<p>Violence against women, of which intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant part, is a widespread public health problem. There is a great need for effective programs that address this issue. The objective of this study was to explore the experiences expressed by the members of the Karla network whose purpose was to combat IPV. Due to the nature of the study, a qualitative approach was taken and data was gathered through interviews with professionals in the network. The function of collaboration and its impact on the individuals is highlighted by the core category: Striving for progress. The categories that resulted from the analysis were: 1) Achieving professional satisfaction, 2) Developing professional competence, and 3) Treading water. Working within the network was perceived as rewarding, as the network improved the quality of their work. Updated guidelines and routines were regarded as essential to improve the collaboration. To progress in the work against IPV, methods to recognize and attend to abused women should be refined and implemented. More focus needs to be put on preventive actions. There is reason to direct actions toward children and adolescents and thus the arenas that initially should be engaged are media, school, and youth clinics.</p>

Violence against women, of which intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant part, is a widespread public health problem. There is a great need for effective programs that address this issue. The objective of this study was to explore the experiences expressed by the members of the Karla network whose purpose was to combat IPV. Due to the nature of the study, a qualitative approach was taken and data was gathered through interviews with professionals in the network. The function of collaboration and its impact on the individuals is highlighted by the core category: Striving for progress. The categories that resulted from the analysis were: 1) Achieving professional satisfaction, 2) Developing professional competence, and 3) Treading water. Working within the network was perceived as rewarding, as the network improved the quality of their work. Updated guidelines and routines were regarded as essential to improve the collaboration. To progress in the work against IPV, methods to recognize and attend to abused women should be refined and implemented. More focus needs to be put on preventive actions. There is reason to direct actions toward children and adolescents and thus the arenas that initially should be engaged are media, school, and youth clinics.

Thesis advisor: Paul Gray / This thesis is a study of inter-sectoral collaboration and the impact of crises and social learning and cooperation initiatives on corporate change. The main purpose is to demonstrate how governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations can most effectively work together to solve some of the world's most pressing development problems. Using case studies of extractive multinational corporations operating in Colombia, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria, this paper presents support for the fact that crises are essential catalysts for corporate change. Moreover, analysis of these cases reinforces the critical role social learning and cooperation initiatives play in driving longterm improvements in corporate practice. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program.

The transition from communism to capitalism at the end of the last century was one of the most significant events in the world economy since industrialization. During the latter part of the 1980s, people the Central and Eastern European countries and former Soviet Republics opted for a change from highly distorted command economic system to a market driven economic system. Privatization and liberalization policies led to major changes in the commodity mix and volume of agricultural production, consumption and trade. However, the changes and the impacts varied among countries as they followed different transition strategies. This study investigated the impact of market liberalization on the agricultural sector, as well as how the inter-sectoral linkages among the agricultural, industrial and service sectors responded in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary using time-series analysis. The study estimated an econometric model that incorporates the linkages among the sectors using a Vector Error Correction Model. The procedure identified long-run and short-run relationships for each country. The results showed that a sector can have a negative linkage to other sectors in the short-run; however, that does not mean that the linkage will be negative in the long-run. Impulse response functions were constructed to determine how a system reacts to a shock in one of the endogenous variable in a model. The study explored how a shock in the agricultural sector was absorbed by the other sectors in the economy, and how a shock in the other sectors was absorbed by the agricultural sector, in all four countries. The responses reflected how the variables are interrelated within a country, and how the shocks are transferred through different linkages over a long period of time. Such dynamic analysis was used to identify the total impacts of different policy alternatives.

