Search Results (1,994)

Across the Global South, heightened contestation over rural land has placed land administration at the centre of policy debates, particularly where mismatches between official land records and lived realities generate disputes, exclusion, and limited access to welfare and compensation. In India, these challenges are shaped by colonial cadastral legacies, fragmented institutional arrangements, and rapidly changing rural and peri-urban landscapes. While digitization of land records is widely promoted as a solution to improve transparency and efficiency, reforms implemented without meaningful community participation risk reproducing existing inequalities in more rigid and legally entrenched forms. This article examines the limits of digitization-led land reforms in India and explores how decentralized and community-engaged governance approaches can strengthen land administration. Focusing on two case-study regions in Western India—Talasari and Chiplun in Maharashtra—the study draws on qualitative field research conducted between December 2024 and October 2025, including Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), Key Informant Interviews (KIIs), institutional process-mapping, and analysis of land administration procedures across multiple departments. The combination of field-based evidence and process-mapping enables a grounded analysis of institutional coordination, governance bottlenecks, and the relationship between formal land records and customary tenure practices. The findings show that digitization without community-engaged implementation processes often reproduces inaccuracies and governance gaps rather than resolving longstanding structural problems. Outdated cadastral records, fragmented institutional arrangements, and weak coordination between departments continue to intensify exclusions, tenure insecurity, and administrative fragmentation. The article therefore argues that strengthening land governance requires hybrid and decentralized approaches that integrate statutory and customary systems through co-governance and community participation. These findings have important policy implications for ongoing reforms such as the Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) and the Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA), highlighting the need to align digitization initiatives with local tenure realities, participatory governance, and stronger institutional coordination. Full article

Cloud Atlas (2004) presents a process of religious genesis. This genesis is set against the backdrop of the retreat of stable institutions and recoverable origins, gradually taking shape at the far end of a broken transmission chain. Existing criticism has tended to examine this novel’s nested form separately from Sonmi~451’s posthumous sanctification. This article connects these lines of inquiry by reading the orison as a witness medium within a broken chain of narrative transmission. Along this chain, Ewing’s Pacific diary establishes a compromised model of institutional Christianity, in which faith gains public effectiveness from conversionist rhetoric. This damaged state of institutional religion constitutes a reverse baseline prior to the formation of Sonmi’s testimony as a witness medium. Sonmi’s interrogation in Nea So Copros records political speech as testimony, giving material form to a condemned voice and supporting it to survive beyond her execution at the end of her world. Zachry’s post-apocalyptic valley receives this damaged medium, whose legal grammar has vanished from local memory, but the loss of this grammar does not bring reception to an end. In this context, Meronym’s historical interpretation of Sonmi’s origin intensifies the pressure on devotional allegiance, with sacred use first persisting in prayer and ritual space, then entering the cradle-side oral narrative. The novel’s nested design allows the reader to move across separate storyworlds. Only in this cross-world position can the reader juxtapose the state-recorded testimony with its afterlife as an object of prayer. Thus, religion as a communal claim is formed under semantic loss and becomes clearly visible only from the reader’s cross-world position. Full article

The implementation of water reuse strategies requires robust Decision-Support Tools (DSTs) capable of integrating legal, environmental, site-specific, and technological aspects. However, existing approaches are often limited by fragmented methodologies or high data and modelling requirements, restricting their applicability in early-stage planning. This study presents the development and validation of LëtzREUSE, a DST designed to support the selection of treatment technologies for the reuse of urban water sources, including rainwater, stormwater, light greywater, and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents. The tool is based on a parameter-driven framework that combines (i) regulatory compliance as a first filtering step, (ii) technology applicability defined through operational thresholds linked to water quality parameters, and (iii) prediction of treatment performance along treatment trains. In contrast to multi-criteria approaches, the methodology avoids subjective weighting by directly linking input water quality to process feasibility and expected effluent characteristics. Additionally, ecotoxicological risk is quantified through risk quotient (RQ) reduction, enabling the evaluation of environmental relevance alongside technical performance. The DST was validated using experimental data from the Bleesbruck WWTP, where measured influent characteristics were used to assess the performance of the tool. The results demonstrate that the tool successfully identifies feasible technologies, with Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) + UV (Ultraviolet light) and UV/H₂O₂ + GAC emerging as the most suitable options. By providing the expected quality parameters, both treatment trains can be compared. The final decision should be based on other parameters such as operational complexity. Full article

