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There is a serious problem of the right to access to adequate housing in South Africa particularly by the indigents and the vulnerable in the society. This paper examined the efficacy and efficiency of the transformative interventions that have been progressively introduced to realize the right to access to adequate housing in South Africa. Methodologically, secondary data such as the Constitution, legislation, case law and relevant scholarly literature were broadly consulted, utilized and applied to explore these interventions in addressing the inherent problem of lack of access to adequate housing constitutionally mandated in South Africa. This approach is in line with the qualitative research method. The study found that those who have been saddled with the responsibility to provide and deliver adequate housing to the needy have dismally failed and most of them escaped accountability hence culture of impunity thrived broadly.

This volume provides an analytical framework and operational approaches needed for the implementation of results-based accountability. The volume makes a major contribution to the literature on public management and evaluation. Major subject areas covered in this book include: performance based accountability, e-government, legal and institutional framework to hold government to account; fighting corruption; external accountability and the role of supreme audit institutions on detecting fraud and corruption.

This document assesses the quality of financial accountability and transparency in Bangladesh, and makes recommendations for improvement. With respect to public funds, it compares the financial management standards, and practices of agencies using such funds against and international, or \" best practice \" standard, and also the standards, and practices of the external \" oversight \" agencies - nine Audit Directorates of the Comptroller and Auditor General ' s Office, parliamentary committees concerned with public expenditure, donor agencies, and the media. It assesses what it would take to qualify the country for programmatic, or sector lending in replacement of all individual project lending. With respect to private funds in the hands of companies, commercial banks, insurance companies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), it examines the regulatory activities of the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the two Stock Exchanges, Bangladesh Bank, NGO Affairs Bureau, and the accounting and auditing profession that serves both public, and private sectors.

Corruption is a multidimensional phenomenon that rears its head in many places. For this reason, it is difficult and challenging to assess how well a country is doing in addressing it. This title provides guidance to practitioners and policymakers in the design of anticorruption reforms.

This report sets out the principal aspects of civil service reform that were discussed at a workshop for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund staff on September 2, 2001. The objective of the workshop was to strengthen collaboration between the Bank and the Fund in order to achieve greater effectiveness in Bank- and Fund-supported programs in this area. The workshop concluded that strengthened collaboration between the Bank and the Fund should ensure consistency between the sometimes-conflicting goals of short-term fiscal discipline and longer-term structural reforms supported by Fund and Bank programs. After the introduction, section 2 presents an overview of the major objectives of civil service reform, highlighting some of the core macrofiscal and structural perspectives. Section 3 follows, and highlights recent Bank- and Fund-supported programs that address civil service reform. Section 4 considers the effectiveness of Bank and Fund interventions, noting the intrinsic tensions between reform objectives and the politically challenging nature of civil service reforms. Section 5 considers how the two organizations have worked, both individually and in tandem. This section also offers conclusions and proposals for improving the effectiveness of Bank-Fund interventions in civil service reform.

The interrelationality of health and peace is complex, multifactorial, and imbued with political and economic challenges. Peace and health outcomes reflect shared fundamental values related to the achievement of a balanced holistic condition on the individual and collective level. This causal relationship between social inequity and health requires special attention be paid to the impact of political instability and structural violence on undermining health systems in conflict zones. The mutual dependency between peace and health means that peace cannot be achieved without the existence of physical, mental, social, and spiritual health, and holistic health cannot be sustained under violent conditions. The interrelationality of peace and health as mutual conditions shapes our understanding of global solidarity and advocacy in relation to health diplomacy and peace promotion if addressed equally across all conflict zones. This commentary analyzes the unique interdisciplinary contextual factors that contribute to, or undermine the realization of global health and peace in three active conflict zones: Palestine, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Contextual analysis, review of the evidence, and synthesis of the authors' perspectives were used. The health-peace nexus remains a theoretical approach and lacks real application in most settings under crisis. Peace is a multifaceted phenomenon that necessitates the participation, dedication, and action of all sectors and stakeholders in global societies, including health policymakers, scientists, professionals, and people. Both the \"right to health\" and the \"right to peace\" even at the minimum remains unfulfilled, particularly in Palestine, and can be realized through two trajectories: (1) honest, responsible, and fair accountability, transparency, and political commitment empowered by reliable global health diplomacy for maintaining peace, eliminating the roots of injustice, and protecting health systems, and (2) equitable and real implementation of peace-health approaches, policies and actions driven by monitoring mechanisms that promote health, well-being, health security and equity for all nations under conflicts.