nÃo hà / Este estudo utilizou a Teoria do Insumo-Produto para desenvolver uma estimativa de impactos em termos de produÃÃo, valor adicionado e postos de trabalho, no Cearà e no restante do Brasil. Impactos estes gerados pela entrada em operaÃÃo de dois empreendimentos industriais de grande porte: A Companhia SiderÃrgica do PecÃm e a Refinaria Premium II. Foram utilizados Modelos inter-regionais de Insumo-Produto fechados com relaÃÃo Ãs famÃlias, em que a economia foi regionalizada em Cearà e restante do Brasil e desagregada em 17 setores. Os resultados locais encontrados apontam um incremento de 3,1% no Produo Interno Bruto -PIB- e de 1,4% na PopulaÃÃo Economicamente Ativa -PEA- do Cearà no caso da Companhia SiderÃrgica do PecÃm e de 18,0% no PIB e 9,5% na PEA para o caso da Refinaria Premium II. Resultados fora do estado do Cearà foram de magnitude bruta prÃxima aos encontrados localmente. O presente trabalho considerou uma estrutura produtiva que retrata a realidade de 2004, ano referÃncia da principal matriz utilizada. / This study used the Theory of Input-Output to develop an estimate of the impacts in terms of output, value added and jobs in the Brazilian state of Cearà and in the rest of Brazil to be caused by the entry into operation of two large industrial enterprises: the Companhia SiderÃrgica do PecÃm, a steel producing company, and the Refinaria Premium II, a oil refinery. In this study, interregional input-output models closed with respect to households were used. The economy has been regionalized in Cearà and the rest of Brazil and desagregated into 17 sectors. The local results show an increase of 3.1% in GDP and 1.4% of the labor force in the case of Companhia SiderÃrgica do PecÃm and 18.0% of GDP and 9.5% of the labor force in the case of Refinaria Premium II. The impacts outside of Cearà were found to have similar gross magnitude when compared with the local ones. This study considered a productive structure that depicts the reality of 2004, the year of reference for the main matrix used.

Der intersektorale Wasserkonflikt zwischen urbaner und agrarischer Wassernutzung in Hyderabad und die Konkurrenz zwischen den Bedürfnissen der Stadt und den Ansprüchen der Landwirtschaft werden verschärft durch willkürliche Verteilungspraktiken, die den offiziellen Zuteilungsrichtlinien oft widersprechen. Übersetzt in die Sprache von Ostrom, gilt die vorliegende Untersuchung der Kernfrage, warum bestimmte praktizierte Regeln (rules-in-use) fortbestehen, obwohl formale Regeln (rules-in-form) im Bereich der Nutzungsrechte an Wasser vorhanden sind. Die Arbeit versucht dementsprechend zu erklären, wie bestehende Institutionen und Governancestrukturen die Interaktionen beteiligter Akteure und deren Verhalten beeinflussen und wie daraus eine durch Willkür gekennzeichnete Umverteilung erwächst. Knights Verteilungstheorie institutionellen Wandels und sein Ansatz über Machtressourcen vermögen zu erklären, wie menschliche Interaktionen in Zusammenhang mit solchen Konflikten über begrenzte Ressourcen zustande kommen. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit zeigen ebenfalls, welche Wirkungen die Charakteristika verschiedener Gruppen von Wassernutzern und deren spezifische Abhängigkeit von Wasserressourcen auf ihre Fähigkeit zur politischen Einflussnahme ausüben. Solche Ausprägungen von Ressourcenabhängigkeiten bedingen Machtasymmetrien und erhöhen das Ausmaß willkürlicher Umverteilungen von Wasser. Die Untersuchung identifiziert eine Literaturlücke im Bereich der Politik der Wassergovernance, indem sie den Wählereinfluss als Machtressource im Land-Stadt-Konflikt um Wasserressourcen empirisch belegt. Die Arbeit zielt insgesamt darauf, das Erklärungspotential von Eigentumsrechtstheorien zu nutzen und anhand von Wasserkonflikten in Hyderabad ein Beispiel zur Anwendbarkeit aktueller Theorien institutionellen Wandels zu geben. / Hyderabad’s inter-sectoral water conflict and competition between the city’s urban needs and the agricultural sector have been fueled by persistent arbitrary water reallocations against the prescribed allocation guidelines. To translate the key question into Ostrom’s language; this study seeks to unravel the persistence of rules-in-use, despite the rules-in-form already in place within the realms of property rights. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework identifies exogenous variables and its influences on the role of institutions which shapes human interaction and decision making processes. It attempts to explain how the existing water-allocation mechanism has propagated the way rules and actors currently interact to influence such arbitrary water re-allocation. Knight’s distributional theory of institutional change and his concept of power resources provide good explanations of human interaction in the context of such conflicts over limited resources. The study results also reveal how the characteristics of water-user groups and its dependence on water resource have the ability to exert political influence over water allocation. Such attributes of resource dependence characterizes power asymmetry, thereby increasing the scale of arbitrary water reallocations. Henceforth, this study addresses the gap in ‘politics of water governance’ in existing literature by empirically deriving ‘political electorate’ as a power resource in rural-urban water contestation. Overall, this study seeks to employ the theoretical explanations of property rights and attempts to provide a case on the applicability of contemporary theories of institutional change by taking the case study of Hyderabad’s water contestation.

