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Although the importance of climate change is generally acknowledged, its impacts are often not taken into account explicitly when planning development projects. This being due to limited resources, among others, this paper aims to propose a simple and low-cost approach to assess the viability of human activities under climate change.

Many human activities are feasible only within a narrow range of climatic conditions. Comparing such “climate corridors” with future climate projections provides an intuitive yet quantitative means for assessing needs for, and the viability of, adaptation activities under climate change.

The approach was tested within development projects in Pakistan, Peru and Tajikistan. The approach was shown to work well for forestry and agriculture, indicating positive/negative prospects for wheat in two districts in Pakistan, temperature constraints for maize in Peru and widening elevation ranges for walnut trees in Tajikistan.

Climate corridor analyses feed into the preparation of Local Adaptation Plans of Action in Pakistan.

The simplicity and robustness of climate corridor analysis allow for efficient analysis and communication of climate change impacts. It works when data availability is limited, but it can as well accommodate a wide range of complexities. It has proven to be an effective vehicle for mainstreaming climate change into adaptation planning.

The purpose of this paper is to identify social entrepreneurship dimensions that emphasize the specific personal characteristics of social entrepreneurs (SPCSE) and social entrepreneurship organization (SEO) among students in higher education institutions who are active participants of the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) program in Malaysia.

Quantitative approaches and instruments were used to analyze the profile of social entrepreneurship in this cross-sectional survey study, which involved 394 active SIFE students in Malaysia in 2011. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data and describe the SIFE student's SPCSE and SEO.

The social entrepreneurship of the SIFE students was high, with a dominant SEO. However, the dimensions of SPCSE need to be applied effectively to the students involved, whose social entrepreneurship was merely moderate. There was a strong positive relationship between SPCSE and SEO of SIFE students, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.73.

It is recommended that further longitudinal research be conducted to assess the depth of the impact of social entrepreneurship on SIFE students. In this manner, more useful information related to the impact can be leveraged to improve the pattern of the social entrepreneurship program.

The SIFE participants’ social entrepreneurship profile can be used by the Ministry of Higher Education in formulating social entrepreneurship policy for higher education institutions. The Malaysia SIFE Foundation and the administrators of higher education institutions should encourage more university students to participate in SIFE program to increase the number of social entrepreneurs who will help solve social, economic, and environmental problems.

There has been no discussions of the social entrepreneurship programs in Malaysia. This paper attempts to fill the current gap.

Devolution of fiscal and administrative autonomy to public schools is a global phenomenon now. Various models of school autonomy have been adopted both in developing and developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of devolution of fiscal autonomy to public primary schools through Parent–Teacher Councils (PTCs) on retention of primary school children in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, Pakistan.

Two sources of data were used to analyze the research question: Education Management Information System for the years 2006–2011 and 2007–2012, and a specially designed survey questionnaire used to compile information about PTCs from 222 public primary schools in the KP Province. Multiple linear regressions were conducted to examine whether PTC reforms are related to retention rates. An education production function approach was used to examine the effect of “inputs” (PTC reform) on “outputs” (retention).

The regression results indicate that reforms in procedural mechanisms to spend PTC budget and schools with separate classrooms for each grade level are significant in improving retention to the last grade of primary. The results also indicate that retention in all-girls’ schools tend to be significantly lower compared to all-boys’ schools.

First, the integration of data sets resulted in a small sample size, 361 schools, out of which the researcher could visit only 222 schools (10 schools per district) due to time and financial constraints. There may be a probability that with a larger sample size the author findings may look slightly different. However, this is the only current data set collected by the researcher in KP, Pakistan. Second, an ideal way of calculating retention is to track each and every child enrolled in a school over a period of five years and to calculate retention at the end of Grade 5 called true cohort model. However, due to unavailability of such kind of data, a more commonly used method, called reconstructed cohort method, is employed. In this method, data on enrollment by grade are used for six consecutive years, with an assumption that the student flow rates will remain unchanged over time and across grades.