Cachaça is one of Brazil’s most important distilled spirits, and its chemical and sensory quality is strongly influenced by the technological conditions adopted throughout production. Among the physicochemical parameters used to assess quality, volatile acidity has traditionally been regarded as a regulatory criterion; conversely, increasing evidence indicates that its significance extends beyond legal compliance, reflecting microbial control, fermentation performance, distillation practices, storage conditions, and consumer perception. This narrative review critically examines the current knowledge regarding the formation, technological modulation, regulatory relevance, and sensory implications of volatile acidity in Brazilian cachaça. The literature was selected from major scientific databases and official regulatory documents, emphasizing studies addressing fermentation, distillation, aging, chemical quality, and sensory evaluation. The review discusses the biochemical pathways involved in acetic acid formation, the influence of acetic acid bacteria, oxygen availability, hygienic practices, distillation fraction separation, and oxidative processes during storage. It further compares Brazilian regulatory requirements with those adopted for other distilled beverages and examines the relationship between volatile acidity and sensory perception, highlighting the absence of consensus regarding sensory thresholds specific to cachaça and the influence of beverage matrix and volatile interactions on consumer acceptance. Finally, the review proposes volatile acidity as an integrated quality marker capable of reflecting multiple technological stages rather than an isolated analytical parameter. Current knowledge gaps, particularly regarding the integration of chemical, microbiological, and sensory data, are discussed to support future research and contribute to the continuous improvement, standardization, and international competitiveness of Brazilian cachaça. Full article

An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a legal obligation in Bangladesh for projects with substantial environmental and socio-economic impacts. Over time, Bangladesh has established sound policies, rules, and a growing workforce to support the EIA process. However, two key issues persist: the effectiveness of EIA reports and weak implementation of Environmental Management Plans (EMPs). In practice, implementing agencies often prioritize physical progress over environmental safeguards, treating the EIA as merely a clearance formality for Planning Commission approval. Regulatory bodies, such as the Department of Environment and the Planning Commission, frequently neglect the substantive review of EIA reports, focusing on checklist requirements rather than rigorous environmental scrutiny. This procedural mindset undermines the role of EIA as a strategic planning and decision-making tool. This study examines each step of the EIA process, from report preparation to EMP implementation, highlighting gaps that require sustainable improvements. A mixed-method approach was employed to evaluate the quality of the EIA process, with particular attention to its methodological rigor, accuracy of impact assessment, challenges in public participation, and the effectiveness of the proposed EMPs and their implementation. The recommendations presented in this study aim to enhance the efficiency of the EIA process and promote its application in similar contexts across developing countries. Full article

This paper extends the post-factual polity framework into AI infrastructure and public administration systems theory. It asks how proprietary analytical platforms alter the state’s capacity to produce, audit, and contest the categories through which risk, threat, eligibility, fraud, and deviance become actionable. Using a structured documentary case analysis of Palantir Technologies across United States agencies and allied jurisdictions, the study applies three diagnostic markers—categorical opacity, contestation displacement, and substitutive dependency—to examine the migration of sovereign classification into vendor-controlled infrastructure. The research gap was identified through an integrative review of public administration, AI governance, algorithmic accountability, systems theory, surveillance studies, and Palantir scholarship. The analysis distinguishes AI epistemic capture from ordinary IT vendor lock-in: the former concerns not merely technical dependence or high exit costs but the loss of public capacity to define and contest consequential administrative categories. The paper argues that administrative law, procurement reform, and algorithmic impact assessment remain necessary but insufficient when agencies lack substitutive capacity. It specifies untangling as a systems-level task involving capacity reconstruction, categorical repatriation, contractual restructuring, and procurement reorientation. Hybrid intelligence is advanced as a post-untangling architecture that embeds machine processing within contestable, accountable, and legally governed human judgment. The contribution is diagnostic, methodological, and design-oriented for AI systems governance. Full article