The economic growth and the increase in population has led to an increased demand for water for various purposes such as domestic consumption, irrigation, industrial use, power generation, navigation, recreation, and ecological requirements. With the increase in population, the per-capita water availability is continuously decreasing. Due to increase in demand and accompanying scarcity of water the conflict among the potential users of the resource is on raise. Hence, the allocation of the available water resource is a big challenge as the intersect oral and inter-regional water allocation is often competing and conflicting in nature. In the above context a good model to manage the available water resources would require reliable inputs on the available water resources. In the first part of this thesis we compare different techniques that are typically used for modeling the river water flow. Time series analysis (ARIMA) is compared with machine learning techniques such as support-vector regression (SVR) and neural network models. The performance of these techniques is compared by applying them to a long-term time-series data of the inflows of three tributaries of the river Cauvery into the Krishnaraja Sagar reservoir (KRS). Flow data over a period of 30 years from three different observation points established in upper Cauvery river sub-basin is analyzed. Specifically, a multi-layer feed forward network trained with a back-propagation algorithm and support vector regression with epsilon-insensitive loss function is compared with the ARIMA models. It is found that the performance of support vector regression model is superior to those of the other techniques considered. The second part of our thesis is to develop a model for optimal water allocation to the different sectors with the aim of maximizing the total utility of available water resource in a river basin. A hydro-economic modeling framework is developed that incorporates the economic assessment of the value of water. This inter-sectoral allocation problem is studied in the context of enforcing certain minimum water rights to every person for domestic use and a certain minimum irrigation need set out by the contingency plans of the state agriculture department in Cauvery river basin. A non-linear optimization model is built to obtain an optimal inter-sectoral water allocation policy. The study evaluates the economic impact of different parameters of competing demands such as water availability, population, basic water right (quantity), ground water contribution, and crop benefit. The optimal policies that implements the water allocation priorities as set out by the National Water Policy (2012) are compared. Further, results show that the basic water right can be secured for essential needs with optimal management of available surface and ground water resources. In the third part of thesis, we study the conflict of water sharing that arises between sectors/regions. We consider the river water-sharing problem between two agents along a river. Each agent has a stated claim to the river water. The Absolute Territorial Sovereignty (ATS) and Absolute Territorial Integrity (ATI) principles are promoted by different agents along the river as a means to maximize their individual benefit. However, these principles are invariably considered to be unjust by one or more of the other agents. Hence, it is preferred to have a negotiated water treaty that is perceived to be equitable and just by all. A one way downstream stream bilateral bargaining model can be used to guide the negotiated water treaty between the agents. In this bargaining framework we introduce the issue of negative externalities imposed by the upstream agent on the downstream agent/s in the form of pollution and/or flooding. This imposes a cost on the downstream agent to mitigate losses due to the negative externalities. A bargaining model that incorporates the impact of negative externalities is developed to guide the negotiated treaties. We identify individually rational bargaining strategies for a two agents transferable utility one way downstream river water sharing problem. The results characterize the agreement and disagreement points for bilateral trading

