Valongo Wharf

Despite the absence of a law on cross-border cooperation in the Slovak Republic, it can be concluded that the existing legal frameworks in Slovakia and Ukraine provide sufficient and diverse formal opportunities for cooperation between regional and local authorities on both sides of the border. At the beginning of the 90s of the 20th century, real self-governing structures, the business environment, and the non-governmental sector were just starting to take shape, and the relations between the then-new states of Slovakia (founded in 1993) and Ukraine (founded in 1991) were just being formed anew. The legislative environment was gradually formed. From this period, if we do not count legislative frameworks at national levels, almost the only formal evidence of cooperation between regional and local actors on both sides of the border is official documents on international partnerships of cities and municipalities. Of course, cooperation existed, especially in areas where it still works. In the field of culture, sports, tourism, education, and possibly also other, but practical matters, for example, related to transport connections or trade. We believe that, given the circumstances, the intensity of cooperation was at a lower level than at present. The paper deals with mapping international partnerships of local and regional public administration bodies in the Prešov and Košice regions with partners in Ukraine, from 1993 until now. The text deals with the legislative and institutional framework for the cooperation of local and regional actors across the border. Part of the article is also an overview of the contractual relations between the examined local and regional public administration bodies. The paper also offers political considerations and recommendations for the further development of the investigated relations. The paper also includes an interpretation of the results of the author‘s survey and the sociological survey carried out for the SIBSU project. Key words: public administration, international partnerships, local and regional authorities, Slovakia, Ukraine

Komodo National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site which holds significant ecological, cultural, and social value. This research examines the implementation of global governance in managing the park, focusing on coordination among international, national, and local actors. This research uses qualitative descriptive methods, including literature review and document analysis. The research highlights the complex coordination between the Indonesian government, international organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and UNESCO, and local communities. The approaches of governance involve species conservation in the Komodo Islands, rehabilitation of vital habitats, and sustainable tourism development. Advanced technologies such as satellite and drone surveillance are used to monitor illegal activities and ecosystem health. The biggest challenge in managing Komodo National Park lies in balancing conservation efforts with tourism-based economic development. To address this, a zonation approach and putting in place programs to train the locals in ecotourism would be one way forward. This research evaluates how sustainable coordination, integrated approaches, and stakeholder collaboration contribute to preserving the park’s universal value.

World Heritage (WH) sites are areas for international conservation of nature and culture with outstanding universal values. The Nordic countries possess two large landscapes with WH recognition that serve as a base for this study, the WH Laponia and the WH High Coast/Kvarken Archipelago. The WH Laponia in Sweden combines both cultural and natural value; the Norwegian area of Laponia is not designated WH, but represents an area with governmental ambitions to become an UNESCO WH site. The WH High Coast/Kvarken Archipelago (Sweden/Finland) is a serial-nominated, transnational WH site designated purely on nature merits. Within these WH sites, there are local communities and indigenous peoples with democratic rights who participate in the management of the areas and use the local resources of their natural environment.This article analyses the processes of WH nomination and implementation of the WH Convention (1972) in the Nordic countries. It also depicts a strong Nordic tradition of transnational learning (TNL) which is also used within WH governance. The article uses comparative methods and theories of governance, co-management, transnational governance and TNL in the analysis of the transboundary WH sites. The empirical results illustrate the challenges of local democratic participation in the national and transnational decision-making regarding nomination and implementation of the WH Convention. It suggests that deficiency of democratic participation during early stages in pre-WH designation processes may be compensated by TNL. Learning between and within WH-related networks and groups, show in the Nordic perspective examples of incorporating WH stakeholders in cooperation across national borders. TNL may be restricted by cultural and legal limitations.

The conceptual ambiguity and abstractness of legally defined lived culture have been critically discussed, while various policy studies and programs are implemented in South Korea. However, there have been fewer studies paying attention to empirically examining a constructed understanding of lived culture based on the perceptions of local cultural policy actors.
 This study classifies and characterizes local cultural policy actors’ perceptions of lived culture by identifying four major elements that construct the concept of lived culture in the context of cultural policy and applying latent profile analysis. The local cultural policy actors in this study refer to those who were engaged in mediating and supporting local residents’ grassroots creative activities in the city of Busan, including public officials, arts administrators, librarians, curators, artists, and activists.
 The analysis uncovers five latent profiles, which can be labeled as ‘higher group’, ‘medium group’, ‘lower group’, ‘social-impact-centered group’, and ‘cultural democracy-centered group’.
 It also confirms that each group is affected by the length of employment status, related work experience, and the types of affiliated organization. Based on the findings, this study argues for the need of training for local cultural policy actors to improve their conceptual understanding of lived culture in a broad sense and emphasizes to generate national-level statistical data on a regular basis. This can contribute to enhancing the local actors’ policy implementation capacities and establishing a foundation to operationally define the concept of lived culture at the on-the-ground-level.

