Elephant Project Research Articles

Roads to nowhere but the belt is Gucci: has China’s Belt and Road Initiative been successful so far and why?

This article assesses the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with respect to three objectives: strengthening China’s geopolitical stance, spurring geo-economic development in the Western regions and instilling a spatial fix to overaccumulation and thirdly, providing profit opportunities to troubled state-owned enterprises. I find that the BRI has only delivered on the third aspect, with even the BRI’s signature white elephant projects providing windfall incomes to the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) constructing and operating them. My explanation of this phenomenon is two-fold. Firstly, I argue that tense, coercive competition (Crotty, 1993) has spurred Chinese SOEs to revert to rent-seeking activity in order to stay afloat and realise managers’ cadre ambitions. As the state-owned Asset Supervision and Administrative Council (SASAC) evaluates manager performance based largely on company performance, demanding numbers that cannot be achieved under coercive competition in an environment of overcapacity, managers reverted to guanxi practices and corruption to secure under-the-counter deals, relying on soft budgets and beneficial lending practices. Amid tightening domestic regulation and Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, these strategies are becoming less viable and sustainable to pursue at home. As managers’ incentive structure has not evolved, pressure to seek rents persists, pushing SOEs to pursue their strategies abroad via the BRI. Secondly, the export of the strategies to persist amid coercive competition is enabled by a fragmented institutional environment, allowing SOEs to abuse asymmetries in information and outmanoeuvre stringent evaluation of their proposed BRI projects by mobilising political support through networks.

Fiscal Policy and Unemployment Nexus in Nigeria: An Empirical Analysis (1990–2021)

ABSTRACT: This study assessed the fiscal policy and unemployment nexus in Nigeria using time series data covering 1990 to 2021. Economic downturn, poor living standard, inadequate employment generation and increasing unemployment rate are sources of concern and worry. Job creation seems not to be getting the needed attention in the scheme of economic policies in Nigeria. The proxies for fiscal policy were: government capital expenditure (GCE), government revenue expenditure (GRE), government external debt (GED) and government total revenue (GTR), while that for unemployment was the unemployment rate. Specifically, this sought to examine the nexus between GCE and unemployment rate, GRE and unemployment rate, GED and unemployment rate, and GTR and unemployment rate. The ex-post-facto research design was used while the hypotheses were tested at 5% significance level. The time series data obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical bulletin was analyzed using the OLS technique. The test results showed that: GCE had a coefficient of 3.84 and a probability of 0.9893; GRE had -0.000481 coefficient and a probability of 0.6365; GED had 0.000584 coefficient and a probability of 0.1292 while GTR had 0.002070 coefficient and a probability of 0.0000. The probability f-statistic value of 0.000000 showed that proxies for fiscal policy are jointly significant to the unemployment rate. The adjusted R2 and Durbin-Watson values were 86% and 1.798125 respectively. It was recommended that the federal government should: (1) apply her capital expenditure properly and direct it to sectors that will help create more jobs and reduce unemployment rate, (2) make her recurrent expenditure to be supportive of the various government infrastructures, (3) drastically reduce her growing and high debt profile without commensurate job opportunities, (4) use her revenue to drive the economy instead of being applied on non-productive, white elephant projects or misappropriated.

International Capital Inflow and Human Capital Development in A Developing African Economy: A Study Of Nigerian Economy 1987- 2018

Extant literatures show that savings gaps in developing countries constitute critical constraints to investments in human capital and this has propelled the scramble by developing countries for international capital to fill the gaps. The paper principally examines the effect of international capital inflows (ICI) on human capital development (HCD) in a developing African economy with Nigeria as case study. The specific objectives are to investigate, determine, assess, examine and ascertain the effects of foreign portfolio investment (FPI), foreign direct investment (FDI), official development assistance (ODA), foreign remittance (RMT) and external debt stock (EXDSK) respectively on HCD. Ex-Post Facto research design on data from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin and Annual Reports and the World Bank Development Indicators were adopted using Descriptive Statistics, Augmented Dicker Fuller tests for unit roots and diagnostics. The results of the Autoregressive Distributive Lag indicated that FPI had positive and significant long run and short run effect on HCD while FDI, ODA, RMT and EXDSK, only have positive and significant short run effects on HCD. The study concluded that ICI has only short run significant effects on HCD with the exception of FPI. Some of the recommendations are that: government should strengthen and deepen the capital market system in Nigeria to sustain existing FPI and attract new ones; government should avoid using ODA for long term project financing in Nigeria and that EXDSK should be contracted solely for short term investments with economic reasons as against white elephant projects without economic justifications.