Background/Objectives: Shared Care Planning (SCP) represents a collaborative decision-making process integrating advance care planning and shared decision-making to support ethically complex clinical pathways. Since 2016, the Clinical Ethics Consultation (CEC) service at the Fondazione Policlinico Universitario “Agostino Gemelli” IRCCS (FPUG) in Rome has implemented SCP through the use of the Shared Document (SD) for healthcare ethics planning. This study aimed to describe the SD as an operational tool supporting SCP, focusing on its procedural characteristics, multidisciplinary dimension, and the ethical and contextual issues emerging during its implementation. Methods: This single-center, retrospective observational study analyzed digitized medical records of patients who underwent SCP through the drafting of one or more SDs between 2016 and 2024 at FPUG. Data were extracted from SDs and clinical records in accordance with the RECORD guidelines. Variables included processing time, number of meetings with the clinical ethics consultant (CEc), number of healthcare professionals and family members involved, ethical–clinical issues, contextual challenges, and care orientations proposed within the SDs. Descriptive statistics were used to characterize the cohort and operational aspects of the service. Results: Among 454 patients referred to the CEC service, 154 patients underwent SCP, resulting in 160 SDs. The most frequent ethical issues concerned the proportionality of treatments to initiate (70%) and ongoing treatments (31%). Contextual issues emerged in 74% of cases, particularly pregnancy-related situations (44%) and absence of a legal guardian (19%). Drafting of SD required multiple interdisciplinary meetings (mean: 2.4), with an average processing time of 7 days. The number of healthcare professionals involved increased over time, reflecting growing multidisciplinary participation. The most frequent care orientations included palliative care (58%), withholding invasive/intensive maneuvers (34%), and indications for surgical or diagnostic treatments. Conclusions: The SD emerged as a structured clinical–ethical tool supporting complex shared care planning processes beyond issues of informed consent alone. Its use facilitated multidisciplinary deliberation, the integration of ethical and contextual factors, and continuity in care planning across different clinical trajectories. Full article

The digitalisation of healthcare is transforming not only clinical practice but also the legal architecture through which health rights are protected, coordinated, and operationalised. Using Italy as a doctrinal case study within the European Union (EU) framework shaped by the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Health Data Space, and artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, this article argues that digital healthcare is moving beyond consent-centred protection toward governance-based safeguards. The Italian trajectory is especially revealing because regionalised healthcare governance intersects with centralised digital coordination through the Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico, the Ecosystem of Health Data, and EU rules on the secondary use of health data. The article contends that this shift does not displace consent as a legal or constitutional value, but requires stronger substitute and complementary safeguards when consent can no longer operate as an effective practical control mechanism. These include clear legal bases, differentiated access regimes, data minimisation, secure processing environments, meaningful patient information, democratic accountability, human oversight, anti-discrimination duties, and clearer allocations of responsibility among clinicians, institutions, and technology providers. AI-mediated care is treated as a downstream test case for whether governance-based legality remains compatible with autonomy, dignity, and responsibility in clinical care. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in high-stakes socio-technical systems, intensifying concerns about autonomy, accountability, data rights, and fundamental-rights protection. This article develops an exploratory, expert-informed Human-Centred AI (HCAI) pre-design governance framework that translates selected risk-based obligations of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act into early organisational decisions about human oversight, data accountability, documentation, and bounded algorithmic autonomy. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, the study combines an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) survey of 28 experts with think-aloud interviews with 15 of those respondents. The AHP results show that, among the governance criteria included in the model, AI design objectives received the highest upper-level priority and human oversight and control received the highest global priority, followed by personal information protection, design ethics, intellectual property rights protection, and limits of algorithmic autonomy. The interviews explain these priorities by showing that experts framed trustworthy AI governance as a problem of controllability, responsibility allocation, traceable data use, rights protection, and verifiable human intervention rather than model performance alone. The study contributes by defining pre-design governance as a bounded initial consideration-stage decision structure, combining AHP-based priority evidence with qualitative justification logic, and proposing a preliminary governance package of decision points, minimum evidence artefacts, and illustrative operational check criteria. The package is not presented as a validated legal compliance model; instead, it provides an expert-informed translation pathway for future organisational, sector-specific, and empirical validation. Full article