Dans une série d'essais empiriques, cette thèse analyse les effets de la diversification productive sur la volatilité et la productivité dans les pays riches en ressources naturelles. Dans le premier chapitre, je montre que bien que les ressources naturelles affectent négativement la croissance économique en augmentant la volatilité, les pays riches en ressources peuvent compenser les effets déclencheurs de la volatilité des ressources en diversifiant leurs économies. Les pays dont la structure de production est initialement plus diversifiée, ou qui parviennent à se diversifier au cours de leur développement économique, sont susceptibles de bénéficier de leur dotation en ressources. Dans le deuxième chapitre, j’explique que les pays riches en ressources disposés à diversifier leurs économies pour stimuler leur productivité sont confrontés à deux choix; soit développer des industries axées sur les ressources, soit diversifier leur économie dans son ensemble vers de nouvelles activités qui ne dépendent pas nécessairement des ressources naturelles. L’analyse empirique montre que la diversification par les liens vers l’aval du secteur de l'exploitation minière ne conduit pas à des améliorations de productivité. En revanche, l'élargissement et la diversification de la structure de production dans son ensemble offrent des potentiels de croissance de la productivité à des niveaux de revenus plus élevés. Dans le troisième chapitre, j’analyse la relation entre la diversification et la volatilité du point de vue du réseau de production constitué par l’ensemble des liens d’approvisionnement entre secteurs. Je trouve que l'emplacement d'un secteur au sein du réseau et son influence sur d'autres secteurs ont des effets contradictoires sur le risque que les fluctuations subies par ce secteur génèrent une volatilité agrégée. Les secteurs situés dans des régions denses du réseau ont un effet atténuant sur la volatilité globale via les effets de substitution, tandis que ceux qui sont plus influents et au centre d'un réseau fortement asymétrique génèrent des fluctuations globales via les effets de contagion et les liaisons intersectorielles. Ceux-ci suggèrent que la répartition et la structure des liens interindustriels jouent un rôle important dans la façon dont la diversification conditionne l'impact des chocs idiosyncrasiques sur la volatilité globale. / In a series of empirical essays, this thesis looks at the various intertwining aspects of growth volatility and productive diversification in resource-rich countries. In the first chapter, I find that while natural resources adversely affect economic growth by increasing growth volatility, resource-rich countries can offset the volatility-triggering effects of natural resources by diversifying their economies. Countries that start off with more diversified production structure or are able to diversify as they develop are likely to benefit from their resource endowment. In the second chapter, I discuss the fact that resource-rich countries willing to diversify their economies are faced with dual policy options; to either develop resource-based industries, or diversify their economies as a whole into new activities not necessarily dependent on natural resources. The empirical analysis shows that diversification through downstream and forward linkages to mining does not lead to productivity enhancements. However, broadening and diversifying the production structure as a whole offer potentials for productivity growth at higher levels of income. In the third chapter, I look at the relation between diversification and volatility from a production network perspective, composed of input-output linkages across sectors. I find that the location of a sector within the production network and its influence on other sectors have conflicting effects on the risk that sectoral shocks lead to aggregate volatility. Sectors that are located in dense parts of the network have a mitigating effect on aggregate volatility via substitution effects, while those that are more influential and central in a strongly asymmetrical network generate aggregate fluctuations via contagion effects and inter-industry linkages. These suggest that the distribution and the network structure of inter-industry linkages play an important role into how diversification conditions the impact of idiosyncratic shocks on aggregate volatility.

The point of departure in this study was to find a logical structure to answer the research question. In order to do this, the central concept adequate was defined, clarified and linked to the research question while on the same score, concepts related to it were also defined and clarified. The objectives of the study and the conceptual instruments were combined and thereafter linked to HIV/AIDS as a real life phenomenon. The literature reviewed assisted in accessing sources relevant to the topic, in setting the theoretical framework for the study and selecting appropriate tools to measure and evaluate the adequacy of governmental health and welfare interventions. The theoretical framework of the study is informed by the idea that the Government has obligations in terms of a social contract with society. On this basis, a conceptual instrument was built, bearing in mind section 2 of the 1996 Constitution. The evaluation criteria used involves collection and sifting through information and data while on the same score, making judgements about the validity of information obtained and deriving inferences from such information. / Public Administration / M. Admin. (Public Administration)

The point of departure in this study was to find a logical structure to answer the research question. In order to do this, the central concept adequate was defined, clarified and linked to the research question while on the same score, concepts related to it were also defined and clarified. The objectives of the study and the conceptual instruments were combined and thereafter linked to HIV/AIDS as a real life phenomenon. The literature reviewed assisted in accessing sources relevant to the topic, in setting the theoretical framework for the study and selecting appropriate tools to measure and evaluate the adequacy of governmental health and welfare interventions. The theoretical framework of the study is informed by the idea that the Government has obligations in terms of a social contract with society. On this basis, a conceptual instrument was built, bearing in mind section 2 of the 1996 Constitution. The evaluation criteria used involves collection and sifting through information and data while on the same score, making judgements about the validity of information obtained and deriving inferences from such information. / Public Administration and Management / M. Admin. (Public Administration)