In this chapter, the first German nomination for the World Heritage List is analyzed: Aachen Cathedral. In 1978, this originally Carolingian church was the first heritage site in Europe to be placed on the World Heritage List. This chapter particularly focuses on the changing meaning of Aachen Cathedral. In the second half of the nineteenth century, during the Wilhelmian period and under the Nazi regime, the cathedral had mainly a national significance. After the Second World War, the image of the German past in general changes, and so did the meaning of Aachen Cathedral. Under the postwar Christian Democrat governments, an international narrative of the German past was created. Charlemagne—the founder of Aachen Cathedral—played an important role in this new narrative as one of the alleged founders of the European ideal. This new view on Germany’s history helped the country to deal with its traumatic national past and to provide the new European ideals with an imaged precedent. In 1978, this denationalization process was symbolically concluded with the inclusion of the cathedral to World Heritage list. The chapter points to the lack of detailed procedural guidelines for the nomination of World Heritage in these early years. The nomination of Aachen Cathedral was an initiative of national and local actors with relative freedom to act. The chapter also shows that local actors made frequent use of the new World Heritage status. Aachen presented itself more and more as a European city and local administrators successfully tried to raise money internationally for the restoration of the church.

Why is it important for women to hold leadership positions in organizations? If it is important for women to hold leadership positions in organizations, how do women get into such positions? Both public administration research and organizational research provide answers to these questions. However, the integration of these two bodies of literature remains limited. This study joins public administration scholarship on representative bureaucracy and management scholarship on women in leadership to hypothesize and test institutional, organizational, and political explanations for women’s attainment of leadership positions together in one model. This study uses a new panel dataset to examine how women get into upper-level leadership positions in 12 federal regulatory organizations over more than 20 years of time. If promoting equity is one rationale for government regulation, studying the representation of women in leadership in this setting is important. Yet, recent work in this area is limited. The data suggests that women are more likely to gain access to leadership positions when the dominant political ideology in government is democrat and in agencies that work in feminine policy contexts, are younger, and where the risk of failure is higher.

Municipal consolidation is one of the policies employed to overcome the problems resulting from fragmented political structure in metropolitan regions. Although this policy has technical roots in theory, such as increasing efficiency and effectiveness, it has a political background in practice because boundary changes redefine the distribution of political sources. Consequently, local political actors, in relation with national political actors especially in such countries as Turkey, where there is a strong political connection between national and local political structure due to its unitary system, attempt to shape this redefinition process to maximize their self-interest. The consolidation process, thus, becomes a power struggle between politicians. In addition, local governments are the most obvious performance arena for central governments; therefore, they are indispensable. The primary aim of this study is to show how local political actors attempt to shape this redefinition process to take full advantage of new boundaries. Local political actors attempt to join the winning side, or at least to not to be on the losing side, by taking different positions in the debate. In these matters, losing or winning covers all types of capital, including economic, political, and social. This perception of losing and winning includes not only facts but also expectations. Accordingly, all local actors attempt to redefine or strengthen their positions in the political arena.

Baloche is a language with a rich literary history, it has never enjoyed much academic exposure, particularly in the field of translation (Jahani, 2013). This paper purposes the matter of translation in pragmatic formation of meaning in the Balochi Literature and the correlation of the dynamics of linguistic equivalency and cross-cultural mediation. It is intended to discuss the role of translation in preserving the Balochi language and cultural heritage based on the critical review of a poetry book, Akbar Barakzai, translated into English by Fazal Baloch (2023). It is based on a qualitative methodology and explores the interaction of translation techniques with the social discourses of identity, culture, and resistance in consideration of the theory of Dijk ‘language and power’. The content-analysis however focuses on re-construction of the thematic expression of language, culture, and identity in English translation by Barakzai in his poems. The paper underlines the importance of the role of translators as linguistic activists and cultural mediators who have to compromise in terms of accessibility to the global reader and fidelity to the original texts. It is suggested by the results that not only does translate Balochi poetry help preserve literature, but it is also used as a practical tool to undermine dominant linguistic ideologies and bring Balochi voices to a broader community. Translation helps preserve linguistic diversity, amplifies marginalized voices, and fosters intercultural understanding, making it vital in today’s multilingual, multicultural world. This research explores translation's role in preserving Balochi language, culture, and identity by translating its literature into English.