The Gambian Reality

The Note addresses the assignment mandated The Gambia Constitution Drafting Committee to prepare a Constitution to replace that of 1997 in response to popular demand. The team of experts assembled by government accomplished the task though with a serious flaw: plagiarism. The legislature however, for other reasons, vetoed the document. With diverse viewpoints on plagiarism and legal maxims, through qualitative analysis, this Note examines where the fault lay by probing what the assignment entails. The action of the drafting Committee left the society confused and without recourse after spending a whooping sum of money on what turned out to be a white elephant project that preserved rather than eliminate well preserved colonial constitutional anachronisms. As no legal remedy exist for both plagiarism and breach of trust, the Note concluded that the fault is not in their stars but in the society that needs to accelerate the pace of educational development to avert a repeat of the incidence.

BUSINESS ETHICS. CORRUPTION PERCEPTION ANALYSIS

This paper examines corruption from the perspective of business ethics. It is known that corruption negatively affects the development of countries in several ways: it reduces growth, chases away foreign investors and channels investments, loans and aid funds, the so-called White Elephant Projects. Corruption has a very high price for the poorest, who are denied access to basic goods and services, and this paper shows that the poor suffer the most from corruption. Based on the annual index provided by Transparency International, it can be observed that, in general, some of the richest countries in the world (like: Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, Iceland, Singapore and Sweden) consistently record a low level of corruption.

Front-End Governance of a Major Public Project in Laos: A Conceptual Framework for Ensuring the Right Concept

Major public projects in Laos are faced with multiple challenges, including project identification and its decision-making. Generally, an identification is an important key identifying the potential needs and requirements for achieving the development goal. However, the process was developed without a formal framework and assurance tools that have been criticized for negative social and environmental consequences as “white elephant projects” over the past few years. Considering this context, the study aimed to develop a conceptual framework to navigate an alternative solution for the right project. Based on contextual analysis and systematic literature review, the proposed framework provided the process of concept development and its assurance that it could be systematically developed in a cause-effect chain of needs. The findings indicate areas that reflect new insights of both strategic performance and a governance system, and reforms the decision-making process in providing new knowledge, new rules, and procedures for effective governance.

One Health Evaluation: A Case Study at the University of Bologna.

The level of One Health (OH), or “One Health-ness,” of health interventions has been defined as the capacity to operate according to six dimensions concerning OH operations and OH infrastructures, respectively (thinking, planning, and working; and information sharing, reciprocal learning, and systemic organization). Although health initiatives and research increasingly claim their orientation toward OH, such a capacity is rarely assessed. The objective of this study is to evaluate the One Health-ness of the academic team of the University of Bologna (UNIBO Team) working in the “ELEPHANT” project (Empowering universities' Learning and rEsearch caPacities in the one Health Approach for the maNagement of animals at the wildlife, livestock and human interface in SouTh Africa). This project involves universities, six from South Africa and two from Europe, and aims at embedding OH in research and learning to enable the control of diseases at the human, animal, and environmental interface, and to emphasize the interests of local African communities with wildlife conservation. The methodology adopts the NEOH method, developed in 2018 by the EU-COST Action, “Network for the Evaluation of One Health.” The approach is based on questionnaires delivered to participants, which focus on the six OH dimensions, and then translate answers into quantitative metrics through the OH Index (OHI) and the OH Ratio (OHR). The following two evaluation levels are foreseen: the whole project and the single partner institutions. The evaluations are carried on in parallel, with preliminary, mid-term, and final assessments, to monitor the efficacy of the project actions. The preliminary evaluation of the UNIBO Team resulted in the OHI of 0.23 and the OHR of 1.69 which indicate a low degree of OH-ness and an imbalance between OH operation and OH infrastructure. The UNIBO case study will be the baseline for the evaluation of the other partner institutions involved in the ELEPHANT project. This type of evaluation can support the implementation of OH practices inside a project and underpin the strategies that allow to achieving more effective results. Any improvement in the OH-ness of each single academic team can be also considered as a result of the ELEPHANT project, thus showing its multiplier effect in the context.