This article theorises Hmong migration through the concept of resettled histories, understood as the social and political processes through which histories of war, flight, loss, survival, and belonging are carried into new places, translated into new institutional languages, and contested across generations. Rather than approaching Hmong mobility as a linear movement from Southeast Asia to Western resettlement countries, the article situates Hmong migrations within longer histories of upland mobility, imperial and colonial governance, Cold War militarisation, refugee camps, and contemporary diasporic reconstruction. In response to scholarship on collective memory, postmemory, diasporic memory, refugee critique, digital diaspora, and Asian American studies, the article clarifies that resettled histories are not simply memories preserved after migration. They are histories that become socially active after resettlement through community organisations, veteran memorialisation, Hmong New Year celebrations, oral-history projects, clan networks, digital platforms, political mobilisation, and intergenerational debate. The article also foregrounds differences among Hmong communities by gender, generation, religion, class, political position, national location, and relations to Laos, China, Thailand, France, Australia, and the United States. By engaging contemporary Hmong scholarship and Hmong-produced archives alongside foundational migration and memory theory, the article shows how displaced communities do not merely adapt to host societies; they also struggle to have their histories recognised, narrated, and transmitted. The Hmong case demonstrates that resettlement may provide legal security without ending the historical life of displacement. It therefore offers a lens for rethinking migration as the movement and reconstruction of histories, not only the movement of people. Full article

Background: Competence (within the legal and bioethical framework in Spain, the term ‘competence’ is used as equivalent to healthcare decision-making capacity) in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry is a complex and evolving issue. Legal frameworks vary by country and legal tradition. Most concerns relate to treatment decisions within mental health, but in fact there is a wide range of decisions with a relevant impact on patients’ lives and quality of life over the long term. Forensic science must adapt its current practice to the worldwide challenge presented by this evidence. Objectives: This article will present a current research project about competence (healthcare decision-making capacity) in a sample of adolescent and child population in Spain. The final objective will be to validate the Spanish version of the MacCAT semi-structured interview consenting to psychiatric admission in adolescents in a mixed sample. We also examine some of the influences that must be taken into account in this research. Methodology: This is an instrumental and methodological study utilizing a sequential mixed-methods design (qualitative content validation followed by a quantitative psychometric evaluation). A process of adaptation of the Spanish MacCAT to consent to psychiatric admission in the adolescent population. A pilot study will initially be conducted to evaluate question comprehension and duration. Subsequently, a cross-sectional study will be carried out to assess inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, and validity. Evaluation will include clinical and neuropsychological assessment in five departments at two University Hospitals. Expected results: We will establish new evidence about the evaluation of competence in adolescent psychiatry; to date, no studies have been identified assessing the capacity to consent to psychiatric admission among Spanish-speaking adolescents, nor the factors potentially related to such competence. To our knowledge, the relationship between competence and illness awareness in the adolescent population remains unexplored in the literature, and its analysis constitutes one of the novel contributions of the present study. In addition, we will adapt and validate a well-known evaluation scale to the specific environments of our medical and psychiatric health departments. Conclusions: Objective evaluation of competence for medical interventions and treatments is a challenge in clinical and forensic examination. New evidence is necessary to operationalize classical evaluations in standardized ways, adapted to different countries, legal systems and forensic traditions. Full article

