Search Results (835)

The rule of law, a foundational value of the European Union as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, faces challenges in implementation due to historical and political factors that have evolved over the past decade, particularly within Member States in the administrative domain. While institutional backsliding in countries like Hungary and Poland has drawn significant political attention, less emphasis has been placed on the role of public administrations in upholding or undermining the rule of law on a day-to-day basis. This paper argues that the sustainability of the rule of law in the EU requires more than legal compliance mechanisms. These alone do not address the underlying administrative and cultural factors necessary for effective implementation. Instead, it requires closer attention to how rule-of-law principles are embedded in the everyday functioning of public administrations. This argument is informed by the authors’ systematic examination of recent EU monitoring practices and administrative reform instruments. Adopting a mixed conceptual-empirical methodology, the paper draws on primary data from EU Rule of Law Reports (2020–2024), the EU Justice Scoreboard, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), and the Technical Support Instrument (TSI), complemented by relevant OECD/SIGMA indicators. Several structural obstacles emerge from the analysis. These include symbolic compliance, whereby organisations adopt formal structures without corresponding behavioural change; weak institutional leadership that fails to drive reform momentum; and the absence of integrated performance metrics, which hampers meaningful accountability. Fragmented ownership of reform agendas, in turn, breeds inconsistency in implementation. These challenges point to the limitations of a technocratic or legalistic approach to rule-of-law governance. Strategic leadership and organisational flexibility emerge from the evidence as preconditions—not merely facilitators—of genuine internalisation, though the relationship is context-dependent. Digitalisation can reinforce these dynamics, yet its contribution depends on whether it is embedded within broader integrity-oriented reforms. The paper advocates for a shift from externalized compliance mechanisms to a model that emphasizes administrative ownership through specific strategies such as developing integrity-based leadership programs and embedding governance practices that prioritize transparency and accountability. It proposes concrete institutional reforms, including performance-linked conditionalities that tie funding to measurable outcomes, ethical leadership academies to train future leaders, integrity audits to ensure accountability, and administrative benchmarking to set clear standards, as tools to foster autonomous, value-driven public institutions capable of adapting to evolving governance challenges while maintaining core democratic values. Full article

Groundwater is a critical resource for agriculture and livelihoods, particularly in semi-arid regions such as Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. However, unsustainable extraction has led to aquifer depletion and increased water insecurity. This study uses Ostrom’s design principles to evaluate how Village Groundwater Cooperatives (VGCs) are transitioning toward self-governance in managing groundwater commons. Through field research in Dharta (Rajasthan) and Meghraj (Gujarat), including 33 key informant interviews and nine focus group discussions, this study assesses institutional robustness, rule enforcement, and community participation. Findings reveal that VGCs have the potential to enhance groundwater security through collective water budgeting and recharge interventions, though institutional robustness is constrained by limited formal enforcement. In Hinta, pipelines connected four wells to distribute water equitably, while in Dharta and Meghraj, traditional water-sharing agreements (two-part and three-part systems) sustained cooperation. Groundwater monitoring by trained “Bhujal Jankaars” helped farmers plan crop cycles, supporting informed crop choices that better aligned with available water supply. Despite these successes, to strengthen VGCs for effective groundwater management, formal sanctioning mechanisms are needed to address rule violations. Additionally, women’s participation in groundwater management decisions and operationalising VGCs is low. Conflict resolution mechanisms are currently informal. This study suggests that because women primarily manage domestic water needs while men manage irrigation, integrating women into decision-making is essential to reconcile competing water demands and ensure the long-term viability of VGCs. The findings provide policy insights for scaling up community-led groundwater governance in semi-arid regions. Full article