Biodiversity of Forest Elephants (Loxodonta Cyclotis) Diet in the Ogooué Leketi National Park, Congo Brazzaville

The Ogooué Leketi National Park (OLNP) is located within the Batéké-Léconi-Léfini Landscape in the central basin of the Congo River. The Ogooué Leketi Elephant Project (OLEP) area is important for biodiversity conservation from its significant populations of forest species (forest elephant, gorillas, chimpanzees, duikers, monkeys, etc.) combined with savanna species (Grimm’s duiker, side-striped jackal, etc). Elephant sign is highest 0.9/km in the northwest of the Landscape in the border area of the Batéké Plateau National Park in Gabon where a number of mineral-rich clearings, or bais, attract forest elephants and others wildlife. Elephants travel a long distance and consume diverse plants and occasionally animals’ species from one clearing to others throughout the forest. This paper intends to provide an overall preliminary list of plants consumed by forest elephants across their feeding trials. The results of the study points to the fact that, elephants were found to be feeding on 258 different vegetal species and three animal species recorded from twenty-six elephants feeding trials from March 2013 to December 2014 through different methods. Among these plant species, 156 were identified by us and checked by botanists in both the CERVE at Brazzaville and herbarium of Kinshasa University. Elephants were not only eating plants but they were also consuming occasionally some invertebrate such as bees, termites and ants. An analysis of 53 dung piles revealed that 43 dung piles had traces of 26 species of fruit consumed by elephants while 10 dung piles had no traces of fruits. The OLNP is among the least described protected areas in the Republic of Congo, despite its speculated high potential biodiversity. This lack of ground-truth knowledge is attributed to the status of the protected area that Congolese government classified as park in 2018 after 14 years of existence.

Living With Elephants: Evidence-Based Planning to Conserve Wild Elephants in a Megadiverse South East Asian Country

Theory of Change (ToC) and Social Return of Investment (SROI) are planning tools that help projects craft strategic approaches in order to create the most impact. In 2018, the Management & Ecology of Malaysian Elephants (MEME) carried out planning exercises using these tools to develop an Asian elephant conservation project with agriculture communities. First, a problem tree was constructed together with stakeholders, with issues arranged along a cause-and-effect continuum. There were 17 main issues identified, ranging from habitat connectivity and fragmentation, to the lack of tolerance toward wild elephants. All issues ultimately stemmed from a human mindset that favors human-centric development. The stakeholders recognize the need to extend conservation efforts beyond protected areas and move toward coexistence with agriculture communities for the survival of the wild elephants. We mapped previous Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) management methods and other governmental policies in Malaysia against the problem tree, and provided an overview of the different groups of stakeholders. The ToC was developed and adapted for each entity, while including Asian elephants as a stakeholder in the project. From the SROI estimation, we extrapolated the intrinsic value of the wild Asian elephant population in Johor, Malaysia, to be conservatively worth at least MYR 7.3 million (USD 1.8 million) per year. From the overall calculations, the potential SROI value of the project is 18.96 within 5 years, meaning for every ringgit invested in the project, it generates MYR 18.96 (USD 4.74) worth of social return value. There are caveats with using these value estimations outside of the SROI context, which was thoroughly discussed. The SROI provides projects with the ability to justify to funders the social return values of its activities, which we have adapted to include the intrinsic value of an endangered megafauna. Moreover, SROI encourages projects to consider unintended impacts (i.e., replacement, displacement, and deadweight), and acknowledge contributions from stakeholders. The development of the problem tree and ToCviaSROI approach, can help in clarifying priorities and encourage thinking out of the box. For this case study, we presented the thinking process, full framework and provided evidences to support the Theory of Change.

Sustainability of a local government-instituted ecotourism development: Tayak adventure, nature and wildlife Park in Rizal, Laguna, Philippines

Ecotourism development is a strategy of the Philippine Government. The existence of untapped natural resources and cultural/heritage assets has impeded the expansion of ecotourism. This situation is exacerbated by the literary deficit where a specific aspect has mainly been overlooked—the maintainability of small/medium-scale enterprises once already put in place. Against this backdrop, the study explores and understands the sustainability of TANAW Park's Ecotourism Enterprise of Rizal Municipality. Using a case study design, the article delineates the circumstances to fathom out the local ecotourism development. Firstly, the leadership is the top-down driven in the initiative, but in maintaining, the bottom-up manner is more significant. Secondly, the financial issue is complicated, so ideal is continuing the government agencies and integrating the commercial businesses. Thirdly, the Holy Week events are a single-month focal point, thus regularly extending the supplementary activities can increase revenue. Fourthly, TANAW Park is strategical if connected to the critical neighbouring towns and nearby resources. Lastly, TANAW Park's strengths lie in the presence of the unusual intermixing of assets, and the weaknesses are the risks of becoming a "white elephant project." In whole, TANAW Park is a noteworthy and tangible contribution to the local government and the people of Rizal.

