The global transformation towards sustainability has not only increased the demand for anticipatory and reflexive knowledge to support decision making, but also raises three challenges common all forms of scientific policy advice: appropriately consider societal norms values (challenge normativity), integrate different integration) organize participation stakeholders participation). While new a...

Developments in e-government are resulting in fundamental reorganizations of the ways in which democratic governments operate as well as in the ways in which citizens relate to their own and other governments and to each other. Of special relevance here are the manners in which institutions and citizens are becoming interconnected into a complex ‘web of governance’ via largely uncoordinated inf...

In an endemic area of North-East Brazil (the town of Picos, State of Piauí), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) supported the activity against leprosy in connection with governmental health organizations and local agents. The indicators of leprosy elimination were compared over time (within Picos) and across space (Picos versus Piauí). The case detection rate, above 8 per 10,000 people in the...

The coordination of human organ transplants is a difficult task that involves legal, clinical, organisational and human aspects within a complex distributed environment of hospitals and governmental institutions. We propose a Multi-Agent Architecture that is the kernel of an Intelligent Decision Support System to coordinate the Spanish activity in organ transplants. The different agents of the ...

This paper, based on the exploration of the characteristics of folk innovation, provides thorough analysis of its status quo in China. The author holds that there exist many problems in the innovation among individual folks, non-governmental scientific research institutions and private enterprises, and that in view of Indian experience in folk innovation development, the entrepreneurial culture...

Increasing the sustainability of industrial activities is a top priority for national and supranational governmental institutions [...]