Timely identification of infectious disease threats is essential for public health readiness. Conventional indicator-based surveillance systems, while dependable for tracking established pathogens, frequently lack the agility and sensitivity to detect new infections promptly. Syndromic surveillance, which examines pre-diagnostic and non-specific health indicators from many data sources in near real time, serves as a significant complementary method that improves early warning and situational awareness. This narrative study analysed selected experiences with syndromic surveillance, utilising peer-reviewed literature and institutional records. Four primary data streams were examined: emergency department and hospital records, pharmacy and over the counter (OTC) sales, participative citizen-generated data, and hybrid multi-source systems. Syndromic indicators were reported to identify outbreaks two to fourteen days before standard laboratory reporting across many trials. Data from the emergency department exhibited the highest sensitivity and specificity (47.34% and 91.95%, respectively), whereas pharmacy and participative data offered early indicators at the community level. Integrated systems like ESSENCE (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA) and SurSaUD^® (Saint-Maurice cedex, Paris, France) attained enhanced accuracy yet necessitated significant data integration and governance capabilities. Syndromic surveillance enhances epidemic preparation by detecting atypical health-seeking behaviours and variations from baseline patterns prior to formal diagnosis. Nonetheless, its efficacy is contingent upon data quality, interoperability, and contextual adaptation. Countries like Bulgaria could improve national early-warning capabilities and overall health security through the gradual adoption of pilot projects and integration with existing surveillance networks. Full article

Satellite image recognition increasingly relies on data collected by geographically distributed institutions, but centralizing geospatial imagery is often infeasible due to policy and privacy constraints. Federated learning enables collaborative training, yet standard aggregation (e.g., FedAvg) degrades under strong geographic non-IID shifts, and adding client-level differential privacy (DP) can further reduce utility—especially for rare land-cover classes—due to gradient clipping and injected noise. We propose FL-SPDP, a spatially modulated DP federated framework that leverages coarse spatial priors to reweight and aggregate client updates among geographically related clients, improving robustness to heterogeneity while preserving formal privacy guarantees. Experiments on SEN12MS and BigEarthNet show that FL-SPDP improves accuracy and macro-F1 at a fixed privacy budget ($\epsilon \le 3.5$, $\delta ={10}^{-5}$) and strengthens rare-class performance, demonstrating an effective privacy–utility trade-off for satellite image analysis. Full article

Josip Vojnović (Omiš, 1929–Split, 2008) is a prominent Croatian architect, primarily known in professional circles for organising the construction of Split 3, the expansion of Split during the 1970s. His professional career began with the design of primarily residential buildings and concluded with his position as a university professor. This article analyses the URBS 1 standard residential buildings constructed during the 1960s, which were intended to address the housing shortage in post-war Split. These buildings—the most notable part of Vojnović’s design work—were built in several locations throughout Dalmatia. Even at the time of their construction, they were recognised as a significant example of designed and executed standardised residential architecture. This research is based on archival materials from the State Archives in Split, the Archive of the Urban Planning Institute of Dalmatia–Split, as well as research in situ. The article examines the design of the standard building, including a functional analysis of the residential unit and all the floors, as well as a formal and compositional analysis of the façade. The URBS-1 buildings are an illustrative example of housing construction, due to their number, distribution and architectural features shaped by the economic, technological, social and cultural context of the time. Full article

The evaluation of research and development (R&D) project proposals plays a critical role in shaping national scientific and technological priorities. However, existing expert review systems are often characterized by fragmented digital workflows, limited traceability of decisions, and a strong reliance on manual coordination, which reduces transparency and auditability. This paper proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for a national research project evaluation system that integrates artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies as complementary decision-support and data integrity mechanisms. The framework formalizes the complete evaluation lifecycle, including applicant authorization, formal compliance verification, originality and plagiarism analysis, expert selection and assessment, analytical consolidation of reviews, and fixation of final decisions. Artificial intelligence modules are introduced to support thematic classification, compliance checking, expert matching, and analytical processing of expert evaluations, while blockchain technology is incorporated as an immutable integrity layer for recording critical evaluation events and ensuring data provenance. The proposed approach focuses on architectural design, governance principles, and process modeling rather than system implementation or empirical validation. The framework is intended to serve as a reference model for the design and future development of transparent, accountable, and scalable research project evaluation platforms at national and institutional levels. Full article