Given the current global trend of actively exploring the integration of AI into dispute resolution, we contend that, under existing theoretical and normative frameworks, there is as yet no sound basis for incorporating AI—least of all for replacing judges—into these processes. This is not to dismiss AI’s contribution to dispute resolution; rather, we seek to clarify how AI can be responsibly strengthened in this field. Rather than adopting simplistic technological skepticism, we develop a comprehensive theoretical framework that integrates perspectives from computer science and jurisprudence. By tracing the logical sequence of dispute resolution—goal setting, data input, subject identification, algorithmic processing, and the output and attribution of responsibility—we identify five fundamental issues. First, at the goal-setting stage, a fundamental conflict arises between algorithms, which aim to optimize efficiency, and the judiciary, which pursues multiple values (such as a just resolution and a swift one). Second, at the data-input stage, the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” manifests as the intractable and dynamically interactive problem of “algorithmic bias.” Third, at the subject-identification stage, allowing AI to replace human adjudicators—whether fully or partially—alters the judicial proceedings and undermines procedural justice. Fourth, at the algorithmic-processing stage, the black box and the hallucinations of deep learning are in sharp tension with the judiciary’s exacting demands for certainty and reasoned explanation. Finally, at the accountability stage, outsourcing judicial authority to private developers creates a supervisory vacuum and weakens the state’s liability for compensation. We therefore propose that the legal responses and rule-making needed to address these foundational issues be put in place before, not after, technological implementation. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly shape youth’s educational, social, and informational environments. Although numerous ethical frameworks and guidelines have been developed to guide AI governance, including the OECD AI Principles and the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, they rarely address young people’s perspectives when interacting with AI in their everyday lives. At the same time, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, in General Comment No. 25 published in 2021 on children’s rights in the digital environment, affirms that children should be actively involved in decisions concerning digital technologies that affect them. Objective: This study examines how the scientific literature conceptualizes youth’s right to participate in AI. Methods: An interpretive scoping review was conducted. Database searches and reference list screening were performed between 2010 and 2024 using combinations of keywords related to artificial intelligence, youth, participation, and ethics. Following a systematic selection process, 15 sources were included and analyzed thematically. The corpus comprises peer-reviewed articles, a position paper, legal analyses, policy review reports, and narrative reviews, selected to capture both empirical and normative perspectives on the topic. Results: The literature highlights youth participation in AI as both a children’s rights requirement and a condition for legitimate digital governance. However, a significant gap persists between young people’s widespread exposure to AI systems and their limited influence in decision-making processes. Discussion: Integrating youth participation into AI governance and education may contribute to more inclusive and developmentally informed technological ecosystems. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools—including audit data analytics, robotic process automation, machine-learning models, and generative AI—are changing how audit teams identify risks, select procedures, and evaluate evidence. At the same time, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (the EU AI Act) establishes a risk-based governance architecture built around risk management, data governance, technical documentation, logging, transparency, human oversight, robustness, cybersecurity, and post-market monitoring. The Act is not an auditing standard and does not directly regulate every tool used by audit firms. Nevertheless, its governance logic is relevant where audit firms develop, procure, or rely on AI-enabled systems that process sensitive client data, influence professional judgement, or become part of audit-relevant client systems. This conceptual study uses doctrinal requirements-to-controls mapping and design-oriented analysis to translate selected AI Act governance objectives into firm-level and engagement-level quality-management controls and into criteria for evaluating AI-enabled audit evidence. The paper specifies three modes of AI Act relevance: direct legal relevance where a regulated AI Act role is engaged; indirect relevance where AI compliance documentation becomes audit-relevant information; and benchmark relevance where the Act supplies governance objectives for quality management without creating an audit-law duty. The resulting artefacts are a traceable AI Act/IAASB standards crosswalk, an evidence-risk typology, a quality-management integration model, a documentation and review checklist, and a proportional maturity model. The framework clarifies when AI outputs remain triage or risk-assessment tools, when they provide directional or corroborative evidence, and the narrower conditions under which they may contribute to substantive evidence. It links reliance to data completeness, reconciliation, versioning, validation, false-positive and false-negative behaviour, explainability, logging, source-document corroboration, and reviewer challenge. The contribution is a scalable governance-to-controls framework that supports defensible reliance and inspection readiness without overstating the AI Act’s direct legal applicability. Empirical validation in audit firms remains a priority for future research. It further explains how quantitative risk features and anomaly-detection outputs feed into qualitative audit judgement: models can route attention to unusual transactions or documents, but evidential weight still depends on base-rate-aware error analysis, source-document corroboration, and reviewer challenge. Full article

The European sustainable finance agenda has increased the demand for ESG information, yet most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remain outside mandatory sustainability reporting requirements, which are largely designed for large listed firms. This creates an information gap for banks required to integrate ESG risks into credit assessment, while SMEs often lack proportionate tools to disclose and signal their sustainability-related practices. This paper addresses this gap by examining how an SME-oriented ESG rating can structure sustainability information in bank lending and which criteria and data can support a proportionate assessment framework for resource-constrained firms. Using Banca Etica’s internal socio-environmental rating model and a unique dataset of 2395 Italian SMEs, the study provides descriptive evidence on ESG score patterns by firm size, legal form and economic sector. The results suggest that Social and Governance dimensions are more readily assessable within the rating model, as they rely on observable organisational practices such as labour conditions, gender balance, stakeholder relations and governance structures. By contrast, Environmental scores are systematically lower, suggesting that environmental practices are more difficult to formalise and document through standardised assessment tools, especially when they require monitoring systems, certifications, technological adaptation and upfront investments. The paper contributes to the literature by linking the SME regulatory gap with a parallel gap in ESG rating research and by documenting how an internal bank-based ESG rating can structure SME sustainability information and support credit assessment processes. Rather than providing direct evidence of improved creditworthiness, the study shows how such ratings may function as potential signalling mechanisms for SMEs within relationship-based lending. Full article