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The Farm Service Agency (FSA) conservation loan program was introduced in the 2008 Farm Bill to provide additional credit to assist producers implementing approved Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) conservation projects. This paper explores why this program has been widely underutilized despite an overall increase in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Conservation Program participation.

The FSA administrative loan data are merged with NRCS program participation and payments data for 2010–2021. The share of project costs paid by producers and resulting savings achieved by farmers participating in both programs if their cost-share portion was paid by FSA loans are estimated, as well as the impact on farmer conservation spending under different estimates of increased participation.

A significant share of FSA farmers are likely to take advantage of NRCS programs, with the majority of participants paying under $25,000 in cost-share portions. These loans are less suited to guaranteed conservation loans and more appropriate for the discontinued direct conservation loan program. Few FSA borrowers participating in NRCS cost-share programs pay more than $50,000 in cost-share portions. These loans would receive the majority of benefits from interest reduction schemes under the current guaranteed loan program.

Our results and suggestions provide valuable information when discussing the Guaranteed Conservation Loan Program in the 2023 Farm Bill legislation.

No prior research has attempted to merge FSA guaranteed or direct loan data with conservation program participation and payment data, focused on producer cost-share levels or the FSA Guaranteed Conservation Loan Program in the last decade, making this study a valuable contribution to the literature.

Governments frequently utilise tourism as a means of enhancing the economic participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Australia. Yet, the ‘systemic wickedness’ (Carson & Koster, 2012) of problems, purportedly addressed by government policies for Indigenous Australians more broadly, can arguably be seen as inhibiting the creation of a thriving and sustainable Indigenous tourism sector. For too long, authors have questioned the appropriateness and effectiveness of tourism policy developed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Hudson, 2016; Whitford & Ruhanen, 2010), and importantly, over and above governments’ apparent poor understanding of what ‘works’ and under what conditions, is the absence of First Nations peoples voices in driving the development of the First Nations sector. Utilising a wicked policy lens, this chapter explores Indigenous tourism policy in Australia and discusses the extent to which one particular initiative, the inaugural Queensland First Nations Tourism Plan (QFNTP) 2020–2025 addresses a range of complex and wicked policy challenges.

This paper examines the state’s accountability to its citizens, in particular the First Peoples of settler colonial nations such as Australia, and how these responsibilities may be enacted via a process of compensatory justice in Native Title claims. We focus on the landmark Timber Creek ruling and the impacts of racialized preconceptions on the accountability outcomes of the case.

This study draws on critical race theory to reveal embedded racialised perspectives that perpetuate exclusion and discriminatory outcomes. Court documents including hearing transcripts, case judgements, witness statements, appellant and respondent submissions, expert reports and responses from First Nations leaders, form the basis of our analysis.

The case highlights how the compensation awarded to Native Title holders was based on racialised assumptions that prioritised neoliberal values, commercial activities and reaching a “socially acceptable” judgement over valuing Aboriginal uses of land. A critical analysis of court documents reveals the pervasiveness of presumed “objectivity” in the use of accounting tools to calculate economic value and the accountability implications of a process based on litigation, not negotiation. These findings reveal the hiding places offered by calculative practices that equate neoliberal priorities with accountability and reaffirm the importance of alternative accountings to resist inequitable distributive outcomes.

Novel insights, drawing on First Nations peoples’ connections to land and their perspectives on accountability and justice, are offered in this study. Our analysis of Native Title holders’ submissions to the courts alongside historical and anthropological sources leads to the conclusion that compensation decisions regarding Native Title land must be approached from the perspective of Aboriginal landowners if accountable outcomes are to be achieved.

This study explores citizen activism in the articulation of a politicised counter-account of Aboriginal rights. It aims to uncover the enabling factors for a successful challenge to established political norms and the obstacles to the fullest expression of a radical imagining.

Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony and discourse is used to frame the movement's success in challenging the prevailing system of urbanised healthcare delivery. Empirical materials were collected through extensive ethnographic fieldwork.

The findings from this longitudinal study identify the factors that predominantly influence the transformational success of an Yaṉangu social movement, such as the institutionalisation of group identity, articulation of a discourse connected to Aboriginal rights to self-determination, demonstration of an alternative imaginary and creation of strong external alliances.

This study offers a rich empirical analysis of counter-accounting in action, drawing on Aboriginal governance traditions of non-confrontational discourse and collective accountability to conceptualise agonistic engagement. These findings contribute to the practical and theoretical construction of democratic accounting and successful citizen activism.

This study aims to examine the mediating role of audit seasonality on the association between audit fees and audit quality in Nigerian deposit money banks.

The sample comprises 14 banks with annual financial statements between 2008 and 2020. The modified Baron and Kenny’s (1986) causal mediation model by Iacobucci et al. (2007) through the use of bootstrapped partial least square structural equation modelling and Sobel’s (1986) z-test is adopted to achieve this study’s objective.

The results of the causal mediation analysis show evidence of a fully mediating role of c between audit fees and audit quality in the Nigerian banking industry.

This study extends the body of knowledge by demonstrating how audit fees influence audit quality through audit seasonality as a mediator in line with the job demands-and resources and conservation of resources theories. Regulatory authorities should be wary of policies that will further increase the workload of already burdened personnel of audit firms as the uniform fiscal year-end of 31 December introduced in the Nigerian banking system has unintended consequences on audit fees and audit quality.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies to provide evidence on the indirect association between audit fees and audit quality.

The textile sector is one of the sectors where competition is intense and requires the production of high-value-added products. This study aims to conduct patent analysis to find the technology status, recent trends, applications and technological evaluations of protective textile technologies in practice.

More than 36,840 patent documents related to protective textile technologies are available for researchers, patent examiners and patent researchers. Patent analysis is conducted to report the technology status, recent trends and applications of protective textile technologies. This analysis provides insights into the possible future directions of protective textile technologies in practice. Additionally, association rule mining (ARM) is performed to find the hidden patterns among protective textile technologies.

The development of protective textile technologies is revealed by the technology evaluation in this study. In addition, the sub-technology classes affecting protective textile technologies are examined using the cooperative patent classification (CPC) codes of the patent documents. Technology status and recent trends of protective textile technologies are provided in detail. The results of this study show that (1) protective textile technologies are constantly being developed, (2) the working areas of medical protective textiles are increasing, (3) there are frequent studies on fabric structures for saving lives within the framework of human needs and (4) there are four technology classes, namely A41D, Y10T, B32B and A62B impacting the other technology classes related to textile technologies such as D10B, Y10T, F41H, A62D, D04H, Y10S and D10B.

To have a competitive advantage in the marketplace, evaluation of textile technologies is critical in developing “functionalized” and “technologized” textile products. In particular, evaluating technologies in developing protective textile products is extremely important to meet customer demands and present competitive products in the market. Examining these patents for technology developers, decision-makers and policymakers is an urgent and necessary job. However, studies examining the development of protective textile technologies with patent analysis are very limited in the literature. To fill this gap, technology status, recent trends and applications of protective textile technologies are reported based on patent analysis and ARM in this study.