There are a number of ways to encounter the memory of slavery in Brazil. So many traces of slavery's legacy are present in social relationships and ways of thinking—both in practices and in things, whether in institutions, public places, or our everyday workplaces—that they become invisible. The same can be said for the South Atlantic, where the presence of slavery's past, while easily visible, is also completely hidden. Ana Lucia Araujo's edited volume African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World points out exactly this.A fundamental question that runs through this timely book regards the legitimacy of the various narratives about slavery. After all, who actually wrote the stories of slavery, given that enslaved people and their immediate descendants only very rarely left written accounts about their experiences? Giving voice to enslaved people and their immediate descendants through diverse sources and sites is one of the challenges of the volume, a collection that aims to problematize an imagined African heritage in Brazil. This heritage is claimed as a mark of identity, expressed in both practices and materiality. Traces and strategies to conceal and display become the memory of slavery, memory here thought of as a present-day work and also a right, as something that can help heal wounds and overcome trauma. These memories can be contradictory, ambiguous, and selective, according to the subjects who construct them.The field of research on slavery in Brazil and the transatlantic African slave trade was renewed with the incorporation of studies that consider the legacy of slavery. This volume is a valuable contribution to debates that were initiated in past studies of memory and heritage, and it suggests a path for reformulating theoretical problems around sensitive pasts, forgiveness, and reparations. The public memory of slavery is the common thread that links the chapters and gives a unifying theme to the book, which is characterized by a wide range of perspectives, subjects, sources, themes, and experiences. The volume also incorporates different research techniques, including ethnography, a focus on the longue durée, oral history, and document research in archives and museums. Photography, prints, urban space, textual documentation, propaganda leaflets, objects and collections, displays, ritual practices, festivals and celebrations, depositions, and testimonies make up the robust empirical material gathered here. The themes, temporalities, and subjects discussed in these essays are not meant to offer answers to the meanings and destiny of this African heritage imagined in Brazil but rather to highlight the many ways in which it gets defined and transformed.The circulation of objects, ideas, and people that simultaneously spread values and prejudices is explored in photographs of Afro-Brazilians and prints of public punishment and martyrdom, works that consecrated concepts of race and beauty and disseminated moral values under the aegis of European civilization. We also see the relations between colonialism, patrimonialization, and decolonization in chapters that discuss museum exhibits as privileged sites for the production of public memories. The disparity between individual memories and public memory in Angola puts face-to-face both the historical and contemporary concepts of slavery. In another chapter, the biography of objects provides a methodological approach that breaks with the aesthetic and ahistorical gaze that had assured African art a place in the showcases of the great museums of colonialism.Urban space is also explored as a site of dispute in the production of public memories. Wars over memory and controversies over what to remember and what to forget—as well as the subjects of these debates—are analyzed in the context of areas devoted to cultural heritage in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Luanda. As some authors of this volume problematize the imagined African heritage as the memory of slavery and the African diaspora in Brazil or Angola, the reader is called to acknowledge that the right to memory involves the political struggle for the right to the city.Although academic language prevails throughout the volume, some chapters may appeal to a wider audience interested in reflecting on African heritage in Brazil and its global context. A controversy about the ambivalence of the gaze—particularly concerning the violence of slavery—runs through the work and divides the authors. The volume poses questions about who decides how to represent violence in the narratives of slavery, and according to what evidence (or lack of evidence). Does explicitness about this violence empower the aggressor? Does it terrorize the victim? Does it lead to anachronistic readings? Is it a case of private memories being exposed to the public? The volume expects its readers to feel mobilized to take a position on this issue. As Marc Bloch has already shown, history is imprinted on the landscape. It is our job to forge the tools to interpret these marks. Undoubtedly, this book contributes to that project.

