Framing agriculture and climate in Kenyan policies: a longitudinal perspective

Climate change threatens Kenyan agriculture and the environment, and jeopardizes people's livelihoods and food security. The 2017 Kenya Climate-Smart Agriculture Strategy claims to guide a transformation of Kenya's agricultural system through an integrated approach to agriculture, climate change, development, environment, and food security. By undertaking a longitudinal analysis of policy frames, this study temporally contextualizes climate-smart agriculture (CSA) policy adoption to understand whether CSA is a transformative tool versus business-as-usual. A policy frame analysis of the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment between 2002 and 2017, complemented with in-depth interviews addresses the question how policy frames for agriculture, climate change, development, environment and food security have evolved over time, and which factors contributed to policy frame development in Kenya. Findings demonstrate that (a) CSA in Kenya is an incremental shift away from existing policy frames rather than a radical transformation, (b) a discrepancy exists between Strategic Plans and sectoral policies; and (c) policy frames are influenced by donors, regional and global fora and personal networks. This study suggests that CSA's relevance is limited to those contexts that acknowledge a complex relationship between agriculture, climate change, development, environment, and food security prior to CSA policy adoption

Employer perceptions of planning education in South Africa

The changing nature of planning has raised questions about what skills, competencies, values and literacies should be the focus of planning education, both internationally and in South Africa. This article reports on a survey of planning employers which questioned their perceptions of the relevance of planning education and of the appropriateness of the Bloemfontein competencies, a list of competencies drawn up by South African planning schools in 2000. The study found that planning employers largely felt that planning education is relevant, and that the Bloemfontein competencies are appropriate. As is the case internationally, creativity, problem solving abilities and critical thinking are highly valued, and communicative and organizational capacities are increasingly seen as key issues. Concerns were raised however over the competence of graduates in these realms, raising questions again about the focus of planning education

Collaborating for Inclusive Business:A Systematic Literature Review

It is commonly assumed that inclusive business relies on collaboration to create commercial businesses that benefit low-income populations. Yet, the relationship between collaboration and inclusive business remains unclear. Through a systematic literature review, we assess the state of knowledge on how collaboration informs inclusive business. An interpretive synthesis based on abductive coding of 35 articles selected through systematic screening led to three inclusive business archetypes with unique interpretations of inclusive business and collaboration. The “Pragmatist” favors transactional collaboration to overcome market constraints in low-income markets, (faultily) assuming product access enhances consumer wellbeing. The “Connector” proposes an integrative collaboration to establish linkages between inclusive business and low-income populations and facilitate resource and knowledge exchange, raising tensions between capacity development and commercial viability. The “Transformer” prioritizes transformative collaboration to address the root causes of problems, advocating significant investments with uncertain returns. The archetypes provide a conceptual starting point to classify inclusive business. Each archetype presents unique challenges in the integration of commercial and development objectives, underscoring the need for further research on the viability of win–win discourses.</p

The relevance of town and regional planning education in South Africa.

Thesis (M.Sc.U.R.P.)-University of Natal, 2002.Town and regional planning in South Africa is challenged by global-and local-economic, social and political changes; the weight of its history in the apartheid past; a poor image; and ultimately, a functional change in the traditional role of planners. South African planning schools have to more and more deal with under-prepared students and cope with competition from other disciplines. The crucial question is: does planning education prepare graduates adequately to make a contribution to the profession within this context? This thesis examines the relevance of planning education at South African universities. This is done firstly by comparing South African trends in planning to international trends, and secondly, by assessing practitioners' views on the relevance of planning programmes, and whether their skill requirements match the skills seen as important by planning educators and those offered by graduates. The empirical research was done by assessing four universities' planning programmes, interviewing senior staff at these universities, and surveying 40 planning practitioners in the corresponding four metropolitan areas. The main issues under enquiry were: the relevance of planning curricula; students' practical experience during training; specialist versus generalist education; undergraduate and/or postgraduate education; life-long learning, and the core skills and competency requirements upon entering the planning profession. The world needs planning, and planning education is the key to the survival of the profession. With certain reservations, it is concluded that planning education, through the teaching of appropriate skills, is relevant for planning practice. To a large extent, planning education at South African universities follows international trends

Cross-boundary policy entrepreneurship for climate-smart agriculture in Kenya

Many initiatives to address contemporary complex challenges require the crossing of sector, domain, and level boundaries, which policy entrepreneurs are believed to facilitate. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how, why, and with what effect such entrepreneurs operate to cross boundaries. As this requires an account of both entrepreneurial strategy and the surrounding policy environment, we embed entrepreneurship in the policy frameworks of multiple streams, advocacy coalitions, and punctuated equilibrium. We use qualitative methods to analyse policy development for climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Kenya. CSA is a cross-cutting strategy to sustainably increase agricultural productivity, resilience, and food security while curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. Our results demonstrate that policy entrepreneurs target varying ideas, interests, and institutions across boundaries in order to establish cross-boundary linkages, but this requires additional resources including connections, funding, and time. Simultaneously, this process offers opportunities, for instance, regarding choice of audience and potential resources to tap. Cross-boundary entrepreneurial strategies include venue shopping to soften up communities; framing CSA in multiple ways to address different audiences; demonstrating brokerage between coalitions through impartial leadership and creating a neutral institutional setting; and process manipulation to bypass complexities arising from the scattered policy environment. Although entrepreneurs managed to realize the adoption of a Kenya CSA strategy, the process displays limited changes in policymakers’ ideas; the policy remains the main responsibility of the agriculture ministry alone and receives limited support from local authorities. This raises questions regarding the cross-boundary nature and implementability of this strategy

Primary cutaneous lymphoma in children: A report of four cases

Primary cutaneous lymphoma (CL) is a malignant lymphoma presenting in the skin. Primary CL is rare in children and difficult to clinically diagnose. We report four pediatric cases of primary CL with tumors in different body area: case 1, on the face and left thigh; case 2, on the left side of the neck; case 3, on the left side of the back; and case 4, on the left buttock. The first diagnoses of these children were rash, abscess, lymphadenitis, and fever, respectively in local hospitals. All 4 patients were diagnosed as primary CL by histopathologic examination in our hospital. Three patients (case 1, case 2 and case 4) were treated with chemotherapy. The size of tumor and degree of cutaneous lesion were alleviated after chemotherapy. Case 3 refused to receive chemotherapy, and died. The cases indicated the importance of early diagnosis of primary CL to guide appropriate therapy

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur