The use of materials globally has increased over the past century and it will continue to grow with sustained population and economic growth. Such growth also leads to increased environmental pressures, including climate change. While the Slovak Republic has made notable progress in decoupling environmental pressures from economic activity, its economy remains energy-, carbon- and resource-intensive. The urgent need to steer the country towards circularity calls for a national circular economy strategy to help focus efforts where they are needed most. This report identifies and analyses three areas where circular economy policy would be particularly impactful: the use of economic instruments to promote sustainable consumption and production, the construction sector and the food and bio-waste value chain. It also proposes more than 30 concrete policy recommendations supported by an implementation plan and a monitoring framework. Implementing these recommendations can also help the Slovak economy reach its climate change mitigation objectives.
This is the third Environmental Performance Review of the Slovak Republic. It provides an evidence-based assessment of the country's progress towards its environmental goals over the past decade. The 29 recommendations aim to help Slovakia improve its environmental performance, giving special focus to biodiversity and forests in the context of climate change.
The Slovak economy has been relatively resilient to the energy crisis, but growth has slowed amid high inflation, weakening foreign demand and tightening financial conditions. The pandemic and the energy crisis have deteriorated public finances; steady fiscal consolidation is now needed to rebuild fiscal buffers and improve long-term fiscal sustainability in the face of rapid population ageing. Sustaining economic convergence and facilitating inclusive structural change requires improving skill provision at all stages of the learning cycle, fostering the domestic innovation capacity and improving the business environment.
This book is a collection of articles, written by both academics and practitioners as an evidence base for citizen engagement through information and communication technologies (ICTs). In it, the authors ask: how do ICTs empower through participation, transparency and accountability? Specifically, the authors examine two principal questions: Are technologies an accelerator to closing the “accountability gap” – the space between the supply (governments, service providers) and demand (citizens, communities, civil society organizations or CSOs) that requires bridging for open and collaborative governance? And under what conditions does this occur? The introductory chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for understanding the potential of technologies to achieving intended goals. Chapter 1 takes us through the theoretical linkages between empowerment, participation, transparency and accountability. In Chapter 2, the authors devise an informational capability framework, relating human abilities and well-being to the use of ICTs. The chapters to follow highlight practical examples that operationalize ICT-led initiatives. Chapter 3 reviews a sample of projects targeting the goals of transparency and accountability in governance to make preliminary conclusions around what evidence exists to date, and where to go from here. In chapter 4, the author reviews the process of interactive community mapping (ICM) with examples that support general local development and others that mitigate natural disasters. Chapter 5 examines crowdsourcing in fragile states to track aid flows, report on incitement or organize grassroots movements. In chapter 6, the author reviews Check My School (CMS), a community monitoring project in the Philippines designed to track the provision of services in public schools. Chapter 7 introduces four key ICT-led, citizen-governance initiatives in primary health care in Karnataka, India. Chapter 8 analyzes the World Bank Institute’s use of ICTs in expanding citizen project input to understand the extent to which technologies can either engender a new “feedback loop” or ameliorate a “broken loop”. The authors’ analysis of the evidence signals ICTs as an accelerator to closing the “accountability gap”. In Chapter 9, the authors conclude with the Loch Ness model to illustrate how technologies contribute to shrinking the gap, why the gap remains open in many cases, and what can be done to help close it. This collection is a critical addition to existing literature on ICTs and citizen engagement for two main reasons: first, it is expansive, covering initiatives that leverage a wide range of technology tools, from mobile phone reporting to crowdsourcing to interactive mapping; second, it is the first of its kind to offer concrete recommendations on how to close feedback loops.
This roadmap is designed to aid North Macedonia’s government in establishing a solid policy foundation for a successful transition to a circular economy.
This roadmap aims to assist the Albanian government in establishing robust policy foundations for a successful circular economy transition. Informed by a comprehensive diagnostic of Albania’s circular economy landscape, the roadmap strategically integrates existing policy initiatives, fostering synergies across sectors, measures and actors involved in this transformation.
During the breakup of the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe underwent transitions to democracy that involved varying degrees of struggle and turmoil. Czechoslovakia eventually split in two with the establishment of separate Czech and Slovak republics in 1993. Paul Hacker witnessed this transition firsthand from his vantage point as head of the U.S. Consulate in Bratislava. This is his story of U.S. diplomacy during this period, from the time the consulate was reestablished there in 1990 (after a forty-year hiatus during the Cold War) through the opening of the U.S. Embassy in 1993 after Slovakia had gained its independence. The memoir covers the volatile political intrigues and changes of the era, the administrative challenges of operating a small diplomatic outpost that was dependent on the embassy based in Prague (headed for much of this period by the high-profile U.S. ambassador Shirley Temple Black), tensions between Slovaks and Czechs and between the Slovak majority and its ethnic Hungarian minority population, the legacy of the Holocaust, and the developments that finally led to independence for Slovakia. In a final chapter, Hacker brings the story of Slovak postindependence political history up to the present, including Slovakia&’s accession to both NATO and the European Union.
"An eyewitness account by an American diplomat of the events that led up to Slovakia's independence in 1993. Includes an examination of Slovakia's post-independence development"--Provided by publisher.
This book presents several recent advances on Evolutionary Computation, specially evolution-based optimization methods and hybrid algorithms for several applications, from optimization and learning to pattern recognition and bioinformatics. This book also presents new algorithms based on several analogies and metafores, where one of them is based on philosophy, specifically on the philosophy of praxis and dialectics. In this book it is also presented interesting applications on bioinformatics, specially the use of particle swarms to discover gene expression patterns in DNA microarrays. Therefore, this book features representative work on the field of evolutionary computation and applied sciences. The intended audience is graduate, undergraduate, researchers, and anyone who wishes to become familiar with the latest research work on this field.