Generative AI (GenAI) now produces text, images, audio, and video that can be perceptually convincing at scale and at negligible marginal cost. While public debate often frames the associated harms as “deepfakes” or incremental extensions of misinformation and fraud, this view misses a broader socio-technical shift: GenAI enables synthetic realities—coherent, interactive, and potentially personalized information environments in which content, identity, and social interaction are jointly manufactured and mutually reinforcing. We argue that the most consequential risk is not merely the production of isolated synthetic artifacts, but the progressive erosion of shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices as synthetic content, synthetic identity, and synthetic interaction become easy to generate and hard to audit. This paper (i) formalizes synthetic reality as a layered stack (content, identity, interaction, institutions), (ii) expands a taxonomy of GenAI harms spanning personal, economic, informational, and socio-technical risks, (iii) articulates the qualitative shifts introduced by GenAI (cost collapse, throughput, customization, micro-segmentation, provenance gaps, and trust erosion), and (iv) synthesizes recent risk realizations (2023–2025) into a compact case bank illustrating how these mechanisms manifest in fraud, elections, harassment, documentation, and supply-chain compromise. We then propose a mitigation stack that treats provenance infrastructure, platform governance, institutional workflow redesign, and public resilience as complementary rather than substitutable, and outline a research agenda focused on measuring epistemic security. We conclude with the Generative AI Paradox: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, societies may rationally discount digital evidence altogether, raising the cost of truth for everyday life and for democratic and economic institutions. Full article

The collaboration between economic and ecological departments in land-use planning is crucial for advancing sustainable development. However, existing research has largely focused on macro-level policies and technical instruments, paying insufficient attention to the micro-level logics of behavior and strategic interactions between these two departments. This research employs a rigorous mixed-methods approach to bridge empirical depth with analytical rigor. The qualitative phase, encompassing 41 semi-structured interviews and analysis of 327 internal documents, examines the departments’ real-world motivations, strategic behaviors, and the cost–benefit structures underlying their decision-making. Based on these empirical findings, a tailored evolutionary game theory model is constructed to formally simulate the dynamic pathways and stable equilibria of collaboration between the Economic and Ecological Departments. Our analysis reveals that the evolutionary game system converges toward a dichotomy of stable states: a non-cooperative equilibrium characterized by development-oriented land-use planning with adaptive regulation, and a cooperative equilibrium underpinned by green-coordinated planning supported by stringent regulatory enforcement. A cooperative equilibrium is more readily achieved when both departments demonstrate a willingness to simultaneously increase their cost investment parameters in sustainable land-use planning. Conditions contrary to this mutual commitment lead to a non-cooperative equilibrium. Building on these findings, the study synthesizes this interplay into a novel “Institutional-Situational-Behavioral” (ISB) framework. This framework provides a cohesive theoretical lens for diagnosing and fostering interdepartmental collaboration in sustainable land governance. The research thus offers a theoretical foundation for analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of interdepartmental collaboration and delivers mechanism-informed policy guidance for enhancing sustainable land-use planning. Full article

As a critical institutional arrangement for regulating the distribution of ecosystem service benefits, the scientific setting of ecological compensation standards is particularly vital in cross-regional watershed governance. However, there is currently a lack of methods grounded in the multifunctionality of forests and residents’ preferences for determining compensation. Taking the Jinghe watershed as a case study, this research employed a contingent valuation questionnaire survey (n = 747 valid responses) to analyze residents’ perceptions and willingness for forest ecological compensation. The results show that (1) watershed residents generally understand the multifunctional services of forests (cognitive rate: 71.6%–96.4%), and most agree that upstream forest construction benefits downstream ecology, but 30%–40% remain unclear about specific compensation policies. (2) The average willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for upstream residents is 314.10 CNY/mu/year, while the average willingness to pay (WTP) for downstream residents is 289.59 CNY/mu/year. This translates to a compensation standard range of 4343.85 to 4711.5 CNY/ha/year, approximately twice the local afforestation cost but one-sixth of the estimated total ecosystem service value. (3) While over 60% of respondents prefer compensation via governmental funds, there is notable and growing acceptance for development-oriented mechanisms like industrial collaboration and joint park construction under fiscal constraints. (4) Regression analysis indicates that occupation, annual income, and ecological cognition positively influence willingness, whereas age and household size show negative correlations; formal education level showed no significant impact. This study provides empirical evidence and a preference-based framework for setting scientifically grounded and socially accepted multifunctional ecological compensation standards in cross-regional watersheds. Full article

