Islamic finance must follow rules developed by Islamic experts in the context of this global market. This chapter provides a description of the use of islamic finance for infrastructure projects.

This chapter identifies areas where in-depth research can find out institutional challenges that are most critical to Bangladeshs economic development. Two approaches are employed. The first approach uses a variety of institutional measures available in international databases to examine how a country, in this case, Bangladesh, differs from a set of comparators. It is largely based on these indicators that the idea of a Bangladesh paradox was formed: Bangladesh appears as a country with impressive economic growth performance but weak institutional performance. However, there can be some doubt about the reliability of institutional indicators in global rankings. Therefore, the second approach is undertaken where a questionnaire survey of various types of decision-makers and academics is used. The survey respondents identify several institutional weaknesses which include ubiquitous corruption (electoral, business, and recruitment to the civil service); executive control over legal bodies, the media, the judiciary, and the banking sector; inadequate coverage of public services; the number and intensity of land conflicts; and gender discrimination.

This chapter outlines the epoch of urban planning evolution in Nigeria. It highlights and describes the nature of urban planning, the roles of planners, urban planning challenges, and prospects of urban planning in Nigeria. Urban planning in Nigeria evolved before colonialism. As the country transited from the colonial era to Independence, urban planning also went through significant transformation. It became an essential tool to facilitate orderly spatial arrangement of the various land uses with emphasis on promoting functional relationships among the various land uses so as to ensure harmony in the development of the built environment. This is considered a common good due to its importance for economic and socio-cultural development. The method of investigation is essentially an analysis of secondary data obtained from published journal articles and reports. Over the past years, urban planning has evolved as a discipline and an institutionalised profession. It has witnessed the enactment of many planning laws. However, the contention in this chapter is that, even with the presence of well-formulated urban planning, its future is far from bright. Urban planning in Nigeria lacks commitment from the government.

The Introduction outlines the historical, social, and cultural background of business in China since the economic reforms commencing in the late-1970s. The empirical material regarding entrepreneurs and business in present-day China deployed in this book is described, and an account of the research methods employed in acquiring it is outlined and discussed. In addition, the Introduction provides a detailed summary of the six chapters that constitute this book, including a preliminary discussion of the issues treated throughout. By presenting select examples of fieldwork findings, discussed in the context of a broader background indicated in official and related sources of data, as well as findings and theories presented in the published literature, the Introduction details the range of substantive issues that are treated in and which are the focus of each of the six chapters to follow.

The Conclusion highlights how an examination of entrepreneurs in contemporary China, including a careful and empirically grounded account of business and social relations in China, challenges many conventional approaches to research and research findings regarding such core concepts as trust, social networks, crisis, gender, family business, and e-commerce, and shows how standard conventions that are widely accepted in the scholarly and research literatures are in need of revision. It is shown how this book provides a clarification and extension of the conceptualization of a number of core theoretical notions by drawing on the details of the many cases that are explored in the six chapters of this monograph. It is shown how the research findings reported in this book will serve the purpose of stimulating and encouraging further research on erstwhile neglected aspects of business relations as well as the development of new theoretical frameworks for understanding social exchange dynamics in business, not only in China but more generally.

This chapter examines whether and to what extent information about the procedures and performances of international organizations affects citizens legitimacy beliefs. It examines this issue comparatively across seven international organizations in different issue areas, including the African Union, European Union, United Nations Security Council, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The survey is conducted in four countries in diverse world regions (Germany, the Philippines, South Africa, and the US). The analysis shows that information about both procedures and performances impact legitimacy beliefs. Moreover, citizens update their legitimacy beliefs in line with information about democracy, effectiveness, and fairness in global governance.

This chapter examines how information on the authority and purpose of international organizations influences citizen legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. Advancing on previous research that primarily has studied effects of procedures and performances on citizens legitimacy beliefs, this chapter uses a conjoint experimental design to assess how different institutional qualities matter when simultaneously communicated to citizens. The chapter explores this issue across hypothetical international organizations in two countries (Germany and the US). It finds that citizens form legitimacy beliefs in line with information about authority and purpose in international organizations. However, this relationship depends on citizens’ political priors. Information about an international organization’s authority has a weaker negative effect on legitimacy beliefs among internationalist citizens. Moreover, the effect of information about an international organization’s social purpose depends on citizens’ political values. These conditioning effects are only found in the more polarized context of the US and not in Germany.

Our food systems have performed well in the past, but they are failing us in the face of climate change and other challenges. There is a broad consensus that transformation of food systems is required to make them sustainable and equitable for all. Transformation occurs via agents of change: individual behaviour, policies and institutions, research and innovation, and partnerships and alliances. Outcome-oriented agricultural research for development can help bring about directed transformation that maximises benefits and minimises trade-offs.

This chapter makes a case against a substantive understanding of the material constitution. It first centres on Carl Schmitt’s concrete-order thinking as a glaring example of a theory that attaches priority to the material over the formal and yet fails to explain where matter comes from. Materiality turns out to be a shorthand for the social, while what the social is remains mostly under-developed and eventually takes up communitarian and identitarian connotations. By building on Santi Romano’s and Karl Llewellyn’s theories, the author unearths an alternative notion of the material. The constitution is an institution in the sense of a set of organisational practices as practices, not their sedimented outcomes, such as behavioural standards, normative values or fundamental principles. Unlike substantive conceptions, the processual understanding easily accounts for how collectives make room for change of their substantive contents while preserving their collective character.

Wallace’s interest in the metanarrative systems that guide and govern human behavior persisted throughout his career, from urban geography, pharmacology and language through entertainment, taxation and alienation. One such system is that of citizenship, which arguably grows in significance the later we look in Wallace’s writing, reaching its zenith in The Pale King. This chapter outlines the configuration and operation of citizenship throughout Wallace’s work, situating it against a critical backdrop of studies of American space and citizenship more generally and working in dialogue with the accompanying chapters on ecologies, geographies and politics. A decisively American writer, Wallace’s writing deploys a complex set of images associated with citizenship and civic duty. Examining the shifting, almost hallucinatory qualities of nation space at play in Wallace’s late capitalist cultural imaginary, this chapter argues that Wallace’s image of citizenship emerges from a concept of community – individually and locally constructed by means of engagement with civic systems – rather than nationalist or historicist in nature.

In contrast to the small-scale we of shared action, this chapter analyses the large-scale and temporally prolonged we’s of communities governed by social norms. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone and of historicity, I distinguish between anonymous social normativity and historical social normativity. Anonymous social normativity provides a set of social norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected comportmental pattern that we assume to be a universal default. However, this kind of social normativity comes with only a minimal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin. Historical social normativity, on the other hand, implies a historical awareness in which social norms are disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable. For Heidegger, this leads to the proto-political possibility of what I call communal commitments—roughly, commitments in which a group of people commit themselves to sustain a particular set of social norms across generations.