Recommendations For Future Steps Research Articles

Transition towards sustainable yak farming in Bhutan: stakeholders’ viewpoints and recommendations for future steps

ABSTRACT The Bhutanese government initiated a highland development programme in the year 2016 to promote yak farming because the number of yak farming families is declining. However, there are several cross-cutting policies and issues that affect successful implementation of interventions to support yak farming in transition. We studied the challenges and opportunities to sustain yak farming and related trade-offs around problems and solutions through individual and focus group interviews with six stakeholder groups (i.e. herders from two regions, extensionists, park rangers, livestock officials, and forest officials). Overall the herders rated forage availability and yak mortality as the main threats to yak farming, while government officials rated labour availability as the main threats. Most problems and solutions that were identified in the focus group interviews had diverging views among the stakeholder groups. There is clearly a need for a multi-stakeholder dialogue aiming to discuss problems and solutions together. This should take away misleading and disputed claims, and provide understanding about the approach to cope with risks and uncertainty around transhumance yak-based communities. A strong collaboration should lead to appropriate policy, which would reduce challenges and barriers, and simultaneously give opportunities to herders and their children to stay in yak farming in future.

MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE AND DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES IN KOSOVO

Issues undertaken in this work include: how to increase the development of small and medium enterprises, the factors that affect their development, barriers in this process, how to help new entrepreneurs, how to increase the number of employers in this economic activity, innovations in enterprises, improvement of retailer balance, and how to increase local production and performance in general. This study will help address specific difficulties and problems of enterprises in Kosovo, and provide necessary recommendations for future steps for small and medium enterprises, while making it easier and supporting them in economic activities to develop economic support and have better employment for future generations in general

Water protection in the Baltic Sea and the Chesapeake Bay: Institutions, policies and efficiency

The Baltic Sea and the Chesapeake Bay share many characteristics. Both are shallow, brackish marine areas that suffer from eutrophication. Successful policies targeting point source pollution have lowered nutrient loads in both areas, but achieving the desired marine quality will require further abatement: efforts may be extended to more complicated and expensive pollution sources, notably agricultural nonpoint loads. Despite their ecological similarities, the two watersheds have different histories and institutional settings and have thus adopted different policies. Comparing and contrasting the policies reveal ways to improve the efficiency of each and ways to avoid the path of trial and error. No comparison of the parallel protection efforts, which involve expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, has been carried out to date. The present paper analyzes the policies applied in the two regions, distilling the results into six recommendations for future steps in preserving what are valuable sea areas.