phytoplankton community structure with environmental heterogeneity is more predictable over longer-term (e.g., months to years) than shorter-term (e.g., days to weeks) scales. My research emphasizes that consideration of phytoplankton community dynamics and the uncertainty associated with phytoplankton predictions are needed for freshwater management under global change. / Doctor of Philosophy / Freshwater phytoplankton, which are microscopic primary producers, are experiencing many environmental changes in lakes and reservoirs due to global change. This includes changes in water temperature, which affects phytoplankton growth and the types of phytoplankton that are present in the water. As a result, phytoplankton communities are changing in ways that affect water quality. For example, phytoplankton may grow rapidly and form blooms which cause unsightly surface scums, clog filters at water treatment plants, or release toxins. My dissertation research uses ecosystem experiments, computer modeling, and large datasets from many lakes to study how the interactions between phytoplankton and their environment might change due to human activities. I found that it is difficult to predict how phytoplankton will respond to changes in water temperature over the short term (days to weeks), but that longer-term (months to years) responses to water temperature changes are more predictable. I also found that the types of phytoplankton present in the water vary across depth in response to light, temperature, and predation. Since the species of phytoplankton that are present determine a waterbody's water quality, my results indicate that water quality can vary substantially among different depths. Finally, I found that the greatest sources of uncertainty in predicting phytoplankton are due to the challenges in accurately measuring the amount of phytoplankton that are present in a lake and representing complex phytoplankton processes in computer models. My research demonstrates that it is important to think about multiple types of phytoplankton and how they interact with the environment, not just the total amount of phytoplankton present, when predicting how water quality will change due to global change. In addition, it is important to consider the uncertainty associated with predictions of phytoplankton when we make decisions about how to manage water quality.