Medium-Term Revenue Strategies as a Coordination Tool for DRM and Tax Capacity Building

This chapter investigates the introduction of Medium-Term Revenue Strategies (MTRS) in developing countries as part of technical assistance for tax capacity building. The MTRS concept was devised by the Platform for Collaboration on Tax and is supposed to be a holistic high-level roadmap for tax policy reform around which civil society and external aid donors can coordinate. Tax capacity building for domestic resource mobilization has become a crowded governance field over the last decade with multiple bilateral and multilateral partners involved, sometimes in the same country. While there have been multiple high-level coordination efforts, within-country coordination is still lacking. As such, we investigate the concept’s usefulness as a coordination tool for donors to ensure their assistance is matched with a country’s needs and preferences. We also critically examine the concept’s potential pitfalls and deficiencies in terms of scope and ambition, partners, and legitimacy. We conclude that if the MTRS is evaluated as it is intended, an additional tool in the larger toolbox of coordination in the tax capacity building regime, the concept holds promise but calls for close scrutiny to ensure that they are truly country-owned and country-specific roadmaps.

Towards BIM-Enhanced Renovation Management Tools with Support to Stakeholder Interaction

This paper presents two renovation management tools that are currently being developed in BIM4EEB project: BIMPlanner—a planning and management tool for housing renovation projects —and BIM4Occupants—a coordination tool between contractors and occupants. An information-sharing layer, based on ontologies and linked data technologies, is an essential technical enabler of these tools. The layer allows data sharing across the different components of the toolkit. The tools aim to enhance information sharing between renovation stakeholders and to enrich BIM data with links to other relevant data in renovation projects.

ANALISIS DINAMIKA PERMASALAHAN IMPLEMENTASI ANGGARAN PEMERINTAH DAERAH DI INDONESIA

The budgeting process is central to every administration be it the central government, local governments and the private sector because financial control is perhaps the most effective coordination tool. The scope and nature of government operations as a whole are determined by the allocations for the various programs. In fact, human nature has never been proven compared to when humans struggle to get a larger than usual share of the funds. This paper examines budgeting at the local government level, its preparation, problems and prospects. The study found that there was a wide gap between the budget plan and its implementation which resulted in the failure to fulfill political promises and the increasingly high expectations of society. The widespread dissatisfaction of the masses with the local government contributed greatly to the slow pace of local community development. This paper makes several recommendations that will reduce the incidence of budget deficits in the Government.

Fighting Fundamentalism with Pluralism

What role can social media play in helping to bring forth social revolutions, inciting change not in government or laws but in social attitudes and real world behaviors? Social change relates not only to regime change but to change in people’s way of thinking. In this chapter, I argue that social media during the Arab Spring was used as more than a mere coordination tool promoting efficient street demonstrations. Bloggers and Facebook users employed these technologies in many of the same ways that the printing press was employed during the Enlightenment period—to upend traditional authorities, to engender popular participation in debates over governance and values, and to foster care and empathy for fellow citizens. Contrary to popular perception, the Arab Spring demonstrates how today’s technological tools can go the next mile and transform not just politics but societies themselves. In the particular context of religious democracies, through examples, the chapter explores how nonstate actors are helping to influence constitutionalism and other lawmaking in Muslim majority states by using technologies to elaborate plural normative and legal options, thus undermining fundamentalist stranglehold on social and legal authority.

Package Sectoral Order as an Effective Tool for Managing Import Substitution, Development of New Technologies and Energy Modernization

Import substitution in the energy sector requires development in Russia of a group of new industries and modernization of existing capacities. That calls for integrating the structures of fundamental and applied science, education, power engineering production, energy generation and electricity transport in the framework of a complete innovation cycle. The key to the problem solution is forming an integrated mechanism for planning and management of scientific-research, power engineering and electric power segments as parts of a single technological chain of work and procurement from basic research to equipment disposal. The R&D result should be a package sectoral order for equipment and technologies — a new planning and coordination tool in the market environment of Russian energy and power engineering. It is proposed to build a new information control loop in the energy sector of Russia to form the basis of a package order within the industry in order to establish medium- and long-term scientific and technical planning for replacing retiring equipment, tracking contracts and monitoring results of their implementation.

Boundary Objects as a Learning Mechanism for Sustainable Development Goals—A Case Study of a Japanese Company in the Chemical Industry

This paper explores the role of boundary objects in the translation and transformation process of a sustainability concept—Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs)—into a firm’s business practices. The qualitative case study describes the experience where a Japanese company successfully implemented SDGs and generated product innovations through its learning process. The findings of the study identify four types of effective boundary objects: (1) organizational repository boundary objects, including historical contextualization and best practices; (2) a standardized form of boundary objects based on certification process of environmental sustainable products; (3) an ideal type of boundary objects through digital forum based learning platform; (4) a “powerful” community of practices that come across hierarchy and functions. This paper extends the literature by showing the interconnectedness of boundary objects, the possible negative side of technology based boundary objects, and the significance of community of practices as a monitoring and coordination tool to ensure the effective operation and measurement of sustainability.