Given the pressures of integration and assimilation, how are people within communities able to make decisions about their own environment, whether individually or collectively? Governing Ourselves? explores issues of influence and power within local institutions and decision-making processes using numerous illustrations from municipalities across Canada. It shows how communities large and small, from Toronto to Iqaluit, have distinctive political cultures and therefore respond differently to changing global and domestic environments. Case studies illuminate historical and contemporary challenges to local governance. This book covers topics including government structures and institutions and intergovernmental relations and reaches more broadly into geography, urban planning, environmental studies, public administration, and sociology.
Sustainable Self-Governance in Businesses and Society offers a sound introduction to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and clarifies its relevance to support organisational sustainability and self-governance. While the VSM has been known since the early 1980s, it hasn’t been always easy to understand and to apply. It explains the self-transformation methodology to analyse the way organisations manage (or not) their complexity and govern themselves. The work is supported by multiple examples of application in organisations of all scales – from small to multi-national corporations and from organised social networks to communities and national organisations. It clarifies the relevance of Beer’s theory to support systemic learning and change in organisations, and to coach them to self-organise and self-govern. Readers interested in further understanding insights from complex systems and cybernetics theories for designing and transforming organisations will benefit from this book, as it works to offer very detailed insights on how to put the VSM theory into practice. It clarifies how it improves adaptive capabilities, agile and self-regulated structures, more capable of fully implementing corporate sustainability strategies and self-governing themselves. The chapters provide key reading for managers, consultants, practitioners, and post-graduate students working in organisational transformation, governance, and sustainability.
Globally, far too many discussions about Indigenous governance and development are dominated by accounts of disadvantage, deficit and failure. This book paints a different international picture, testifying to Indigenous peoples as agents of governance innovation and successful developers in their own right, telling stories in their words, from their own experiences and countries. From Indigenous voices, we hear alternative concepts and measures of effectiveness, legitimacy, success and sustainability. Indigenous stories and voices are captured as case study chapters, written in lively, clear language about what is happening that is promising and productive in Indigenous self-determined governance for self-determined development in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the USA; all English colonial–settler countries.
The governance of education in many countries and regions of the world is currently in transition, challenging histories, remaking subjectivities and shaping possible futures. This book provides an up to date analysis and discussion of the cutting edge theme of educational governance from an international comparative perspective. The volume explores the landscape of educational governance in its broadest sense; considering new forms of steering, leadership and management, assessment and evaluation, teaching and learning, knowledge creation and the realities and possibilities for different forms of political engagement. The new spatial dynamics of education are explored in institutional settings such as schools and universities and via professional groupings such as teachers, administrators and leaders. The chapters in this book are based on the best peer reviewed papers and keynote speeches, which were delivered at the XXVI Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) in June 2014 in Freiburg, Germany. Comparative Education is uniquely situated to explore the emerging dynamics of educational governance within changing and newly emerging educational spaces because it provides the opportunity to learn more about different local, national or regional educational processes and trajectories and to share knowledge about the logics, ideologies and impacts of different techniques and regimes of governance across Europe and beyond. Hans-Georg Kotthoff is Professor of Comparative Education and School Pedagogy at the University of Education Freiburg, Germany, and President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) since 2012. Eleftherios Klerides is Lecturer in Comparative Education and History of Education at the University of Cyprus and the Secretary-Treasurer of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE).
Leviathan invests the sovereign with nearly absolute power, and that vast sovereign has drawn the reader's eye for 350 years. Yet Hobbes has much to say about subjects as well, and he articulates a normative conception of a good subject.
At a time when the Métis are becoming increasingly visible in Canadian politics, this unique book offers a practical guide for understanding who they are, how they govern themselves, and the challenges they face on the path to self-government. The Métis have always been a political people. Kelly Saunders and Janique Dubois draw on interviews with elders, leaders, and community members to reveal how the Métis are giving life to Louis Riel’s vision of a self-governing Métis Nation within Canada. They look to the Métis language – Michif – to identify Métis principles of governance that emerged during the fur trade and that continue to shape Métis governing structures. Both then and now, the Métis have engaged in political action to negotiate their place alongside federal and provincial partners in Confederation. As Canada engages in nation-to-nation relationships to advance reconciliation, this book provides timely insight into the Métis Nation’s ongoing struggle to remain a free and self-governing Indigenous people.
Today, our personal and emotional lives have become the object and target of psychologists, therapists and other professionals. This book examines the birth of these engineers of the human soul' and their influence upon our society.
SIM book is not for everyone, but its a packaged combination of great insights, words of encouragement, and action plans for those existing or potential entrepreneurs, business leaders and managers, all kinds of professionals, youths, adults, parents, and spiritual persons wholl want to fulfill their purpose in life and leave behind a legacy that can live beyond them. Its almost impossible for anyone to achieve anything without knowing who they are, where they are, and what they need to do in order to achieve any of their lifes goals. Many of these facts are elicited in the SIM book, and the principles outlined, if implemented and managed properly, can turn a mediocre life into a successful and fulfilling one.
Recent nature conservation initiatives in Southern Africa such as communal conservancies and peace parks are often embedded in narratives of economic development and ecological research. They are also increasingly marked by militarisation and violence. In Ruling Nature, Controlling People, Luregn Lenggenhager shows that these features were also characteristic of South African rule over the Caprivi Strip region in North-Eastern Namibia, especially in the fields of forestry, fisheries and, ultimately, wildlife conservation. In the process, the increasingly internationalised war in the region from the late 1960s until Namibias independence in 1990 became intricately interlinked with contemporary nature conservation, ecology and economic development projects. By retracing such interdependencies, Lenggenhager provides a novel perspective from which to examine the history of a region which has until now barely entered the focus of historical research. He thereby highlights the enduring relevance of the supposedly peripheral Caprivi and its military, scientific and environmental histories for efforts to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which apartheid South Africa exerted state power.