The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the Philippines: Lessons from a White Elephant Project

In public policy literature, white elephant projects are described as large-scale investment ventures which do not only crowd-out funds from smaller-scale investment opportunities, but also lead to negative social returns. This case study briefly sketches recent literature and information on white elephant projects and then proceeds to examine the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) in the Philippines, considered an example of a white elephant project. This particular megaproject had implications on the Philippines' fiscal standing and energy security, offering lessons for future projects of this size and significance.

The Mali Elephant Project: protecting elephants amidst conflict and poverty

This short report shows how it has been possible to protect a small yet important, highly vulnerable, remnant population of desert‐adapted African elephants Loxodonta africana that roams through a vast, populated area of Mali, which in recent years has become lawless and subject to an aggressive jihadist insurgency. Initial studies showed how ecosystem trends threatened elephant survival and local livelihoods, and exacerbated human–human and human–elephant conflict. A combination of adaptive management and action research methods was used to understand the social, economic, political and environmental aspects of this complex system. This knowledge served to derive intervention strategies that attempted to tackle the underlying drivers of threat to elephant survival. Central to this approach was the reinforcement of existing attitudes towards elephants and the use of collaborative methods. Local communities were empowered to counter resource over‐exploitation and degradation by devising resource‐management systems that were rooted in existing practice and provided tangible livelihood benefits from elephant conservation. When lawlessness overtook the elephant range in 2012, it became subject to attacks by armed groups, a deepening insurgency and elephant poaching. The existing community work proved key to respond to the escalation of poaching in 2015, as it had engaged local people in the conservation effort, improving their lives and securing local ‘buy‐in’. This facilitated the work of the newly created anti‐poaching unit, which was trained to operate according to an ‘intelligent’ and ethical doctrine that used local information to cope with the insecurity and target its efforts.

Politics, risk, and white elephants in infrastructure PPPs

Theoretical research on cooperation between public and private partners in infrastructure projects suggests that they can be a tool for preventing white elephants. However, various case studies suggest that actual outcomes are largely dependent on the effective transfer of operational risk to the private partner. This paper explores policy and planning dysfunction, and the idea that private entities that participate in public-private partnerships (PPPs) with no substantial risk transfer, and under heavily subsidized schemes, may engage in lobbying and exert pressure to develop white elephant projects.

From Megaproject to White Elephant: Lessons from the Philippines's Bataan Nuclear Power Plant

Drawing from recent literature on white elephant projects, this article examines the case of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP)—the paradigmatic example of a white elephant project in the Philippines. The BNPP megaproject had massive implications for the country's fiscal standing and long-term economic prospects, offering lessons for future projects of this size and significance. By revisiting the BNPP's problematic history as well as the continuing infrastructure governance challenges in the post-Marcos period, this study outlines the repercussions of such dynamics for the Philippine government's "Build, Build, Build" infrastructure program, the most ambitious since the Marcos era.

Autocrats and Skyscrapers: Modern White Elephants in Dictatorships

Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue expensive and socially wasteful elephant projects. Our argument highlights that weak accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize such projects, whereas democratic leaders are more constrained from doing so. We subsequently test different implications from this argument by drawing on a global dataset recording various features of skyscrapers, a prominent type of modern white elephant. We find that autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies, and this result is robust to controlling for income level, state control over the economy, and country- and year-fixed effects. Further, autocratic skyscrapers are more excessive and wasteful than democratic. Autocratic regimes also pursue skyscraper projects no matter if they preside over rural or urban societies. In contrast, skyscrapers are fewer and - when first built - associated with less waste in democracies, and they are more frequently built urbanized democracies than in rural.

Community involvement and joint operations aid effective anti-poaching in Tanzania

The Ruvuma Elephant Project (REP) area is located in the United Republic of Tanzania and lies between Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania and Niassa National Reserve in Mozambique. The area is dominated by miombo woodland with a mosaic of different land uses. Unfortunately, this mosaic of wildlife, forests, people with a variety of often competing land uses, as well as the presence of an international border close by, helps make it one of the worst impacted areas in Africa in terms of elephant poaching for the ivory trade. Despite the recent resurgence of elephant poaching in Tanzania, and in particular within the Selous ecosystem which includes the REP area, the results show the project has managed to curb elephant poaching. It is believed that the local elephant population within the REP area should remain stable if current anti-poaching input levels can be maintained. The success of the REP may be attributed to various approaches and activities that are beyond the scope of conventional anti-poaching units or programmes. These include a strong focus on: working with communities to achieve their reciprocal support and participation; joint patrols and operations; and intelligence-led operations within and outside the protected areas.

