Empowerment has become a hegemonic moral horizon and key modality of governance across the global South and the global North. Whether in the realm of development or in that of welfare and urban governance, a broad range of actors, from local NGOs to social professionals and international donors, now envision the empowerment of local communities as a crucial condition and means for achieving good governance and social justice (Cruikshank 1999; Rose 1996). Anthropologists and development scholars – including ourselves – often find themselves ambivalently positioned in relation to such projects of empowerment. In this essay, we turn to the hesitancies and experimental practices of our research interlocuters in two urban settings saturated by a ‘will to empower’ (Cruikshank 1999). During ten months in the year 2017, Anick followed the everyday practices of family workers in three community centers and neighborhood associations in the northeast of Paris, who were tasked to help working-class and migrant-background parents regain confidence and agency vis-à-vis state institutions. Like the parents with whom they worked, many of these family workers hailed from the banlieue themselves and were of migrant backgrounds. Naomi worked with 15 male former gang leaders in Mombasa (Kenya) who sought to reform themselves to escape police violence. Naomi’s interlocutors were between 16 and 28 years old and worked closely with their friend Hasso during 2019 and 2022. In this period, Naomi conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with these young men and with Hasso, during which she observed their weekly meetings and the individual lives of several group members, and she conducted life history interviews with five of them. These two cases thus figure actors who were differently positioned in relation to the will to empower.
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ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority) published in December 2014 a document about the regulation norms. In that document the ESMA proposed to skip the exemption option for energy companies for the guidelines of the financial instruments. From Jan. 3 2018 MiFID II (Markets in Financial Instruments II) expanded the catalogue of financial instruments to energy companies. MiFID II requires that – among others – energy companies have the obligations to include the product in position limits, tests for fulfilment of conditions for exclusion, and inclusion in the supervisory regime under the EMIR (European Market Infrastructure Regulation). The MiFID II is obligatory for all EU members.Although there is a tendency for unbundling the several tasks in the energy sector, in some countries – like France – all tasks are concentrated in the hand of the state. At the other hand, in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK the tasks are divided among several parties. The financial relations between these parties are (partly) financial instruments.This study is important for the electricity market. In this study we describe the financial relations between the several parties in the electricity market in the Netherlands. The focus will be on the question of who bears the financial risks on the future cash flows. We describe the working of the clearing and the margin requirements for a better understanding. This has never been done for any country. In the light of MiFID II this analysis can also be interesting for other EU countries.
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Wat doen banken eigenlijk? Ik denk dat banken goed zijn in het grootschalig en min of meer veilig sorteren van informatie. Een tak van sport die ze gemeen hebben met telecom-bedrijven en sommige overheidsdiensten zoals de burgerlijke stand, de belastingdienst of het CWI. Daarbij gebeurt dat sorteren op de financiële markten in toenemende realtime, denk hierbij aan de beurs, maar bij de banken zelf nog steeds niet: uw dagelijkse overschrijvingen en bedrijfs- of particuliere financieringen die u wellicht thuis online invoert worden door de banken pas gedurende de nacht uitgevoerd. Sorteren dus. De core van het bankenbedrijf is daarmee hun rekencentrum. Al het personeel, de strategieafdelingen en de beleggingsdeskundigen zijn er om het rekencentrum te vullen. Het huidige businessmodel van banken gaat daar uiteindelijk ook om: het vullen van het rekencentrum waar het sorteren plaats vindt. Het gaat om provisie en voor provisie heb je traffic, zeg maar sorteren, nodig. Tegenwoordig noemen we een dergelijke benadering een inside-out, aanbodgerichte benadering van de business.
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This qualitative interview study explores the practices of adult female gamers who play the videogame The Sims, focusing on the motivations they have for playing and how playing a video game might influence their digital competence. We address the wider context of leisure and the household, investigating to what extent playing videogames has become domesticated in the daily life of the family. It is found that female gamers play The Sims because they enjoy the particular way it allows them to take control, fantasize, and be challenged. For some, it is clear that playing this video game has increased their digital skills. We notice that there is an interesting similarity between the pleasures of playing this videogame and more traditional ways of female media engagement such as reading women’s magazines or romance novels and watching soap operas. Our gamers similarly enjoy The Sims as leisurely moments for themselves, clearly and intentionally separated from domestic and family duties. We conclude that playing a videogame can be seen as a highly modern and liberating practice, as both playing in general and using ICT have traditionally not been a part of the female leisure domain.
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In deze bijdrage willen we aangeven welke concrete stappen het hoger onderwijs in Nederland nu zou moeten zetten om een brede uitrol van open onderwijs te faciliteren, mede in het licht van het toekomstbeeld dat minister Bussemaker heeft geschetst in haar strategische agenda HO2025. We geven aan welke belemmeringen er zijn voor grootschalige adoptie van open onderwijs en welke maatregelen nodig zijn om het toekomstbeeld te realiseren.