The findings of this study provide vital policy input to the Government of Pakistan in particular and other developing countries in general. The study reveals that PTCs have critical impacts on educational outcomes, school productivity and return on public sector educational investment thus providing an impetus for further strengthening of PTC and community participation. Besides, this study offers significant implications as to how school-based management programs will lead to outcomes under resource scarcity in developing countries.

The paper has implications for the role of school leadership and community participation and for how to engender community involvement in marginalized areas where communities often do not have the time, resources or confidence to participate in their schools. Besides, community participation in parent–teacher meetings means that the school budget is spent transparently and with consensus. Hence, the chances of misuse of funds are minimized to a considerable extent, a dilemma faced by many developing countries. Finally, the collection of PTC-related data regularly especially details about budget allocated, spent and, the unutilized budget may result in better record keeping, which was found lacking during the visit.

The uniqueness and originality of this paper can be gauged from the fact that no systematic study exists with regards to the impact of school autonomy on students’ retention to the last grade of primary in KP province – a poor and conflict-ridden region in a low-income country (Pakistan). Also, the data collection from primary and secondary sources was not an easy task. However, the researcher as a civil servant has to use personal contacts to collect primary and secondary data. Hence, this study is unique and first of its kind in nature. No such research has been conducted so far by any researcher, especially in KP.

The purpose of this study is to frame the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions as the main actors in the organisational field. More precisely, Libyan commercial banks have been identified as empirical evidence, to identify constraints of the institutional environment governing the behaviour and decision-making of commercial banks, when adopting Islamic financial transactions.

A questionnaire has been designed for 14 Libyan commercial banks which is distributed to the Board of Directors, managers, directors of departments, and personnel. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the measurement model by using the first-order and second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have been applied as essential steps to embody the conceptual framework and test the research hypotheses.

The results of the EFA indicated sufficient correlation among the dimensions of the external environment. The CFA supported this study’s hypotheses. The modelling showed that the cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions are institutional constraints impeding Libyan commercial banks’ adoption of Islamic financial transactions. Interestingly, the findings of the CFA align with the EFA findings in supporting the conceptual framework of the research. They portrayed that the cultural-cognitive dimension has been identified by explicit and implicit cognition.

This study systematically embodies the dimensions of the external institutional environment, namely, cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions, as the main factors in the organisational field to be conceptually rich lenses to investigate social considerations to reinforce institutional thought broadly. The results of this study were consistent with extant Islamic financial literature, reflecting symmetry and similarity across commercial banks, particularly at the first stage of adopting Islamic financial transactions.

Electronic learning (e‐learning) has gradually become an important part of university education. There is a trend among universities in Taiwan to offer more and more e‐learning courses. The effectiveness of teaching or learning in an e‐learning system can be quantified by multi‐criteria measures. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching or learning in an e‐learning system measures in linguistic preferences.

A generalized quantitative evaluation model that considers both the interdependence among measures and the fuzziness of subjective perception is currently lacking in the literature. The results indicated that the fuzzy analytical network process is a simple, suitable, and effective method of identifying the primary measures that influence the effectiveness of e‐learning, specifically in the context of interdependent measures and varying linguistic preferences.

The most significant measures of e‐learning effectiveness were the quality of the e‐learning system and learner attractiveness. Enhanced usage of multimedia features can attract learner attention and may eventually increase learner attractiveness. Reducing the waiting time for learning materials to load may improve the quality of the system. Furthermore, the management should actively maintain and improve the responsiveness of instructors to learner inquiries.

The main contributions of this study are twofold. First, the evaluation can be considered as a complex‐dependence, hierarchical decision‐making problem. This study contains a review of the literature and identifies 21 criteria and five aspects to measure e‐learning system effectiveness. Second, this study integrates fuzzy set theory and the ANP to develop an evaluation model that prioritizes the relative weights of the proposed measures. The proposed method can be used to handle dependence within a set of measures and to construct a hierarchical structure.