Manoeuvring in an Environment of Uncertainty

Manoeuvring in an Environment of Uncertainty
Title Manoeuvring in an Environment of Uncertainty PDF eBook
Author Boel Berner
Publisher Routledge
Total Pages 407
Release 2017-11-01
Genre Political Science
ISBN 135172827X

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This title was first published in 2000. Recent years have seen tremendous economic and political changes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors to this volume focus on the pressing problem of how actors in their everyday life, political and social action handle uncertainty. With the help of rich empirical material from different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors try to understand how actors react, manoeuver, organize and make their actions meaningful in an environment characterized by unpredictability and change.

Shaping Claims to Urban Land

Shaping Claims to Urban Land
Title Shaping Claims to Urban Land PDF eBook
Author Fons van Overbeek
Publisher Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages 512
Release 2022-10-03
Genre History
ISBN 3110734532

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The concept of 'hybridity' is often still poorly theorized and problematically applied by peace and development scholars and researchers of resource governance. This book turns to a particular ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's Governmentality and investigates its usefulness to study precisely those mechanisms, processes and practices that hybridity once promised to clarify. Claim-making to land and authority in a post-conflict environment is the empirical grist supporting this exploration of governmentality. Specifically in the periphery of Bukavu. This focus is relevant as urban land is increasingly becoming scarce in rapidly expanding cities of eastern Congo, primarily due to internal rural-to-urban migration as a result of regional insecurity. The governance of urban land is also important analytically as land governance and state authority in Africa are believed to be closely linked and co-evolve. An ethnographic reading of governmentality enables researchers to study hybridization without biasing analysis towards hierarchical dualities. Additionally, a better understanding of hybridization in the claim-making practices may contribute to improved government intervention and development assistance in Bukavu and elsewhere.

The Crisis of Innovation in Water and Wastewater

The Crisis of Innovation in Water and Wastewater
Title The Crisis of Innovation in Water and Wastewater PDF eBook
Author Duncan A. Thomas
Publisher Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages 364
Release 2005-01-01
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 9781781958391

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This is an extremely well-researched and documented book. The authors hypothesis is that the current water and wastewater sector is failing the populations of the western-world by clinging to orthodox and short-term visions of new technology and innovation, and also failing the developing nations by believing that delivery of western-world high-technology solutions is a contribution to humanitarian development. This is the crisis of innovation . To many practitioners in the water industry the book will be perceived to be hypercritical (of the incrementalism, conservative and dogged traditionalism ) of the sector, but in fact it is stimulating and positive. In the latter chapters an alternate more holistic model of water development is described. There needs to be a movement from large, central infrastructure resources to distributed systems that are more appropriate to local needs and can be coupled with environmentally sustainable energy sources and practices. Tim Lack, European Topic Centre on Water, UK Whilst acknowledging a massive leap from standpipe to universal water provision in 100 years in developed countries, the authors of this book see problems for global sustainable water supply and wastewater removal in the future. Using the UK water industry as an example, they describe the global water industry as risk averse and unwilling to innovate, a view that is encouraged by the institutional and financial regimes under which it works. The book explores the reasons for concern and sets out some hard-hitting views on how the water industry is failing to identify and tackle the essential problems in a world which is becoming ever more depleted of fresh water. The concluding chapter brings to a focus the problems of the crisis in innovation and gives some concrete suggestions for tackling them. This volume should raise the awareness of policymakers and regulators, technologists and concerned members of the public. Peter Chave, Independent Consultant and formerly Head of Pollution Control, National Rivers Authority, UK This significant new book highlights a little acknowledged but potentially catastrophic crisis of innovation in the global water sector, which institutions and industries are frighteningly ill-equipped to tackle or even accept. It suggests potential new technology and policy approaches to overcome both current and future problems. The book explores how technological innovation is vital to help provide sustainable water in both the UK and developing countries. However, innovation is being overlooked in the face of global trends to privatize and regulate water utilities. The authors highlight how the global water sector is failing to respond to increasingly complex world needs and continues to build largely unsustainable centralized infrastructures, opposing more appropriate, distributed and local modern technologies. The book also includes suggestions for potentially innovative technology and policy solutions to meet escalating global water and wastewater demands. Importantly, the authors adopt a long-term perspective that crosses both disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and include an international comparative perspective, covering a diverse range of examples and countries. This comprehensive book will have a broad appeal amongst researchers and academics with an interest in technology management, innovation studies, geography and development studies. It will also be a valuable asset for water regulators and governmental and non-governmental organisations working in this field.

