International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United Kingdom and Canada have demonstrated a distinct withdrawal from education programming towards campaigns and fundraising. This study explores how the nature of INGO global education programming has shifted over time. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of a) the place of INGO-produced global education within the context of international development and the field of global education, and b) what type of role (if any) INGOs have to play in future global education programming. The shifts in INGO global education over time are identified through a comparative historical analysis of the socio-political and funding conditions affecting INGO-produced global education programming in Canada and the UK including the embedded case studies of two sister organizations, Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada. This study looks broadly at the fifty year history of INGO global education, then focuses on the current experiences of two INGOs that are representative of conditions of INGO dependency within their country contexts. A conceptual framework based on the work on the educational typologies of Askew and Carnell (1998) and the ethical positionings of Barnett and Weiss (2008) is used to analyze, evaluate, explore, and describe the global education programming mechanisms prioritized by INGOs. The trend of INGO global education programming as fundraising campaigns lacks the commitment to relationship building, and the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are important for developing informed and capable constituencies who would understand systemic inequalities. This begs the question as to whether INGOs are satisfied with the short-term, socially regulatory outcome of fundraising when they have the potential to facilitate the dialogical, equitable relationships that can increase the possibilities for social transformation.

The Dual-Ladders system of Community Planners and Community Architects was established and propelled by the public works department of the Kaohsiung city government in 2002; it has been almost 2 years. Based on the basic principles of ¡§Bottom-up¡¨ and ¡§Community Independence¡¨ created by the whole community and driven by the current head of the public works department, Mr. Chin-Rong Lin, with the citizen participation in environment planning and reworks, it encourages the involvement of local community planners/community architects to proceed with the system of space problems diagnose and material space reworks plans. This study is to cite the Community Veranda plan pushed by the City of Kaohsiung as an example. In 2002, this plan produced five pieces of work representing the five administrative districts. Starting from September of 2003, these pieces completed one after another. These pieces were the signature pieces of the first anniversary of the Community Planners /Community Architects system in Kaohsiung. Based on this operation model and the working attitudes and the levels of satisfaction of the participating community planners and community architects toward this system, explore and discuss the major issues, such as the participation motives, role identifications, volunteer frequency, system establishment, interaction, difficult situations, and future developments. In addition, for the problems such as the special needs of local environments, the understandings of the system, the role definitions for the professionals, the differentiation of job responsibilities, the self-examination of professional ethics, the interactions among the professionals, and the interaction/integration of government agencies, use the research methods such as document reviews, case analysis and in-depth interviews, to further discover the problems within, to explore the directions for improvements and to guide the strategies for the future development of the system. This study shows that the levels of involvements of the community planners/community architects dropped after their initial participation. The reasons are mostly the practical concerns of personal interests. Besides, the construction industry shows signs of recovery, therefore the demands for these professionals increase. There is a lot of similarity between the expectations for the professionals from the system and the role identifications of the average professionals. There should be differentiation and cooperation for the two systems. Most professionals have the same way of volunteering, but it is not frequent enough. Overall, the professionals think that ¡§Bottom-up¡¨ and ¡§Community Independence¡¨ are beyond reach at this moment and there are many issues of the system need to be addressed. On top of that, lack of trainings, the mere formality of checkpoint mechanism, much needed improvement of the interactions between the professionals and the government agencies, and no leading agency for integration are also the causes for the poor operations and many obstacles of the system.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1917. / Bibliography: p. [166]-170.