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Recent years have shown the emergence of numerous local energy initiatives (prosumer communities) in the Netherlands. Many of them have set the goal to establish a local and sustainable energy provision on a not-for-profit basis. In this study we carried out exploratory case studies on a number of Dutch prosumer communities. The objective is to analyse their development process, to examine the barriers they encounter while organising their initiative, and to find how ICT could be applied to counteract these barriers and support communities in reaching their goals. The study shows that prosumer communities develop along a stepwise, evolutionary growth path, while they are struggling with organising their initiative, because the right expertise is lacking on various issues (such as energy technology, finance and legislation). Participants stated that, depending on the development phase of their initiative, there is a strong need for information and specific expertise. With a foreseeable growing technical complexity they indicated that they wanted to be relieved with the right tools and services at the right moment. Based on these findings we developed a generic solution through the concept of a prosumer community shopping mall. The concept provides an integrated and scalable ICT environment, offering a wide spectrum of energy services that supports prosumer communities in every phase of their evolutionary growth path. As such the mall operates as a broker and clearing house between 2 prosumer communities and service providers, where the service offerings grow and fit with the needs and demands of the communities along their growth path. The shopping mall operates for many prosumer communities, thus providing economies of scale. Each prosumer community is presented its own virtual mall, with specific content and a personalised look-and-feel.
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Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has been recognized as an important technology to increase the local self-consumption of photovoltaics in the local energy system. Different auction mechanisms and bidding strategies haven been investigated in previous studies. However, there has been no comparatively analysis on how different market structures influence the local energy system’s overall performance. This paper presents and compares two market structures, namely a centralized market and a decentralized market. Two pricing mechanisms in the centralized market and two bidding strategies in the decentralized market are developed. The results show that the centralized market leads to higher overall system self-consumption and profits. In the decentralized market, some electricity is directly sold to the grid due to unmatchable bids and asks. Bidding strategies based on the learning algorithm can achieve better performance compared to the random method.
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During the past years a lot of research has been done on measuring and analyzing the stated and re-vealed preferences of house buyers, in order to develop so called new product market combinations for the housing market. It has become clear from these studies that the choice of a house buyer for a cer-tain type of dwelling is based on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, derived from the quantita-tive and qualitative attributes he observes and perceives when confronted with the choice for a dwell-ing. A dwelling as such, can be regarded as a complex ‘product’, consisting of a varied amount of quantitative and qualitative attributes. A dwelling not only offers a place to eat, sleep and live, but also a place of comfort and safety. For a growing group of house buyers their dwelling seems to be-come more and more even like ‘a statement of life style’, in the same way a dwelling was regarded as ‘a statement of richness’ in the earlier days. The focus of researchers is gradually moving towards the qualitative criteria that determine the choice behaviour of house buyers. Or, more specifically, towards the relationships between the preferences, perceptions, emotions and beliefs of the house buyer and the quantitative and qualitative criteria he has in mind. And, secondly, they want to understand how these aspects are related to the actual choice for a dwelling. An intriguing question is how these preferences, perceptions, emotions and beliefs (i.e. psychological factors) can be measured and analyzed in such a way that they can be described and communicated unambiguously to different parties that are involved in the housing market. The aim of this conceptual paper is to make a start with the exploration of the expected added value of Conjoint Analysis and Rule Developing Experiment as tools for measuring and analyzing the combi-nation of quantitative and qualitative criteria that direct the choice behaviour of house buyers. Conjoint Analysis, which has originally been developed for marketing applications, analyzes the joint subjective and psychological factors that influence the choice behavior of consumers. Applying Con-joint Analysis as a method of research, will not only add to the measurement and analysis of stated and revealed preferences of house buyers. It may be also of help to develop knowledge on unstated and even innovative preferences, which will eventually lead to innovative, yet unknown dwelling concepts and dwelling market combinations. These unknown combinations might be found by adding the method of Rule Developing Experiment.
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After the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in May 1945, Germany no longer existed as a sovereign, independent nation. It was occupied by the four Allied powers: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. When it came to the postwar European recovery, the biggest obstacle was that the economy in Germany, the dominant continental economic power before the Second World War, was at an almost complete standstill. This not only had severe consequences for Germany itself, but also had strong economic repercussions for surrounding countries, especially the Netherlands. As Germany had been the former’s most important trading partner since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the Netherlands would be unable to recover economically without a healthy Germany. However, Allied policy, especially that of the British and the Americans, made this impossible for years. This article therefore focuses on the early postwar Dutch-German trade relations and the consequences of Allied policy. While much has been written about the occupation of Germany, far less attention has been paid to the results of this policy on neighbouring countries. Moreover, the main claim of this article is that it was not Marshall Aid which was responsible for the quick and remarkable Dutch economic growth as of 1949, but the opening of the German market for Dutch exports that same year. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbwg-2018-0009 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijn-lak-71793013/
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Voetbal en witwassen zijn begrippen die steeds vaker met elkaar worden geassocieerd. Een blik op de krantenkoppen uit het voorjaar van 2019 suggereert dat de sport een criminaliteitsprobleem heeft.
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