This study examines teachers’ awareness, experiences, and perceptions concerning Ocean Literacy (OL), with particular emphasis on their knowledge levels and the pedagogical, structural, and institutional challenges associated with integrating OL into formal education. Since the early 2000s, the concept of Ocean Literacy has been defined as understanding the ocean’s influence on humans and humans’ influence on the ocean. The paper draws on work conducted within the Erasmus+ project Sea Tales, one of whose aims was to explore and deepen understanding of Ocean Literacy. Employing a cross-cultural comparative design, this research analyses how OL is conceptualised and enacted within educational contexts in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, and Romania. A mixed-methods methodology was adopted, comprising a systematic literature review, country-specific investigations, co-design sessions with educators and relevant OL stakeholders, and a large-scale teacher survey (N = 266). Findings indicate a pronounced discrepancy between teachers’ high motivation to incorporate OL and the limited institutional and pedagogical support available to them. The study advocates for the development of a holistic, flexible, and multi-tiered teacher training framework that is responsive to contextual constraints, offers accessible and ready-to-use materials, and provides differentiated pathways that cater to both novice and experienced educators. Full article

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping public-sector operations, yet its adoption in developing countries remains poorly understood. Existing research focuses largely on traditional AI in developed contexts, leaving unanswered questions about how GenAI interacts with institutional, organizational, and governance constraints in resource-limited settings. This study examines the organizational factors shaping GenAI adoption in Vietnamese local government using 25 semi-structured interviews analyzed through the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework. Findings reveal three central dynamics: (1) the emergence of informal, voluntary, and bottom-up experimentation with GenAI among civil servants; (2) significant institutional capacity constraints—including absent strategies, limited budgets, weak integration, and inadequate training—that prevent formal adoption; and (3) an “AI accountability vacuum” characterized by data security concerns, regulatory ambiguity, and unclear responsibility for AI-generated errors. Together, these factors create a state of governance paralysis in which GenAI is simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. The study contributes to theory by extending the TOE framework with an environment-specific construct—the AI accountability vacuum—and by reframing resistance as a rational response to structural gaps rather than technophobia. Practical implications highlight the need for capacity-building, regulatory guidance, accountable governance structures, and leadership-driven institutional support to enable safe and effective GenAI adoption in developing-country public sectors. Full article

This study investigates how board gender diversity affects firms’ long-term investment behavior in Korea, focusing on capital expenditures and R&D spending from 2011 to 2021. Using firm fixed-effects regressions and robustness tests with alternative measures of gender diversity, the results show that independent female directors are positively associated with long-term investment. However, this effect is significant only in non-Chaebol firms, where board independence is stronger, and gender diversity reflects genuine governance engagement. In Chaebol-affiliated firms, where female directors are often appointed to meet regulatory requirements, the relationship is insignificant, suggesting that diversity driven by formal compliance fails to enhance strategic decision-making. These findings highlight that the effectiveness of gender diversity depends on institutional authenticity rather than numerical representation. The study contributes to the corporate governance literature by showing how ownership structure and board independence condition the real impact of gender-diverse boards and offers policy implications for promoting substantive rather than symbolic diversity reforms. Full article