 Public participation, as a form of direct democracy, is becoming increasingly popular in the government policy-making process in China. This thesis argues that public participation in China acts neither as a supplement to a well-founded democratic system, nor as an alternative to an electoral democracy, nor even as an effective accountability politico-legal institution. Instead, contemporary public participation is an interim measure that caters to an urgent social need and provides temporary legitimacy to the state. As such, it is the first step towards further political liberalization, for which it lays a foundation. The public participation system in China has developed from its original form as a solely state-led, political campaign-oriented system in the closed era to the coexistence of three ideal-type public participation in the open era: state-led, issue-specific participation, spontaneous, issue-specific, group-based participation and spontaneous, issue-specific, individual-based participation. Public hearing, corporate lobbying and e-participation can be correspondingly treated as representative mechanisms of the three ideal-type public participation in China. In addition, the institutions of open government information and judicial redress are currently the most significant support structures for this system. Relying on the methodologies of case studies, statutory interpretation, quantitative calculation and socio-legal analysis, the thesis finds that citizens can articulate their demands on policies in public hearings, but government organs are inclined to prevent any substantial challenge to their proposed policies. Although business groups have not been conferred with any special systematic opportunity to participate in the formulation of policy, corporate lobbying contributes towards undermining the government’s monopoly in the policy-making. Citizens in e-participation take full advantage of the flexibility and anonymity of the Internet to enjoy a free, low-risk space of debating government policies and monitoring government officials. Although the implementation of the Regulations on Open Government Information has been basically satisfactory, the Regulations have failed to establish the necessary transparency for public participation. What citizens seek in public participation litigations is not only judicial redress of their grievances, but, even more significantly, de facto influence on a policy-making process taking place outside the courtrooms. The public participation system as a whole in China has a paradoxical character in contextual, structural, functional and developmental aspects. Its essential defect is to fall short of a device that makes government policymakers accountable for the output of public participation. The public participation system is used by the state as a viable trajectory for its own legitimization to secure the formal validation of government policies and to reduce the risks that it confronts in the ongoing democratization process. It is used by citizens as a locus of their self-expression values and as an incubator of their developing citizenship, also providing a prompt channel for citizens’ rightful contest. The prospects of this system and its impacts on future legitimization of the state are ultimately underpinned by citizens’ struggles for liberty and democracy, but they are directly shaped by the state’s adaptive strategy. / published_or_final_version / Law / Master / Doctor of Legal Studies

Natural resource management requires the simultaneous consideration of many different and often conflicting goals. For resource decisions to accurately reflect public values and desires, a systematic method is needed for assessing the importance which public groups attach to different management goals. Direct judgments of the importance of goals are often used as weights in additive utility models for evaluating alternative resource decisions. The overall value of each alternative is assessed by assigning it a value with respect to each relevant goal, multiplying each value by the corresponding goal's importance weight, and summing the weighted values. The validity of this procedure depends on the assumption that each goal's importance is judged independently of all other goals and is not affected by perceived conflicts between goals. Otherwise, the importance of some goals will be overestimated (double-counted). This study tested the validity of this assumption for direct judgments of the importance of forest management goals. Subjects read a description of a hypothetical national forest and rated the importance of six forest management goals on a ten-point scale. They also rated the amount of conflict between each possible pair of goals. The management scenarios were varied to represent two levels of conflict between a wilderness preservation goal and a timber production goal, and two levels of scarcity of existing wilderness areas in the region of the national forest. The conflict and scarcity manipulations were crossed, creating four conflict/scarcity conditions in a two-by-two ANOVA design. Analysis showed that both conflict and scarcity produced effects on ratings of the management goals' importance. The effects differed depending on the nature of the individual goal. In particular, goals which conflicted with wilderness preservation were rated lower in importance when the conflict was higher and when wilderness scarcity was high. This suggests that people discount the importance of goals which are perceived as conflicting with a highly valued goal, such as wilderness preservation. Importance ratings would therefore underestimate the importance of goals such as timber production if they were used as weights in an additive utility model. Further analysis revealed the presence of a single strong dimension underlying the ratings of conflict between goals. This dimension also seemed to be related to judgments of goal importance. It is possible that both conflict and importance judgments are made with respect to general cognitive attributes of the goals (for example preservation/utilization orientation). The results of this study show that direct judgments of goal importance may not satisfy the requirements of additive utility models, and that public perception of conflict between goals must be taken into account when interpreting judgments of the importance of management goals. A resource planner must be aware of what preconceptions the public holds about conflicts between goals and how these preconceptions affect the expressed importance of the goals.