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
Title The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa PDF eBook
Author Wale Adebanwi
Publisher Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages 386
Release 2017
Genre History
ISBN 1847011659

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Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa.

Advances in Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control

Advances in Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control
Title Advances in Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control PDF eBook
Author Qiping Chu
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages 782
Release 2013-11-18
Genre Technology & Engineering
ISBN 3642382533

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Following the successful 1st CEAS (Council of European Aerospace Societies) Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control (CEAS EuroGNC) held in Munich, Germany in 2011, Delft University of Technology happily accepted the invitation of organizing the 2nd CEAS EuroGNC in Delft, The Netherlands in 2013. The goal of the conference is to promote new advances in aerospace GNC theory and technologies for enhancing safety, survivability, efficiency, performance, autonomy and intelligence of aerospace systems using on-board sensing, computing and systems. A great push for new developments in GNC are the ever higher safety and sustainability requirements in aviation. Impressive progress was made in new research fields such as sensor and actuator fault detection and diagnosis, reconfigurable and fault tolerant flight control, online safe flight envelop prediction and protection, online global aerodynamic model identification, online global optimization and flight upset recovery. All of these challenges depend on new online solutions from on-board computing systems. Scientists and engineers in GNC have been developing model based, sensor based as well as knowledge based approaches aiming for highly robust, adaptive, nonlinear, intelligent and autonomous GNC systems. Although the papers presented at the conference and selected in this book could not possibly cover all of the present challenges in the GNC field, many of them have indeed been addressed and a wealth of new ideas, solutions and results were proposed and presented. For the 2nd CEAS Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control the International Program Committee conducted a formal review process. Each paper was reviewed in compliance with good journal practice by at least two independent and anonymous reviewers. The papers published in this book were selected from the conference proceedings based on the results and recommendations from the reviewers.

Decision-making Strategies for Automated Driving in Urban Environments

Decision-making Strategies for Automated Driving in Urban Environments
Title Decision-making Strategies for Automated Driving in Urban Environments PDF eBook
Author Antonio Artuñedo
Publisher Springer Nature
Total Pages 205
Release 2020-04-25
Genre Technology & Engineering
ISBN 3030459055

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This book describes an effective decision-making and planning architecture for enhancing the navigation capabilities of automated vehicles in the presence of non-detailed, open-source maps. The system involves dynamically obtaining road corridors from map information and utilizing a camera-based lane detection system to update and enhance the navigable space in order to address the issues of intrinsic uncertainty and low-fidelity. An efficient and human-like local planner then determines, within a probabilistic framework, a safe motion trajectory, ensuring the continuity of the path curvature and limiting longitudinal and lateral accelerations. LiDAR-based perception is then used to identify the driving scenario, and subsequently re-plan the trajectory, leading in some cases to adjustment of the high-level route to reach the given destination. The method has been validated through extensive theoretical and experimental analyses, which are reported here in detail.

What Room for Manoeuvre?

What Room for Manoeuvre?
Title What Room for Manoeuvre? PDF eBook
Author Jean Daudelin
Publisher McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages 344
Release 2008-03-26
Genre Political Science
ISBN 0773574603

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Canada's thirty-four million people and trillion dollar GDP don't occupy much space on a planet of seven billion whose economy is now worth forty trillion dollars. The country is not a lightweight yet, but certainly its position as a power is shrinking. What does that mean for the country's foreign policy and its various players? What room is left, and for whom?