Background/Objectives: Federated learning (FL) offers a way for healthcare institutions to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing sensitive patient data. This systematic review aims to comprehensively synthesize the ethical dimensions of FL in healthcare, integrating privacy preservation, algorithmic fairness, governance, and equitable access into a unified analytical framework. The application of FL in healthcare between January 2020 and December 2024 is examined, with a focus on ethical issues such as algorithmic fairness, privacy preservation, governance, and equitable access. Methods: Following PRISMA guidelines, six databases (PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Scopus, ACM Digital Library, and arXiv) were searched. The PROSPERO registration is CRD420251274110. Studies were selected if they described FL implementations in healthcare settings and explicitly discussed ethical considerations. Key data extracted included FL architectures, privacy-preserving mechanisms, such as differential privacy, secure multiparty computation, and encryption, as well as fairness metrics, governance models, and clinical application domains. Results: Out of 3047 records, 38 met the inclusion criteria. The most popular applications were found in medical imaging and electronic health records, especially in radiology and oncology. Through thematic analysis, four key ethical themes emerged: algorithmic fairness, which addresses differences between clients and attributes; privacy protection through formal guarantees and cryptographic techniques; governance models, which emphasize accountability, transparency, and stakeholder engagement; and equitable distribution of computing resources for institutions with limited resources. Considerable variation was observed in how fairness and privacy trade-offs were evaluated, and only a few studies reported real-world clinical deployment. Conclusions: FL has significant potential to promote ethical AI in healthcare, but advancement will require the development of common fairness standards, workable governance plans, and systems to guarantee fair benefit sharing. Future studies should develop standardized fairness metrics, implement multi-stakeholder governance frameworks, and prioritize real-world clinical validation beyond proof-of-concept implementations. Full article

Spirituality and religion are underrecognized components of mental health and substance use (MHSU) care for youth of African descent. This study explores the dual role of spirituality and religion in influencing the help-seeking behaviors, recovery journeys, and care outcomes of youth of African descent aged 18 to 25 residing in Nova Scotia, Canada. Drawing on findings from a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded community-based study using mixed methods, including interviews, focus groups, and arts-based approaches, the research highlights both the supportive and ambivalent roles spirituality plays in MHSU care. Participants shared themes such as spiritual reflection as a turning point, the assurance of a higher power, the culturally responsive support of faith-informed providers, and the significance of meditation and unseen connection as healing tools. While the narratives of research participants attested to the role of spiritual and religious practices in offering a sense of belonging, hope, and culturally aligned care, they may also reinforce stigma or act as a barrier to accessing formal MHSU services. These themes were derived from qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 60 youth participants. Through the lens of Ubuntu and Afrocentric paradigms, this paper calls for a more holistic and culturally inclusive approach to care, one that respects or honors the spiritual and communal lives of youth of African descent. It also reinforces the importance of training MHSU care providers to recognize, respect, and integrate spirituality as a legitimate component of wellness and recovery for help-seeking youth of African descent. Full article

The increasing complexity of contemporary urban systems necessitates decision-making frameworks capable of systematically integrating multidimensional sustainability considerations into policy evaluation processes. While existing urban sustainability assessment approaches predominantly focus on isolated environmental or socio-economic indicators, they often lack methodological coherence and direct applicability to operational decision-making. This study proposes a multi-layer sustainability indicator framework explicitly designed to support evidence-based urban decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, institutional constraints, and competing policy objectives. The framework integrates environmental, economic, social, and institutional dimensions of sustainability into a structured decision-support architecture. Methodologically, the study employs a two-stage approach combining expert-based weighting techniques (Analytic Hierarchy Process and Best–Worst Method) with multi-criteria decision-making methods (TOPSIS and VIKOR) to evaluate and rank alternative urban policy scenarios. The proposed framework is empirically validated through an urban case study, demonstrating its capacity to translate abstract sustainability indicators into comparable decision outcomes and policy priorities. The results indicate that the integration of multi-layer indicator systems with formal decision-analysis tools enhances transparency, internal consistency, and strategic coherence in urban governance processes. By bridging the gap between sustainability measurement and decision implementation, the study contributes to the advancement of urban governance scholarship and provides a replicable analytical model applicable to cities facing complex sustainability trade-offs. Full article