International development non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in the United Kingdom and Canada have demonstrated a distinct withdrawal from education programming towards campaigns and fundraising. This study explores how the nature of INGO global education programming has shifted over time. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of a) the place of INGO-produced global education within the context of international development and the field of global education, and b) what type of role (if any) INGOs have to play in future global education programming. The shifts in INGO global education over time are identified through a comparative historical analysis of the socio-political and funding conditions affecting INGO-produced global education programming in Canada and the UK including the embedded case studies of two sister organizations, Save the Children UK and Save the Children Canada. This study looks broadly at the fifty year history of INGO global education, then focuses on the current experiences of two INGOs that are representative of conditions of INGO dependency within their country contexts. A conceptual framework based on the work on the educational typologies of Askew and Carnell (1998) and the ethical positionings of Barnett and Weiss (2008) is used to analyze, evaluate, explore, and describe the global education programming mechanisms prioritized by INGOs. The trend of INGO global education programming as fundraising campaigns lacks the commitment to relationship building, and the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are important for developing informed and capable constituencies who would understand systemic inequalities. This begs the question as to whether INGOs are satisfied with the short-term, socially regulatory outcome of fundraising when they have the potential to facilitate the dialogical, equitable relationships that can increase the possibilities for social transformation.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg.

Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

As one of the most popular social media platforms in China, Sina Weibo has created an environment for the Chinese people to share opinions and post information on events they have witnessed. Thus, Weibo users can be citizen journalists, though most of them have played the role unconsciously. Although Weibo has existed for about six years, citizen journalism is still new to most Chinese people. Some scholars have studied Weibo from the perspective of public opinion or better governance rather than from its ethical demands and influence. This paper discusses the ethical problems of citizen journalism that arose in three case studies where Weibo posts were immediate sources of news and information on disasters and were considered important by mainstream media and the public, but where the posts also provided false information. In addition, a survey found that most Chinese respondents had posted news or information on Weibo, but very few consider themselves citizen journalists. Surprisingly, non-journalists are no more likely to trust citizen journalism than are journalists. Non-journalists are getting more news from citizen journalism on Weibo about national disasters, but they put more trust and credibility in mainstream media. Respondents thought witnessing events and quickly reporting on them were the biggest advantages of citizen journalists, while the biggest problems were bias, emotional reports, rumor and invasion of privacy. About two-thirds of respondents think self-restraint is the best way to handle ethical problems resulting from citizen journalists, but about half favor more legislation. In a striking difference from Western expectations, a relatively small percentage of Chinese respondents think independence from the government is an important journalistic value. Finally, the paper concludes that the public sphere concept is relevant in China in the wake economic reforms and the advent of social media. And it argues that the theory of existential journalism may offer an ethical guide for China’s citizen journalists by emphasizing both freedom and personal responsibility. Finally it suggests that mainstream media, journalists and media scholars play the main role of promoting journalistic ethical values on Weibo.

Environmental research is increasingly using citizen scientists in many aspects of projects, such as data collection and question design. To date, only a limited number of co-created citizen science projects where community members are involved in most or all steps of the scientific process have been completed, and few comparing community engagement methods and efficacy and learning outcomes across demo- and geographic data. This study compares two citizen science programs, evaluating what motivates citizen scientists to participate in environmental health research and whether participation affects scientific knowledge and environmental behavior and efficacy. Participants in the Gardenroots: A Citizen Science Garden Project completed sample collection training and submitted soil, water, vegetable, and dust samples for analysis and received their environmental monitoring results. In the Facilitating Community Action to Address Climate Change and Build Resiliency in Southern Metropolitan Tucson project, Spanish speaking community members of South Tucson underwent training in climate change and environmental quality and sample collection, and worked with families in the South Tucson community, collecting soil and water samples and providing environmental health education. For both projects, participants completed a pre- and post-survey with a variety of qualitative and quantitative questions. These survey instruments were used to evaluate differences in environmental self-efficacy and motivations. In addition, select Gardenroots participants were involved in focus groups and semi-structured interviews to understand and gauge changes in knowledge and to further explore changes in motivation and self-efficacy. The participants were primarily internally motivated and saw increases in both efficacy and knowledge as a result of participation in the program. This information is critical to moving citizen science efforts forward and determining whether such projects: 1) co-produce environmental monitoring, exposure assessment, and risk data in a form that will be directly relevant to the participant's lives, 2) increase the community’s involvement in environmental decision-making, and 3) improve environmental health education and literacy in underserved communities.