The Business Year recently organized a series of panel discussions to discuss the investment opportunities in the sector and the importance of sustainability. This special debriefing includes a transcript of the entire event, as well as a series of other interviews, news, and analysis.

'The Road to Results: Designing and Conducting Effective Development Evaluations' presents concepts and procedures for evaluation in a development context. It provides procedures and examples on how to set up a monitoring and evaluation system, how to conduct participatory evaluations and do social mapping, and how to construct a "rigorous" quasi-experimental design to answer an impact question. The text begins with the context of development evaluation and how it arrived where it is today. It then discusses current issues driving development evaluation, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the move from simple project evaluations to the broader understandings of complex evaluations. The topics of implementing 'Results-based Measurement and Evaluation' and constructing a 'Theory of Change' are emphasized throughout the text. Next, the authors take the reader down 'the road to results, ' presenting procedures for evaluating projects, programs, and policies by using a 'Design Matrix' to help map the process. This road includes: determining the overall approach, formulating questions, selecting designs, developing data collection instruments, choosing a sampling strategy, and planning data analysis for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method evaluations. The book also includes discussions on conducting complex evaluations, how to manage evaluations, how to present results, and ethical behavior--including principles, standards, and guidelines. The final chapter discusses the future of development evaluation. This comprehensive text is an essential tool for those involved in development evaluation.

This book reports the state of the art of energy-efficient electrical motor driven system technologies, which can be used now and in the near future to achieve significant and cost-effective energy savings. It includes the recent developments in advanced electrical motor end-use devices (pumps, fans and compressors) by some of the largest manufacturers. Policies and programs to promote the large scale penetration of energy-efficient technologies and the market transformation are featured in the book, describing the experiences carried out in different parts of the world. This extensive coverage includes contributions from relevant institutions in the Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

The sustainable governance of water resources relies on processes of multi-stakeholder collaborations and interactions that facilitate knowledge co-creation and social learning. Governance systems are often fragmented, forming a barrier to adequately addressing the myriad of challenges affecting water resources, including climate change, increased urbanized populations, and pollution. Transitions towards sustainable water governance will likely require innovative learning partnerships between public, private, and civil society stakeholders. It is essential that such partnerships involve vertical and horizontal communication of ideas and knowledge, and an enabling and democratic environment characterized by informal and open discourse. There is increasing interest in learning-based transitions. Thus far, much scholarly thinking and, to a lesser degree, empirical research has gone into understanding the potential impact of social learning on multi-stakeholder settings. The question of whether such learning can be supported by forms of serious gaming has hardly been asked. This Special Issue critically explores the potential of serious games to support multi-stakeholder social learning and collaborations in the context of water governance. Serious games may involve simulations of real-world events and processes and are challenge players to solve contemporary societal problems; they, therefore, have a purpose beyond entertainment. They offer a largely untapped potential to support social learning and collaboration by facilitating access to and the exchange of knowledge and information, enhancing stakeholder interactions, empowering a wider audience to participate in decision making, and providing opportunities to test and analyze the outcomes of policies and management solutions. Little is known about how game-based approaches can be used in the context of collaborative water governance to maximize their potential for social learning. While several studies have reported examples of serious games, there is comparably less research about how to assess the impacts of serious games on social learning and transformative change.

This handbook illustrates concepts, methods and tools for "primary environmental care", an approach that seeks to empower communities to meet basic needs while protecting the environment. In particular, it focuses on how population size, structure, growth (or decline) and movements relate to the quality of the environment and the quality of life. Emphasis is placed on a community-led process of participatory action research in which local knowledge and skills are fully utilized. A main purpose is to promote the effective, integrated management of environment and population dynamics for the benefit of local people. As a collection of tools for action, it is designed for professionals in conservation and natural resource management, development, population and public health who wish to promote and assist participatory action research in rural communities.

Focusing on a range of regional cases, the book evaluates the respective weight of national interest and internationalist (solidarity) considerations. Ultimately, while classical national interest considerations remain to this day a powerful motivation for power projection, the book shows how an enlightened conception of national interest can encompass solidarity concerns, and how such a balancing of the imperatives of both national interest and solidarity is the major challenge facing decision-makers.--Publisher's description.

This book addresses the emerging field of neuromarketing, which, at its core, aims to better understand the impact of marketing stimuli by observing and interpreting human emotions. It includes contributions from leading researchers and practitioners, venturing beyond the tactics and strategies of neuromarketing to consider the ethical implications of applying powerful tools for data collection. The rationale behind neuromarketing is that human decision-making is not primarily a conscious process. Instead, there is increasing evidence that the willingness to buy products and services is an emotional process where the brain uses short cuts to accelerate the decision-making process. At the intersection of economics, neuroscience, consumer behavior, and cognitive psychology, neuromarketing focuses on which emotions are relevant in human decision-making, and uses this knowledge to make marketing more effective. The knowledge is applied in product design; enhancing promotions and advertising, pricing, professional services, and store design; and improving the consumer experience as a whole. The foundation for all of this activity is data gathering and analysis. Like many new processes and innovations, much of neuromarketing is operating far ahead of current governmental compliance and regulation and thus current practices are raising ethical issues. For example, facial recognition software, used to monitor and detect a wide range of micro-expressions, has been tested at several airports—under the guise of security and counterterrorism. To what extent is it acceptable to screen the entire population using these powerful and intrusive techniques without getting passengers’ consent? Citing numerous examples from the public and private sectors, the editors and contributing authors argue that while the United States has catalyzed technological advancements, European companies and governments are more progressive when it comes to defining ethical parameters and developing policies. This book details many of those efforts, and offers rational, constructive approaches to laying an ethical foundation for neuromarketing efforts.

Youth violence: Sources and solutions in South Africa thoroughly and carefully reviews the evidence for risk and protective factors that influence the likelihood of young people acting aggressively. Layers of understanding are built by viewing the problem from a multitude of perspectives, including the current situation in which South African youth are growing up, perspectives from developmental psychology, the influences of race, class and gender, and of the media. The book then reviews the evidence for effective interventions in the contexts of young people’s lives – their homes, their schools, their leisure activities, with gangs, in the criminal justice system, in cities and neighbourhoods, and with sexual offenders. In doing so, thoughtful suggestions are made for keeping an evidence-based perspective while (necessarily) adapting interventions for developing world contexts, such as South Africa. Youth violence in South Africa: Sources and solutions is a valuable addition to the library of anyone who has ever wondered about youth violence, or wanted to do something about it.

This books analyses the role of public opinion for generating genuine citizen demand for accountability, providing case studies from around the world to illustrate how public opinion forces governments to be accountable.

The Secret Team, L. Fletcher Prouty's CIA exposé, was first published in the 1970s, but virtually all copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, purchased en masse by shady "private buyers." Certainly Prouty's amazing allegations—that the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks, and that President Kennedy was assassinated to keep the U.S., and its defense budget, in Vietnam—cannot have pleased the CIA. Though suppressed (until now), The Secret Team was an important influence for Oliver Stone's Academy Award-winning film JFK and countless other works on U.S. government conspiracies, and it raises the same crucial question today that it did on its first appearance: who, in fact, is in control of the United States and the world?