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BackgroundThe Eastern Cape, one of South Africa’s most economically challenged provinces, continues to grapple with high unemployment, poverty and underdeveloped infrastructure. To address these persistent issues, local economic development agencies (LEDAs) have been established within municipal structures to promote sustainable economic growth. The efficacy of such LEDAs has been brought into question.AimThis study evaluates the efficacy of LEDAs in the Eastern Cape, drawing on findings from the 2023 Auditor-General’s Report.SettingThe research examines eight LEDAs operating across various municipalities in the Eastern Cape, each tasked with advancing local economic development and improving livelihoods in their communities.MethodsA content analysis of the 2023 Auditor-General’s Report was conducted, using secondary data from official sources. The analysis was guided by frameworks related to financial management, performance, governance and internal controls.ResultsThree findings emerged. Firstly, oversight was hindered by agency-related inefficiencies within the LEDAs. Secondly, weak internal structures and inadequate responses impeded effective performance. Thirdly, micro-level challenges within the agencies limited their ability to respond to broader environmental issues.ConclusionThe study highlights systemic weaknesses in the functioning of LEDAs in the Eastern Cape. Strengthening governance, financial controls and compliance mechanisms can enhance service delivery and improve performance management.ContributionThis research deepens understanding of the operational challenges facing LEDAs and offers practical recommendations to enhance their role in fostering local economic development and addressing the province’s socio-economic challenges.

In Development, Security, and Aid Jamey Essex offers a sophisticated study of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), examining the separate but intertwined discourses of geopolitics and geoeconomics. Geopolitics concentrates on territory, borders, and strategic political and military positioning within the international state system. Geoeconomics emphasizes economic power, growth, and connectedness within a global, and supposedly borderless, system. Both discourses have strongly influenced the strategies of USAID and the views of American policy makers, bureaucrats, and business leaders toward international development. Providing a unique geographical analysis of American development policy, Essex details USAID's establishment in 1961 and traces the agency's growth from the Cold War into an era of neoliberal globalization up to and beyond 9/11, the global war on terror, and the looming age of austerity. USAID promotes improvement for millions by providing emergency assistance and support for long-term economic and social development. Yet the agency's humanitarian efforts are strongly influenced, and often trumped, by its mandate to advance American foreign policies. As a site of, a strategy for, and an agent in the making of geopolitics and geoeconomics, USAID, Essex argues, has often struggled to reconcile its many institutional mandates and objectives. The agency has always occupied a precarious political position, one that is increasingly marked by the strong influence of military, corporate, and foreign-policy institutions in American development strategy.

\"Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Regional development agencies (RDA) are the units established for accelerating regional development and increasing local capacity. They aim at activating the regional dynamics and to reduce the intra-regional and inter-regional development gap. In a region, each province may have a different development level. This would pose a problem for socio-economic development. In order to reduce the disparities among the provinces, financial support mechanisms of development agencies would be a beneficial influence only if supports are used with to correct strategies. In order to play a vital role to reduce intra-regional disparities, it is necessary to consider many criteria to categorise settlements in terms of socio-economic development. Some of these criteria are generally subjective and extremely difficult to express in numbers. However, fuzzy sets are a great help to decision makers in a prioritisation of provinces for public grants allocation process with linguistic variables and measurement challenges. In this study, a new city-ranking model has been proposed for development agencies operating in Turkey. To address ambiguities and relativities in real-world scenarios more conveniently, type-2 fuzzy sets and crisp sets have been simultaneously used in multicriteria decision making (MCDM) process of grants allocation. To illustrate the proposed model better, an application with real case data has been performed in the Middle Black Sea Development Agency in Turkey.

A biography of Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative. Boot chronicles his rise and fall as a proponent of a visionary \"hearts and minds\" diplomacy in Vietnam who was ultimately overruled by the American military bureaucracy, which favored bombs and troop build-ups over winning the people's trust.