This article has as objective to present the relation between the current phenomenon of the corporate social responsibility and its relation with the State in the promotion of social policies. We have as example, some cases in Brazil, where the State starts to encourage companies to make social private investment. This is a new way of public administration that praises the co‐responsibility and corporate solidarity with the social development of the country.

Este artigo analisa as políticas públicas de infraestrutura do setor elétrico no período de 2003 a 2010 quando as duas gestões presidenciais no Brasil estiveram a cargo de Luís Inácio Lula da Silva do Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT. A análise de políticas públicas é utilizada como instrumental teórico e metodológico para interpretar as opções teóricas orientadoras e o método de implantação da política energética contemporânea no Brasil. Neste sentido discute-se a trajetória histórica da produção energética brasileira, destacando a herança dos governos militares, bem como a mudança / reforma do papel do Estado empreendido a partir da redemocratização e, principalmente, pela mão dos governos Collor/Itamar (1990–1994) e FHC (1995-2002). O problema de pesquisa investiga a configuração do modelo energético brasileiro a partir de uma gestão federal comandada por um partido político de centro esquerda constituído fortemente vinculado aos movimentos sociais e sindicais críticos das relações de produção capitalista. As conclusões indicam que as políticas públicas de infraestrutura e do setor elétrico no governo Lula não rompem com a perspectiva reformista do Estado, aprofundando sua materialização em razão da necessidade de manter a credibilidade externa e a governabilidade interna.

In response to a renewed focus on multi‐employer bargaining in policy recommendations and policymaking, this article analyses and discusses coordination in the Danish multi‐employer bargaining system. Focusing on two main dimensions of coordination – horizontal, between various key actors at a centralized national level, and vertical, between national and local actors – I find that several interwoven processes of coordination strengthen the multi‐employer bargaining system, offering potential benefits for both employers and employees. However, it takes considerable resources to be part of a highly coordinated multi‐employer bargaining system and to harvest the benefits. Accordingly, various capacities among key actors are decisive for a well‐functioning multi‐employer bargaining system.

Stakeholder analysis combined with social network analysis provides fine-grained insights into water infrastructure planning processes

‘Localisation’ became the new buzzword after the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. However, the nature of the commitment to localisation since has been questioned. What is ‘the local’? How does localisation work in practice? With little empirical research, generalities in theory and practice have prevailed, preventing a nuanced approach to conceptualising the local. This study aims to build a foundation for the understanding of connotative, nuanced ‘locals’ and to explore the multiple dimensions of the local in both theory and practice. The methodology of a case study research, with a semi-structured and flexible approach, facilitated the identification of different elements of a locally led response that resounded in each of the cases. Combined with a literature review, this article aims to answer the questions: What underlying assumptions regarding the local are found in localisation rhetoric, and how do multi-local dynamics challenge locally led disaster response in practice? Answering this question necessitates deconstructing the multi-local in theory and critically examining expressions concerning the local in practice. In this study, one dimension of the local that was observed was ‘the local as locale,’ with the local describing primarily national actors as opposed to the international, without taking local power dynamics into account. The local was also seen in terms of governance, where local–national relations and intranational strife characterised locally led responses, and the national focus excluded local actors who were not usually involved in governance. The local also became a source of legitimation, with local, national and international actors all using the discourse of ‘the state in charge’ and ‘the community knows best’ to legitimise their own role as response actors while disputing others’ capacities. The multi-local lens provides a perspective with potential to change current practices and contribute to a more transformative agenda.

The World Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), USAID and the International Relief/Development Project (IRDP) concluded in different reports that participatory development programs are invariably more effective at addressing local needs and interventions are more often sustained given the engagement of local actors. The main objective of this paper is to present a detailed appraisal of the implementation process of a well-known participatory approach (the UNDP-designed Area-Based Development - ABD) in the challenging context of a rural, cross-border area (in the Western Balkans). Besides reviewing the theoretical and empirical advantages of participatory and endogenous development, this case study reflects the practical shortcomings related to the selection process of a target area and to obtaining commitment from different agents in a post-conflict zone. This article also highlights that adequate implementation of participatory practices is crucial to obtain accurate quantitative and qualitative data (to guide the development agenda) and secure the involvement of both local and (inter)national actors. The latter is an important factor in fostering long-term engagement to development strategies and the achievement of results that are relevant for the local community and in harmony with national policies and international agreements.