Toby Brooks, Joel Farrell, Matthew Hernandez, Adam J. McKee ¡ 6 authors
ABSTRACT Through the American Council on Education, the Carnegie Foundation introduced the Elective Classification of Leadership for Public Purpose (ECâLPP) in 2022. Application for this formal recognition is a voluntary but rigorous process involving the gathering and presentation of a variety of evidence of institutional indicators, concluding with a thorough thirdâparty review and status decision. The designation was initially piloted in partnership with 13 institutions, with 9 founding institutions successfully completing the process in 2021; however, no published work to date was available to provide guidance or insight for the next application round (American Council on Education, 2023). The purpose of this article was to describe the process employed at a Carnegie Special Focus Institution whereby an interdisciplinary team of stakeholders was charged to create, convene, and deploy the necessary processes and information in order to make an application for the 2024 cycle. Given the relative newness of the designation and the interest in the ECâLPP designation by a variety of institutions across the country, it was anticipated that the process employed and lessons learned locally would be beneficial for other individuals and/or institutions considering future application(s). Summary Collaborative Framework for ECâLPP Application: The paper outlines a 6âweek strategic process involving interdepartmental collaboration, emphasizing the importance of leadership, teamwork, and stakeholder engagement for institutions pursuing the Carnegie Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose (ECâLPP). Challenges in Organizational Structure: The manuscript highlights the complexities posed by decentralized structures, such as autonomous academic units, which can hinder cohesive data collection and narrative alignment, underscoring the need for institutionâwide coordination. Strategic Insights for Leadership Programs: The authors identify gaps in learner engagement in leadership initiatives and suggest expanding leadership frameworks to include studentâfacing programs, ensuring institutional alignment with ECâLPP's public purpose objectives. Lessons from the Feedback Process: Though the initial application was unsuccessful, the review panel's feedback provided actionable insights for improving future submissions, such as articulating leadership initiativesâ impact more broadly and refining assessment methods to demonstrate institutional commitment to leadership development.
Abstract Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) faces increasing environmental scrutiny, particularly concerning the energy consumption of the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism and broader Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. However, existing systematic literature reviews of DLT rely on limited analyses of citations, abstracts, and keywords, failing to fully capture the fieldâs complexity and ESG concerns. We address these challenges by analyzing the full text of 24,539 publications using Natural Language Processing (NLP) with our manually labeled Named Entity Recognition (NER) data set of 39,427 entities for DLT. This methodology identified 505 key publications at the DLT/ESG intersection, enabling comprehensive domain analysis. Our combined NLP and temporal graph analysis reveals critical trends in DLT evolution and ESG impacts, including cryptography and peer-to-peer networks researchâs foundational influence, Bitcoinâs persistent impact on research and environmental concerns (a âLindy effectâ), Ethereumâs catalytic role on Proof of Stake (PoS) and smart contract adoption, and the industryâs progressive shift toward energy-efficient consensus mechanisms. Our contributions include the first DLT-specific NER data set addressing the scarcity of high-quality labeled NLP data in blockchain research, a methodology integrating NLP and temporal graph analysis for large-scale interdisciplinary literature reviews, and the first NLP-driven literature review focusing on DLTâs ESG aspects.
Jeremiah Hurley, Deborah Milinkovic, David Feeny, G. Emmanuel Guindon ¡ 6 authors
Social finance offers innovative ways to finance solutions to many of societyâs most challenging problems by attracting private investments that create both financial returns for investors and desired social and environmental impacts. Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) is working with sector partners to develop a social-finance platform called Outcomes Canada (OC) to facilitate community-driven social finance. Many community initiatives face significant capacity challenges and resourcing gaps. At present, community initiatives bear the burden of navigating a highly decentralized financing ecosystem to secure funding and other support needed to build their capacity and achieve desired outcomes. At the same time, governments, social financiers, philanthropists, and academics seek to find and support community initiatives that are producing results. This gap reflects the need for new tools, innovative financing vehicles and streamlined approaches to support community-driven outcomes in Canada.
The article probes into factors that determine processes of decentralization in managing the general education system. The study entails a review of pertinent literature and an analysis of the distribution of powers among entities managing the general education system in Lithuania. The study concludes that the education management system in Lithuania is gradually being decentralized and de-concentrated on the basis of the subsidiarity principle. A successful implementation of the decentralization reform requires the following two conditions: political support for proposed changes and the ability of those charged with carrying out the reform. An analysis of literature confirms that decentralization as a process is also a function of factors other than political will and capacity. These factors include trust (the extent of decentralization depends on the central governmentâs trust in the local government, and vice versa), financial troubles, path dependencies, international developments, etc. An analysis of the distribution of decision making powers in areas of financing and human resources demonstrates that there is a trend towards decentralization, albeit inconsistent due to obstacles on the level of centralized management. The article maintains that there has to be an adequate balance between centralization, which is necessary for the implementation of general national educational objectives, and decentralization, which allows teachers, schoolchildren, parents and the representatives of local communities to participate in education management.
This article assesses the policy strategy for local management of schools in Victoria, Australia within the high involvement framework for creating high performance organizations. The high involvement framework as adapted to education hypothesizes that a decentralized strategy for improving educational performance requires decentralizing four key resources: power over the budget and personnel functions; information about revenues, expenditures, costs and best practices; knowledge and skills including both technical and business knowledge; and rewards including compensation and other incentives. The framework also includes an instructional guidance framework of curriculum standards and student assessment to those standards, and facilitative principal leadership. Based on two years of data collection at both the state and school levels, focusing on governance, management, finance, and curriculum and instruction, the study found that Victoria's Schools of the Future ranked high on all six variables, and that the decentralization process was working smoothly and major changes were being made in curriculum and instruction when school sites also ranked high on the six variables
This article argues that (1) the clarity of a policy intention depends upon the appropriateness of the organizational form to implement it, and (2) the assumptions held by policymakers regarding organization form, in practice, often lead to offsetting or contradictory implementations. The study examines a major recent policy reorganization-Florida's transformation of eight autonomous human services agencies into a single department. Its avowed purposes were to integrate and decentralize services. Elmore's (1978) fourfold model is employed to assess those intentions. The findings indicated that implementation became troubled as policymakers adopted inappropriate organizational assumptions to support their intentions. The conclusions suggest that implementation had to accommodate opposing dimensions of organizational strategy and managerial structure.