PurposeEntrepreneurial Ecosystems (EES) is among the fastest growing entrepreneurship research topics. With even greater vigour, the non-scientific world of economic development agencies, administrations and policymakers has adopted the construct and applies it widely “in the field”, often lacking a solid empirical foundation and pursuing sub-optimal approaches. Improving policy instruments for EES development requires a data driven approach to first understand an EES of a specific region before making any attempts to change it. The paper showcases an empirical approach to create empirically rooted EES policy implications, contributing to closing the gap for insight in regional EES data of sub-national regions.Design/methodology/approachExploring a mixed method design, utilising quantitative Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data and combining it with EES stakeholder interviews, focusing on dysfunctions, redundancies, power asymmetries and cut off elements as well as in-layer division and public organisation behaviour.FindingsOne finding is, that regional economic development agencies (EDA), as a main public instrument to foster regional entrepreneurial activity, seem to bring the potential of a negative impact on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems bottom-up development and the ability to become self-sustained if they assume the role of competitors towards private organisations and businesses.Research limitations/implicationsAs other work on EES, the approach used in this paper only sub-optimally covers temporal system dynamics.Practical implicationsThis paper contributes to future EES support policies being rooted in an empirical foundation.Originality/valueThis paper not only progresses the empirical basis for research on regional EES but also lays the foundation for specific policy implications for a sub-national level entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Under the influence of globalization and the European Union membership accession process, important administrative reform initiatives have been taken in Turkey in the 2000s in the framework of economic, social, political, cultural and technological needs. In this process, central government agencies and administrations, public financial management, local governments and similar public organizations have undergone important transitions. The most important initiative taken to achieve regional governance is the establishment of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). The present study performs a 10-year longitudinal analysis of RDAs in Turkey in the context of governance and local elites. The first phase of the study was conducted in 2010, and the second phase was conducted in 2019. The aim of the study is to evaluate whether RDAs have realized their potential in local democracy, sustainable development and decentralization, as well as to define the characteristics of policies to be pursued in line with further development of these agencies. Consequently, it has been observed that maintaining a centralized state tradition, along with institutional deficiencies, has transformed RDAs into an apparatus of the central government. Pod vplivom globalizacije in pristopnega procesa za članstvo v Evropski uniji so bile v Turčiji v obdobju 2000-2010 sprejete pobude za upravno reformo v okviru gospodarskih, socialnih, političnih, kulturnih in tehnoloških potreb. V tem procesu so centralne vladne agencije in uprave, upravljanje javnih financ, lokalne vlade in podobne javne organizacije doživele pomembne prehode. Najpomembnejša pobuda, sprejeta za dosego regionalnega upravljanja, je bila ustanovitev regionalnih razvojnih agencij. V tej študiji smo izvedli 10-letno longitudinalno analizo regionalnih razvojnih agencij v Turčiji v kontekstu upravljanja in lokalnih elit za obdobje. Prva faza študije je bila opravljena leta 2010 in druga v letu 2019. Cilj študije je bil oceniti, ali so regionalne razvojne agencije uresničile svoj potencial na področju lokalne demokracije, trajnostnega razvoja in decentralizacije, ter opredeliti karakteristike politik, ki jih je treba izvajati v skladu z nadaljnjim razvojem teh agencij. Posledično smo ugotovili, da je ohranjanje tradicije centralizirane države, skupaj z institucionalnimi pomanjkljivostmi, preoblikovalo regionalne razvojne agencije v aparat centralne oblasti.

Objectives Evidence-based decision making (EBDM) allows public health practitioners to implement effective programs and policies fitting the preferences of their communities. To engage in EBDM, practitioners must have skills themselves, their agencies must engage in administrative evidence-based practices (A-EBPs), and leaders must encourage the use of EBDM. We conducted this longitudinal study to quantify perceptions of individual EBDM skills and A-EBPs, as well as the longitudinal associations between the 2. Methods An online survey completed among US state health department practitioners in 2016 and 2018 assessed perceptions of respondents’ skills in EBDM and A-EBPs. We used χ2 tests, t tests, and linear regressions to quantify changes over time, differences by demographic characteristics, and longitudinal associations between individual skills and A-EBPs among respondents who completed both surveys (N = 336). Results Means of most individual EBDM skills and A-EBPs did not change significantly from 2016 to 2018. We found significant positive associations between changes in A-EBPs and changes in EBDM skill gaps: for example, a 1-point increase in the relationships and partnerships score was associated with a narrowing of the EBDM skill gap (β estimate = 0.38; 95% CI, 0.15-0.61). At both time points, perceived skills and A-EBPs related to financial practices were low. Conclusions Findings from this study can guide the development and dissemination of initiatives designed to simultaneously improve individual and organizational capacity for EBDM in public health settings. Future studies should focus on types of strategies most effective to build capacity in particular types of agencies and practitioners, to ultimately improve public health practice.