This open access book provides detailed information on informal credit markets in Africa and how various legal systems affect these markets. Laws that impose strict formalism exclude many people from the financial system. The lessons learned from the informal credit markets in Ethiopia and South Africa indicate that pluralism offers better opportunities for people to access affordable and susta…
This open access book offers readers a better understanding of the legal situation of children and families migrating to the EU. Shedding light on the legal, practical, and political difficulties at the intersection of international family law and migration law, it demonstrates that enhanced coordination between these policy areas is crucial to improving the legal situation of families on the m…
This open access edited volume introduces the concept of causal mechanisms to explore new ways of explaining the global dynamics of social policy, and shows that a mechanism-based approach provides several advantages over established approaches for studying social policy The introductory chapter outlines the mechanism-based approach, which stands out by modularisation and a clear focus on acto…
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of social protection in Latin America, its origins, institutions, and outcomes. The chapters are organised in three groups. The earlier chapters discuss in turn appropriate methods, an analytical framework, and core institutions. The book advocates a causal inference approach to the study of the institutions that have dominated social protection in t…
This open-access book analyses how stakeholder relationships impact the sustainability of health aid. It does this by providing an overarching analytical framework, which allows for a systematic analysis of sustainability, relationships, and a possible causal link between these phenomena. The book goes beyond universal paradigms and detailed single-case studies by offering a thorough analysis o…
International Organizations (IOs) are important actors within global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention and cooperation about social policies. Our knowledge about the involvement of IOs varies significantly by policy fields, and we know comparatively little about the specific roles of IOs in social policies. This volume enhances and systematizes our understanding…
This open access book expands the scholarly and policy debates surrounding digital transformation in higher education. The authors adopt a pluralistic conceptual framework which uncovers three analytical elements – contexts, mediations, and type of effects – for unpacking empirical manifestations. The publicly funded higher education systems in Nordic countries provide solid empirical insig…
What is center and periphery? How can centers and peripheries be recognized by their ontological and axiological features? How does the axiological saturation of a literary field condition aesthetics? How did these factors transform center-periphery relationships to the former metropolises of Romance literatures of the Americas and Africa? What are the consequences of various deperipheralizatio…
This Open Access book summarizes the key findings from the second cycle of IEA’s International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), conducted in 2018. ICILS seeks to establish how well schools around the globe are responding to the need to provide young people with the necessary digital participatory competencies. Effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT) i…
This book is unique in focusing on just one band from one city – but the story of Tat Ming Pair, in so many ways, is the story of Hong Kong's recent decades, from the Handover to the Umbrella Movement to 2019's standoff. A comprehensive, theoretically informed study of the sonic history and present of Hong Kong through the prism of Tat Ming Pair, this book will be of interest to cultural stu…