Editorial: The Importance of the Astonished Eye

The four articles in this first issue of 2014 could not have, at first glance, less in common. The first piece, ‘Zooësis and “Becoming with” in India: The “Figure” of Elephant in Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project’ by Ameet Parameswaran, examines the theatrical adaptation of a 1944 Malayalam poem by the company Theatre Roots and Wings. In ‘The Dynamics of Space and Resistance in Muhammad ‘Azīz's Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place’, Salwa Rashad Amin discusses the importance of ‘Azīz's play in the context of Egypt's recent and historical revolutions. Ketu Katrak takes up the performance of affect and its implication for social justice in ‘“Stripping Women of Their Wombs”: Active Witnessing of Performances of Violence’. Finally, Katia Arfara explores the work of a performance artist in terms of early twentieth-century precedents for European performance art, ‘Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdonck's Performative Installation End’. Theatre Research International readers will find much of value in each article, and they represent the kind of broad international focus our journal endeavours to provide.

Zooësis and ‘Becoming with’ in India: The ‘Figure’ of Elephant inSahyande Makan: The Elephant Project

I analyseSahyande Makan: The Elephant Project(2008), a cross-cultural theatrical production in Malayalam and Japanese by the Kerala-based group Theatre Roots and Wings, as an instance of ‘zooësis’. The performance presents the state of an elephant in the space of a Kerala temple festival ritual,pooram. The elephant moves into a fantasy of the wild as it is under the physiological condition of musth. Approaching the question of the performing animal as intersectional, this performance challenges anthropocentrism and its assumed binary of human/animal, and draws a possible relation between domestic and wild, or the world of norms and freedom, both for elephants and for humans. I argue that by taking embodiment as the site of exploring discipline as well as imagining a freeing, and by positing an alternate way of ‘being worldly’ through affect and senses, the performance articulates what Donna Haraway has posited as the process of ‘becoming with’.

Analysis of the Politics of Local Government Budgeting in Nigeria (1995-2011)

The poor performances of most local government councils in Nigeria had squarely centered around the politics of local government budgeting in the country. A cursory look at the project profile of all the local government councils in Nigeria pathetically reveals lots of abandoned, ill-executed and white elephant projects littered in the various local government areas (LGAs). The financial profile of most local government councils are poor, because of planned mismanagement arising from the unsuspected “financial padding,” embedded in the politics of local government budgeting in Nigeria. The findings from the analysis of this politics of local government budgeting in Nigeria (1995-2011) reveals that the often much cries from the local government administrators in the country that this level of government is seriously under-funded and therefore, not capable of discharging its constitutional duties effectively and efficiently, are nothing but a facade. The analysis of our findings shows that local government councils are adequately funded from the statutory monthly allocations from the Federation Account and had adequate internal revenue generation sources provided for them by the Constitution. However, the finances of this level of government are frittered away and mismanaged through the nature of the politics which accompany its annual budget estimates, which most often are not objectively and rationally construed and executed. Consequently, it is recommended as a panacea to this disruptive and dysfunctional politics of the budgetary process in the local government councils in Nigeria; that the budget office of the State Government which has the immediate responsibility to oversee the affairs of the local government councils Nigeria, should use their budget experts and technocrats to ensure comprehensive review of estimates which local government councils should be directed to submit to the Office of the Accountant General of the State from henceforth. This is the only viable visible way for now, through which sanity and prudence could be brought to bear on the politics of local government budgeting in Nigeria as our analysis from 1995-2011, revealed. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p497

The Relevance of Budget Preparation in School Administration

Nigerian educational system is characterized by declining resources, risingcosts and greater awareness for public accountability. These conditions makethe management of the available human and material resources a socialimperative. It demands a periodic preparation of the school budget. This paper therefore examines the concept of budgeting, its advantages in our school system and suggests some accounting requirements which are aimed at making the preparation of a budget less cumbersome and more realistic. It highlights four types of budgets: Zero-Base budgeting (ZBB), Programme and Performance Budgeting, Planning, Programming and Budgeting Systems (PPBS) and Line-Item or Incremental Budget. This would enable the school administrators to avoid white elephant projects and use the lean available resources in achieving desirable targets. Indeed, school budget is the Head teacher’s “stethoscope” and without it the school administration flounders, the paper observes.