In academic publishing, stings appear to be on the rise. Stings may involve a paper with nonsense or fabricated content, fictitious authors or affiliations, and may be supported by artificially created emails or ORCID accounts, the latter to offer a false impression of validation. In recent times, stings have been used to protest editorial policies or to challenge claims of peer review, with the objective of exposing flawed policies and procedures. While some hail stings as success stories in exposing poor editorial policies and publication flaws, and while others draw humor from them, very few academics have suprisingly assessed the ethics (or lack thereof) and/or criminality of such operations. Consequently, it is rare to find academic papers that are critical of such stings from an ethical and/or criminal perspective. An equally surprising fact is that ethics-promoting organizations (COPE, ICMJE, CSE), which have ethics guidelines for paper submission to a wide swathe of academic and scholarly journals and publishers, do not have ethics clauses specifically calling out sting operations, even though several of their stated ethics guidelines consider fake, false or falsified elements in an academic paper to be unethical. In this paper, some reflection on broad ethical, humor-related and possible criminal elements of sting operations in academic publishing are considered. In addition, the COPE, ICMJE and CSE ethics guidelines were scrutinized to identify any clauses that could support the argument that stings in academic publishing are unethical.

El presente trabajo muestra parte de los resultados de un proyecto de investigación realizado para identificar las tensiones y los puntos de encuentro entre las instituciones estatales de transparencia, fiscalización y asignación de recursos y sus instrumentos (plataforma para el gobierno abierto, portales de internet, reglas de operación, etc.) con las instituciones y procedimientos comunitarios. El estudio se efectúo en 12 comunidades indígenas de distintos pueblos y regiones del estado de Oaxaca, México. La revisión de los mecanismos de participación ciudadana y de la eficacia de los mecanismos estatales y comunitarios permitió observar hasta dónde, unos y otros, favorecen u obstaculizan la rendición de cuentas; así como la necesidad de una visión intercultural para el diálogo entre comunidades e instituciones estatales. En ese contexto, se revisaron experiencias de “contraloría comunitaria”, poniendo énfasis en los mecanismos exitosos al estar basados en normas locales dotadas de un alto nivel de legitimidad, pero también apuntando sus limitaciones. Entre los hallazgos obtenidos se encuentran la alta capacidad de las instituciones de las comunidades indígenas para garantizar la rendición de cuentas, así como la falta de pertinencia cultural de las instituciones del Estado mexicano para reconocer esos mecanismos y establecer esquemas de coordinación para coadyuvar en ese objetivo y los problemas que se generan debido a los desfases entre estos dos ámbitos.

This report presents the findings of a study of functions carried out by Central Finance Agencies (CFAs) that was financed jointly by the Bank Netherlands Partnership Program (BNPP), the Korean Trust Fund (KTF) and the World Bank over a three-year period from July 2008 to mid-2011. CFAs are not a single organization or entity of government but a group of ministries and agencies, of which the ministry of finance (MoF) is normally the most prominent, with collective responsibility for the design and implementation of a country's vast array of financial and fiscal policies and operations. Such policies and operations include macro fiscal analysis and forecasting, budget preparation and execution, accounting and reporting, cash and debt management, fiscal risk analysis, public procurement, tax policy and customs/revenue administration, and the regulation of financial institutions. In most developing countries, the role of CFAs is the public resources nexus of all issues with a political economy dimension. The allocation of roles and responsibilities for central finance functions among the finance ministry itself and other government agencies varies substantially from country to country. Chapter one of the reports defines the concept of a CFA-which is the array of government organizations (including notably the finance ministry) that carry out 16 core finance functions of government (budget preparation and execution, tax policy and revenue administration, procurement, and so on), that are central to the management of public finances. Chapter two summarizes the main issues and themes arising from the case studies. Substantial progress was made in identifying institutional factors that affect the capabilities of CFAs, including their organizational structures, linkages with stakeholders, availability and use of staff with appropriate skills in economics, accountancy and finance. Chapter three describes the CFA database and the questionnaire that was used by Country Management Units (CMUs) and others in compiling it. Chapter four presents the main conclusions and operational implications of the study. 'Political economy' analysis is not only important but fundamental to successful strengthening of CFAs.

'Cities in a Globalizing World' stresses that quality of governance can determine whether the burgeoning cities of the developing world can become global centers of opportunity or urban examples of over crowding and underachievement.